BEER Ch. 3 East European Roots

[Dave Monroe]

On 10/21/13, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> Upper West Side
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_West_Side

Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a
family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar
Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s
called himself a “classicist”; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who
revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary
agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and
lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six.

[...]

But no book is closer to home than Bleeding Edge. It’s impossible not
to read into it a grizzled wanderer’s wary truce with New York,
conformity, and life in public. It’s there in the teasing epigraph, a
quote from crime writer Donald Westlake that describes the city as
“the enigmatic suspect who knows the real story but isn’t going to
tell it.” There’s a chase scene across the very same intersection
where, in 1998, a South African reporter pursued the author, took an
awful photo, and tried to shake his hand. (“Get your fucking hand away
from me,” Pynchon said.) There’s also a lyrical flashback in which our
heroine spies on a building across the street that’s obviously the
Apthorp. His son grew up looking out on that same landmark—from that
same window. These feel like mildly dangerous games for a “reclusive
author” to play—though the family did move out of that apartment four
years ago.

http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/thomas-pynchon-bleeding-edge.html
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l