Very P but all impressionistic.

[John Bailey]

It took me perhaps 8-10 years to read GR all the way through and the
whole time I still thought of Pynchon as my favourite novelist. I have
distinct memories of what I thought of GR before I'd finished it.
- There was a massive amount of context I wasn't getting, just because
I didn't have enough history (especially military history),
mid-century politics, American slang, and so on, and I felt I wasn't
erudite enough to get it
- I now think its mode is more poetry than prose, but at the time
seemed so radical I couldn't figure how to mentally parse it
- It seems so much bleaker and more nihilistic than anything else
Pynchon has written, and I think it's easy to forget that when you
come to a finer appreciation of the novel
And so while Against the Day and M&D might be superficially similar -
expansive, very peripatetic in a narrative sense, zany, full of
linguistic playfulness and generic subversion and historical
gear-changing - they're still very readable at the level of the
sentence (the latter is obviously mannered in an archaic way but still
pretty approachable). And they're not profoundly unsettling,
disturbing, graphic and hard to reconcile emotionally.
That's just my tuppence.

On Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 8:49 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have just read a long twitter thread responding to the question
> Which is Thomas Pynchon's best novel?...(person was reading GR).
>
> 1) supposition: the twitter responders skew younger than most of the Plist.
> 2) many of the plist have read most of TRP from GR on, as they were
> published
>
> 3) Surprising me, there were a lot of Against the Day answers. As well as M
> & D answers
> and not an easy plurality for GR. ---and a putting GR into some kind of
> context--from "needs multiple readings" to what seems like
> you had to be there, so to speak.
>
> Just sayin'.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l