A not so positive short 1966 review (Warren French, Col49)

[Mark Kohut]

Warren French was so solid with old-fashioned books....he missed most of
modernism....
thanks for this...

On Tue, Dec 28, 2021 at 5:31 AM <bulb at vheissu.net> wrote:

> French, Warren. Review of The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon. Western
> American Literature, vol. 1 no. 2, 1966, p. 142-143. Project MUSE,
> <http://doi.org/10.1353/wal.1966.0002> doi:10.1353/wal.1966.0002.
>
>
>
> The Crying of Lot 49. By Thomas Pynchon.
>
> (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1966. 183 pages, $3.95.)
>
>
>
> The West doesn't end at the Sierra Madre. Beyond plains and prairies and
> last lettuce ranch, it falls- often quite literally- into the cool,
> complacent Pacific. Along the sea's littoral, the dregs of the Westward
> Movement have deposited - like a town hiding its garbage in a ravine at its
> edge - a litter of paranoid suburbs, their ceaseless conspiratorial
> whisperings erupting only occasionally into the grating grunts of
> motorcycles and the nightmare shrieks of old men dreaming of losing money.
>
>
>
> This twilight zone is the West as much as the land of "High Noon,"- a
> gilded
> fringe dipped too often in gravy - and some time our novelists are going to
> have to come to terms with its senile sun-seekers, frantic-to-be
> fashionable
> junior executives, atavistic hordes of juvenile delinquents. Some day we
> are
> going to learn how the land that sprawls from Palo Alto to Chula Vista has
> turned the old alchemist's wistful dream into living nightmare by
> converting
> movie stars into public officials, peroxided tramps into cult goddesses,
> subliterate outcasts from other states into authorities on education,
> morals, and art.
>
>
>
> All this by way of preface to saying that Thomas Pynchon, who recently
> stirred some excitement in the literary world with his novel V, has
> ventured
> into California's Suburbia in his second, The Crying of Lot 49, blazing a
> trail others might follow through the cultural quagmire. He leaves, it must
> be ruefully admitted, much for the others to do; for, like a little kid at
> Disneyland, Pynchon has been so overawed by the abundance and vulgarity of
> his material that he has lost sight of the neon forest in his fascination
> with the polyethylene trees. Pynchon has the style to do the job: "One
> summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose
> hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she,
> Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate
> of
> one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul. . . ." So begins the
> unlikely tale; unfortunately, it gets little further. We never learn much
> more about the Inverarity estate, Mrs. Maas's claim to it, or her eventual
> fate at the hands of some sinister rival of the government postoffice, the
> trail of which she happens to cross. Perhaps Pynchon's point is that in
> Kitschland, cleverness becomes an end in itself, nothing does ever get
> anywhere, distraction and dissipation are the end of effort; but a
> successful novel must be more than a comic distorting mirror. Pynchon
> reminds us that there's a lot left to be done in fiction with Western
> materials, but he doesn't get around to doing much of it. Let's hope
> someone
> else will really get this fantastic show on the road.
>
>
>
> Warren French, University of Missouri at Kansas City.
>
>
>
> Happy holidays!
>
> Michel.
>
> --
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>