Hey guys, I see that there is a lot of good taste in literature floating around here and I was just wondering if you guys have read or have any opinions on Pynchon. I'm doing a presentation and I figure since his work is almost all that we know of him and opinions on that would supplement some.
He's certainly an enigmatic character. I have mixed feelings about his writing, or what I've read of it. I liked 'Vineland' when I read it around the time it came out, but still, I also found it ultimately backward looking, and perhaps a bit pessimistic. Very funny in places, and thought provoking. He created the characters of the young shop-lifter girls just right - but others in the book seem a bit like cardboard cut-outs. In a way it's a kind of paranoid fantasy. I have had a copy of 'Gravity's Rainbow' on the shelf for a couple of years - one day maybe I'll get round to reading it.
I started reading V a while ago and found it inventive and entertaining. Then I put it down somewhere and haven't managed to pick it up again just yet. When I was at Cambridge in the 1970s, an Eng Lit student I knew wanted to write his dissertation on Pynchon, but they wouldn't let him as it wasn't considered proper literature.
Crying of Lot 49 is very possibly my favorite book of all time. He's an absolutely incredible writer, but you have to accept not understanding everything all the time, or doing a whole lot of research. In my opinion, Pynchon is one of the few geniuses left.
