NP but RP and the cover of Vineland, so to speak and allude. Another (major) writer influenced by....

[Mark Kohut]

*Contains a wonderful high-praising review of Richard Powers' new novel,
The Overstory, by Charles who just won a major award for criticism and
well-deserved, I say. His reviews are wonderfully written, as well as being
insightful: https://twitter.com/RonCharles/status/981202559959556097
<https://twitter.com/RonCharles/status/981202559959556097>*


*https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/23/the-overstory-by-richard-powers-review
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/23/the-overstory-by-richard-powers-review>*

*AV:* One of your early influences was Thomas Pynchon’s *Gravity’s Rainbow*,
which you first read at age sixteen and which you have “re-read portions of
. . . every year.” What is it about Pynchon that you admire since your
writing styles are dissimilar?

*RP:* More things than I can name. One of the many pleasures of Pynchon is
that he doesn’t have a single style, but manages to create a whole
panharmonicon of voices and styles and tones and moods and registers,
borrowing from high and low, sublime and ridiculous, combining the entire
spectrum of what prose can do into a symphonic whole. I can’t pretend to do
even a fraction of what he manages, but he has inspired me to open up my
own stops and try to vary my own style as much as possible, depending on
the needs and purposes of any given scene. Pynchon is also the master of
casting the reach of fiction far beyond the concerns of the merely personal
and domestic, out into the vast world of human concerns, professions,
researches, and industries. I learned from him that the sciences and math
and engineering are actually the stuff of human passion and obsession, and
that the erotics of knowledge can make for a story every bit as mystifying
and thrilling as the old questions of who’s up and who’s down, who’s in and
who’s out, and who gets to marry whom.

At Bard: http://www.conjunctions.com/about/news/event/?id=133678