Not P but Solenoid. (I so want to read this but who has enough time?)

[Mark Kohut]

There is a very bright and sensitive New Yorker-even critic/ reader who
went over the top about Solenoid...(Not in the New Yorker).
She is probably being chided and this will hang with her for a long
while....Basically, she said although she had read many great books,
she would call none of them a 'religious experience' but that this one
was.....okay, okay......

Anyway, my answer to your paranoia reflections is that when done
right--early Pynchon---you have found a brilliant way to show how much
of a world sees this way......that is, it is not naval gazing, but the
opposite.......which is also why Pynchon can have that great line
about paranoids having real enemies...
in Nixon's America and not only there, paranoia saw reality.

On Sat, Dec 3, 2022 at 9:23 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> My ears always perk up when a Reviewer extols the extreme, exquisite
> quality of an author’s writing. I find the extended prose poetry of
> Pynchon’s writing to be its finest virtue, almost completely apart from any
> narrative story. Almost like the insertion a song in the middle of a
> musical film or play: a conscious heavy dose of poetic imagery.
>
> Separate from the beauty of the writing are the constructs of reality, and
> the various levels in which the writer is acknowledging (even winking) at
> the fact that he’s as an author, creating an artificial world that is apt
> to be full of darkness and deceit and things that aren’t true.
>
> The author becomes a trickster, making layered constructions of “reality”
> into a puzzle game for the reader. Paranoia trope seems like an endless
> ride made more unpleasant by ever deeper versions of “gotcha!” Why, then,
> is paranoia, considered a high level of satire among critics?
>
> Paranoia’s rabbit hole potentially is one’s own navel.  COL49 is one of my
> least favorite novels by P.
>
> On Sat, Dec 3, 2022 at 8:23 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> this novel, anti-novel, getting incredible attention and
>> this from a fine NYT review I post because part of Pynchon
>> is that ole paranoia rag:
>>
>> He practices a sweeping solipsism that makes of paranoia a kind of
>> totalizing faith. Every event, image or experience, whether common or
>> outlandish, throbs with sinister meaning. Objects and memories from
>> childhood bloom with late, apocalyptic significance in adulthood. Dreams
>> contain legible clues for the arresting puzzles of waking life. This is
>> the
>> world as pure conspiracy, a web of impossibly esoteric interconnection.
>> The
>> book’s maximalism is no mere formalist tic, then, but a matter of
>> necessity. Only a novel so sprawling, so unexpected, so incongruous could
>> house such a sublime neurosis.
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>