Review of BE in Bookforum

[Monte Davis]

Ed Mendelson's old "Encyclopedic Narrative" essay has more useful things to
say about "complexity," the "systems novel" and "explain/exhaust" than this
review.

Nor is it clear to me that if one were to read only Vineland, IV, and BE,
one would think about Pynchon in those terms at all. Because we've read V
and GR and M&D and AtD too, we see the systems peeking form the corners of
the "littler" books, but they would hardly be so salient, let alone
diagnostic .

FWIW, I think CoL49 is right on the cusp and that Pynchon in SL underrates
how deftly he swooped from details of 60s California pop culture to the
Great Lost Weird Howling America/Europe (and back) via a flophouse mattress
or the debris in a used car. I find it easy to imagine how in an alternate
bibliography Col49 could have been a 900-page V 2.0 or GR: First-Stage
Booster.

For BE, even the first-time Pynchon reader is likely to bring to the book
much of the ongoing discourse about how vast and endless and virtual
cyberspace is -- not to mention that <cough>NSA<cough> when you look into
the abyss, the spooks can look back at you. Ditto for 9/11 and its cultural
aftermath. He can take all that as read, without gradually (and lengthily)
"educating" us as he had to do with entropy and the decky-dance, or
Tannhauser and calculus, or the Enlightenment project, or capitalism and
boys' adventure tropes. Maybe BE is a Big Pynchon Book passing as a Little
Pynchon Book because much of its thematic work has been done by the culture
at large before it opens.  

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Kai Frederik Lorentzen
Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2013 6:41 AM
To: rich; pynchon -l
Subject: Re: Review of BE in Bookforum


"Of course, Pynchon is famous for his complexity. /V./, /The Crying of Lot
49/ (1966), and /Gravity's Rainbow/ (1973) virtually set the template for
the paranoid style in American fiction, and for what's semi-synonymously
called the systems novel-vast interrogations in which character and plot get
subsumed in grander architectures built to explain or exhaust various
systems of control (political, technological, financial, chemical, etc.).
Other high priests of this tendency include the stylistically diverse
William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace; /The Corrections/ has
one foot in this tradition, as do many of William Gibson's novels."

No, 'The Corrections' does not at all belong into this tradition; the novels
of William S. Burroughs - especially those from 'Naked Lunch' to 'Nova
Express' - should have been mentioned instead.



On 03.09.2013 23:07, rich wrote:
> http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/020_03/12175
>
>
>             Sept/Oct/Nov 2013 
> <http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/020_03>
>
>
>   The Crying of West 79th Street
>
>
>   Reality comes undone in Thomas Pynchon's novel about New York in the
>   early aughts
>
>
>       Ed Park
>
>