Gore Vidal sez, Pynchon marked the end of the American novel (as in *killing* it).

[Christopher]

http://john-steppling.com/2015/01/where-dreams-die/

I was reading some essays from the playwright John Steppling's blog and
came across this which talks about Pynchon a bit. It's mostly about Robert
Stone, and Anderson's adaptation of IV, and detective fiction in
general...and much more that's quite interesting...but there's a nice, if
brief, look at P.

It starts out a little disparaging maybe (the reference to Gore Vidal's
take on P) but doesn't remain so. He seems to be quite ambivalent about P
(I recall that in another essay he says he doesn't know what he thinks of
Pynchon's work but he knows he *does* think about it).

Anyway, here are the most interesting bits in relation to Pynchon:

"...I cannot think of a country today as unpleasant to live in as the
United States. The cultural and social climate that produced Robert Stone
and Thomas Pynchon isnt there anymore and that feels sad."

(I don't live in the US but I find this intriguing so...thoughts on this
anyone?)

"The detective of *Inherent Vice*, also a medical doctor, is the detective
who searches for his own desire. But where is desire to be found? Pynchon’s
real thrust has always been detection, coupled to paranoia. And *Inherent
Vice* is a retroactive detective story with a stoned detective who seems to
connect to a dying 1950s white America as well as to the counter culture of
Kesey and Stone, the Beats and Viet Nam. There is something one feels is
just out of reach in Pynchon, and that is his particular road to the
uncanny... If Moretti is at all right, and I’m not sure, that guilt is
individual and conformity equals innocence, then perhaps that is the real
point of *Inherent Vice*; which is in it’s way the point of *Dog
Soldiers* (*Who’ll
Stop the Rain*) and that is that a society of domination has meant that
difference is now materially guilty, not just mythically. Bly once said
that when a society can no longer distinguish between the mythic and the
everyday, that society is sick. The Salem witch trials being the example he
used. The ruling class has always needed to create false difference."
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