Pynchon's Coast: Inherent Vice and the Twilight of the Spatially Specific

[Monte Davis]

More re Wood and "roundedness" from former P-lister Bill Millard:

"In certain critical quarters there has long been a characterization
problem in Pynchon. One reasonable way to put it is William Logan's
observation, apropos of various excesses in *Against the Day*, that "no one
has ever wept over the death of a Pynchon character the way thousands wept
over Little Nell." Defenders might counter either that his major characters
rarely die in view of the reader, that Dickensian sentiment is too shopworn
an effect to treat unironically, or that certain of Pynchon's deaths
(without hesitation, I would nominate those of Jeremiah Dixon and Charles
Mason) are in fact seriously moving. But the objection still stands. Those
who seek psychological roundedness and credibility above all else in
fiction do not customarily find it here, certainly not in overprivileged
heavies like Fenway. Perhaps Pynchon's general refusal of interiority for
many characters indicates not an inattention to individual psychology or,
as James Wood would have it, an outright authorial incompetence at the task
of constructing credible, nuanced, and realistic individual perspective
(for Wood, arguably the central task of any serious novel). The steady
attainment of greater self-awareness by Sportello, despite his intellectual
and cultural limitations and his memory-beclouding inhalations, indicates
that Pynchon is capable of considerable psychological nuance when he puts
his mind to it. I would add that on the far larger canvas of *Against the
Day*, the extended Cyprian Latewood plot (which arises in mid-novel, too
far along for the more impatient reader or reviewer even to have noticed
it) presents a decisive response to Wood's charges of chronic immaturity,
superficiality, and overtheatricality. But an equally plausible alternative
is that Pynchon habitually eschews a close focus on individual psychology
because of a fully serious conviction that it is simply not as interesting
as broader social systems, either as an intellectual problem or as an
aesthetic object."

On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 12:49 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
wrote:

> http://www.collegehillreview.com/004/0040501.html
>
> Pynchon’s California
>
> http://www.uiowapress.org/books/2014-fall/pynchon’s-california.htm
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150307/14f7ac48/attachment.html>