Saunders on TRP

[Monte Davis]

Just ran across it again, Bookforum 2005:

George Saunders I don't think anyone has gotten closer than Thomas Pynchon
to summoning the real audacity and insanity and scope of the American mind,
as reflected in the American landscape. I read Pynchon all out of order,
starting with *Vineland*, and I still remember the shock of pleasure I got
at finally seeing the America I knew--strange shops and boulevards, built
over former strange shops and former boulevards, all laid out there in
valleys and dead-end forests, heaped on top of Indian cemeteries, peopled
with nut jobs and hustlers and moral purists--actually present in a novel,
and present not only in substance but in structure and language that both
used and evoked the unruly, muscular complexity of the world itself.

In Pynchon, anything is fair game--if it is in the world, it can go in the
book. To me there is something Buddhist about this approach, which seems to
say that since the world is capable of producing an infinity of forms, the
novel must be capable of accommodating an infinite number of forms. All
aesthetic concerns (style, form, structure) answer this purpose: Let in the
world.

This is why Pynchon is our biggest writer, the gold standard of that
overused word *inclusiveness*: No dogma or tidy aesthetic rule or literary
fashion is allowed to prefilter the beautiful data streaming in. Everything
is included. No inclination of the mind is too small or large or
frightening. The result is gorgeous madness, which does what great
literature has always done--reminds us that there is a world out there that
is bigger than us and worthy of our utmost humility and attention.

I have often felt that we read to gain some idea of what God would say
about us if someone were to ask Him what we're like. Pynchon says, through
the vast loving catalogue he has made, that we are Excellent but need to be
watched closely. He says there is no higher form of worship than the loving
(i.e., madly attentive) observation of that-which-is, a form of prayer of
which Pynchon's work is our highest example.

http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html
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