This week in pointless trivia.

[Carvill John]

Thanks, Laura, for your thoughtful post.
I was particularly struck by this:
>But I'd have to say that the opposite holds true with Pynchon. I could go on for hours obsessing over every bit that I loved from his earlier works, but what I dislike most about Bleeding Edge fell into two categories: things that I felt were lacking (so that I could hardly point to them), and things that hit me on a visceral level.
Spot on. This is extremely close to what I've been thinking as I crawl through BE. It's hard to say what it is I don't like, a lot harder than it was, say, to defend IV against claims that it was too light, etc. 
What's lacking? For me almost all the aspects of Pynchon that I cherish are absent. The po-mo stuff is present and correct, but you can keep it. Where's the beautiful language?  The subjects and themes Pynchon has focused on in BE are not handled in any imaginative, insightful, or even entertaining way. What's much worse, though, is the writing style throughout: heavily reliant on overcooked cutesy dialog, corny jokes, stupid names, coincidence, etc; entirely lacking in the jazzy poetry we expect from Pynchon's prose. 

 		 	   		  
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