Re: "To Celebrate the Best Parts of His Nature:" Fiction and the Discourse of Man – By Nick Ripatrazone - The Marginalia Review of Books

[Monte Davis]

Yes. I think, perhaps cynically, that there are two primary reasons CoL49
is underrated:

1) Because of its modest length it's in a lot of curricula for
modern/postmodern fiction courses in colleges and some secondary schools.
So True Pynchon Fans and True Pynchon Critics, who have wrestled with the
Big Books, may tend to look down on it as beginner fare.

2) Pynchon deprecates it in two sentences of the Slow Learner intro, after
speaking fondly of The Secret Integration: "As is clear from the
up-and-down shape of my learning curve, however, it was too much to expect
that I’d keep on for long in this positive or professional direction. The
next story I wrote was  'The Crying of Lot 49,' which was marketed as a
'novel,' and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I’d
learned up till then."

I disagree on both counts (add a grain of salt here, as CoL49 transfixed
*me* when it came out, sending me back to V. and priming me for GR). CoL49
is a gem, and  -- not that it matters -- I regret that IV will now replace
it as the most frequent "way in" to Pynchon.


On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 9:41 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> Interesting stuff on *The Crying of Lot 49*, --- a novella often
> underrated here on the list.
>
> What this review ignores is the influence Henry Adams had on Pynchon's
> "literary catholicism."
>
> My favorite sentence:
>
> "Pynchon might be considered the synthesis of the Catholicism of Marshall
> McLuhan and Andy Warhol, whose communions of saints spanned the electric
> and artistic worlds."
>
>
>
> On 18.02.2015 12:15, Mark Kohut wrote:
>
> Catholic Pynchon. ( which we have discussed here). best novelist of his time, he sez.
> http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/fiction-and-the-discourse-of-man/
>
>
>
> Sent from my iPad-
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l
>
>
>
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