Pynchon & The Death of Truth.

[Mark Kohut]

In Michiko Kakutani's new book---entitled what appears after the "&"--
Pynchon is one of the few writers quoted---many writers of fiction
name-checked and alluded to though . She quotes
the words from Gravity's Rainbow about how "religious--comforting" paranoia
can be and---"there is
still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything---a
condition not many of us can bear for long."

A Pynchon fave, John Le Carre, supplies a chapter epigraph: "Without clear
language, there is no standard of truth."
Orwell throughout this chapter.

And, she quotes Roth [American Pastoral] as defining anew--like an
artist--Hofstadter's "paranoid style in America":
"this counternarrative Roth entitled "the indigenous American berserk"." I
think of another great American writer, Charles Portis, with this phrase.

Michiko says that Hofstadter's original essay was
"spurred by Goldwater's campaign and the right-wing movement around it."
It's seen then in Lot 49.

(From another source, a scholar says
that the modern bashing of the mainstream media--liberal bias and more-- by
the Right began then (and even with Goldwater's
book, I believe,he says, but I'm not looking anything more up).

She focuses on Hofstadter's words: paranoia characterized by "heated
exaggerations" and more words but seeing these two
in quotes put Woods on Pynchon's "hysterical realism" into my head.