Strikes me as a bit of a reach....groooooaaaan.

[Michael Bailey]

Mark Thibodeau replied to Charles F Albert

------------------------------

And what is this about?

On Thu, Sep 8, 2022 at 8:40 AM Charles Albert <cfalbert at gmail.com
<https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l>> wrote:

>* "Suffice it to say that certain words (“hellfire,” “ninja,” “Ginsu,”
*>* “reaper”) and images (an invisible bird of prey soon to strike, an evil man
*>* on a balcony serenely alone) and capabilities (a first-person-shooter game
*>* made flesh, firing a horrifying weapon that is the definition of overkill)
*>* make it read like clumsy fantasy, something on the order of Thomas Pynchon,
*>* were *Gravity’s Rainbow* rewritten by a moron."*


In a review,


https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/09/22/haunting-of-hajji-hotak-jamil-jan-kochai/

The quoted paragraph describes in fictional terms the killing of Ayman
Al-Zawahri by a hellfire missile, first described in journalistic style:

At 6:18 AM on Sunday, July 31, two R9Xmissiles were launched from a General
Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drone, striking and killing the former surgeon and
leader of al-Qaeda Ayman al-Zawahri, one of the planners of the September
11 attacks. The CIA had been trying to find al-Zawahri for more than twenty
years. After America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021,
intelligence led the agency to a Taliban safe house in Kabul where
al-Zawahri and his wife, his daughter, and her children had come to live.
He was never observed leaving the house, but every morning, the CIA determined,
he could be seen reading alone on the balcony.


- before getting to the actual review of Afghan-American author Jamil Jan
Kochai’s fiction - paywall stopped me after this compelling lead-in, though.

It’s the factual part - not Kochai’s stories - that the reviewer is
comparing to Pynchon written by a moron.

As to “reach” - at first I thought maybe Jack Reacher? - it’s a reach in
the sense of stretching for a comparison to Pynchon’s work, I think. It
reminds me more of that guy with the “Poor Impulse Control” tattoo on his
forehead in Neal Stevenson’s _Snow Crash_ sitting in a Zodiac raft firing a
rail gun, tbh.

Also maybe kind of a reach to start a review of fiction with so much
current events data and editorial, but maybe the whole review brings it
home and justifies the approach.