Look, Ma, I'm writing, playing games, being clever

[bulb]

>From The Hudson Review, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Winter, 1973-1974), pp. 773-785. GR
(and other novels) reviewed by Ronald De Feo. Enjoy - I most certainly did!

[start excerpt]

DISPENSERS OF EXCESSIVE PRAISE presently plague the world of book reviewing.
Compulsive enthusiasts, ready to cheer at the drop  of  a  hat, have long
darkened  the  world  of  film cri ticism.  (At  least  once  a  week a
particular New York film critic tags a new movie "One of the most memorable
films I have ever seen.") But  now  similar  clowns  are practising  book
reviewing,  tossing  out  superlatives   at   a   frightening rate  and
unconsciously   making  a  mockery  of  literary  criticism.   When a critic
declares a novel "first-rate," "great," "a  masterpiece,"  "remarkable,"
what sort of books are  included  in  his  own  literary  pantheon? What
standards  of  excellence  is  he  using?  I'm  reminded  of   people who
find Vonnegut  "great."  When  you  ask  them  "Great  in  comparison to
whom?", when you  try  to  discover  what  other  writers  they've  read and
respected, they'll most likely come up with Brautigan , Hesse and Tolkien.
I'm  not  suggesting  that  some  book   reviewers  are  as  limited in
their  reading  as  these  people,  I'm  simply  wondering  how  many  good
books certain  critics  have  consumed  and  even  more  important, how they
reacted to those books.

When a critic in his review of Gravity's Rainbow announces that if he is
exiled to the moon and could take five books with him, Pynchon's novel would
be one of them, we are certainly curious about those remaining big four. (If
Giles Goat-Boy is among them, I, for one, will not sign a petition urging
that this man be returned to the good earth.) If I am mistaken and if
Gravity's Rainbow really is the master-piece, the classic many reviewers
have claimed it to be, then it is a fairly forgettable classic and one that
I have little desire to re-read. Gravity's Rainbow is Pynchon's apocalyptic,
World War II-postwar extravaganza in which normal, even near-normal, human
beings are nowhere to be found. The world has gone positively ma(l.
Technology has gotten as completely out of hand as politics. People are
slaves to the machines and systems of their own design. Death is in the air
both figuratively and literally (V-2 rockets scream through the sky). Plots
and counter-plots are conceived. Paranoia is on the rise. Everyone is a
victim. Everyone is a criminal. Lt. Tyrone Slothrop, whose erections
anticipate the faster-than-sound V-2's and puzzle behaviorists because they
(the erections) represent an instance of response preceding stimulus, flees
London and those who wish to study or destroy him, and travels war-torn
Europe. Along the not-always-so-merry way Pynchon introduces, develops,
drops at will, a host of other characters, infinite crazier than Slothrop
and even more ridiculously structs a number of incredibly labyrinthine to
boggle the mind of even the most determined Pynchon admirer (V. and The
Crying of Lot 49 seem like busy work next to this production). Throughout
the long haul, Pynchon impresses us with how much he has read and even more
amazingly, how much his brain has retained. It seems, in fact, to have
become a cerebral junkyard, filled indiscriminately with both trash and
precious items. For in the novel we find, among an infinite number of other
things, allusions to Rilke, the Bhagavad-Gita, Orson Welles ("The Kenosha
Kid"), references to King Kong, Charlie Parker and Anton Webern, brand names
of various wartime items, names of radio shows of the period, songs,
bandleaders. Pynchon touches on paranoia, history, death, demonstrates a
wide knowledge of philosophy, physics, psychology. Folks, everything is in
this novel but the kitchen sink-and that may be in there as well (at one
disgusting point, a virtuoso fecal passage, Pynchon gets a lot of mileage
out of a toilet bowl).

What does it all ad up to? Pynchon is, to be sure, an extremely gifted man.
His sheer ability to write, to imagine and capture places quite foreign to
him both geographically and historically, his ceaseless energy and
imagination, must impress anyone who has ever tried his hand at fiction. In
Gravity's Rainbow we are treated to a feast, often an orgy, of language:

Over on the coast the Wrens work late, down inside cold and gutted shells,
their blue torches are newborn stars in the tidal evening. Hullplates swing
in the sky, like great iron leaves, on cables that creak in splinters of
sound. At ease, on standby, the flames of the torches, softened, fill the
round glass faces of the gauges with apricot light. In the pipefitters'
sheds, icicled, rattling when tlhe gales are in the Straits, here's
thousands of old used toothpaste tubes, heaped often to the ceilings,
thousands of somber man-mornings made tolerable, transformed to mint fumes
and bleak song that left white spots across the quicksilver mirrors from
Harrow to Gravesend, thousands of children who pestled foam up out of soft
mortars of mouths, who lost easily a thousand times as many words among the
chalky bubbles-bed-going complaints, timid announcements of love, news of
fat or translucent, fuzzy or gentle beings from the country under the
counterpane-uncounted soapy-liquorice moments spat and flushed down to
sewers and the slow-scrumming gray estuary ....

An embarrassment of riches? Perhaps. But the man can write. The real problem
is not Pynchon's talent per se, but rather how is applied. The sameness of
tone throughout Gravity's Rainbow for tedium. By the time the reader is
halfway through (assuming he gets this far), he feels that he has reached a
point of diminishing returns. The always  cool,  hip  voice  of  the
constantly  winking creator (Look, Ma, I'm writing, playing games, being
clever) becomes less and less attractive. Pynchon's canvas, which at first
seemed so vast, now appears limited , closed. The reader senses the somewhat
sophomoric sensibility behind the  book  and  seeks  relief. There  is none
. Only more characters and events filtered through that same irritating
sensibility. Scenes accumulate, there are often striking set- pieces of
writing, but the book lacks tension and fails to build. Although Pynchon
traces the progress of paranoia, shows men constructing the systems and
machinery that will eventually destroy them, creates a nervous world of
total confusion and sudden death, he has no particular point of view  ab out
any  of  these  things.  He  demonstrates and records in  minute  detail,
but  he  doesn't  probe,  penetrate or seek to illuminate. Her merely
markets  chaos,  produces one crazy incident aft er another to his and his
fans' delight.  Pynchon  does not convince us that what he has to say is
worth 760 dense pages. Ideas, a point of view, might have held the book
together and given it the tension it so badly needs.

[end excerpt]