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

[Monte Davis]

That's as good a summary of Pynchon's virtues at that length as I could
ever hope for. Powers himself is very VERY good, and I've just bought The
Overstory.

The Guardian review reminds me of one of the greatest small, drawn-out,
enduring pleasures of my life. We had a small vacation cottage in northern
Maine from the 1960s until 2010. North of Bangor, I-95 -- just extended
there in the 1960s -- crossed a several-hundred-acre bog, the last trace of
either a post-glacial pond or a very successful beaver colony: in the
1800s. Dead flat, featureless except for a few water-tolerant bushes, with
aspens and half-drowned evergreen saplings all around the edge, full forest
rising  beyond.

I imagine the drainage system for the highway must have accelerated drying:
after the first five years I was sure the forest was moving in, sapling by
sapling. and started to memorize markers for sightlines: a road sign, a
distant radio tower, an odd-shaped spruce. For a decade moisture conditions
were right for sparse wild blueberries, while the trees crept inward. The
last time I saw it, in 2014, there were just a few clearings and extra-wide
bits of right-of-way left, with a good number of >50' birches visible
farther into woods. There was random underbrush, enough windfalls to make
things nature-ally untidy. In another decade or two, only the most
sharp-eyed driver -- or any forester -- will notice the tight age/size mix
of the roadside boreal forest there. The forest everlasting.

On Wed, Apr 4, 2018 at 7:57 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> *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
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>