--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, Patrick King <abrasax93@...> wrote:
>
> Imagine a great American novelist, one who is now a septuagenarian, writing
> with all the vivacity and bounce of a young man who has just discovered
> girls. Most of all, imagine sentences and scenes that are so much fun to
> read that you wish "Inherent Vice" were twice as long as it is. Imagine
> saying that about a Thomas Pynchon novel.
>
> **************************************
>
> Imagine it? Of course I can. I've read all his other novels and said it every time. Thomas Pynchon is one of the most delightful, amusing, brilliant, and thought provoking novelists in history. He's the 20th Century Dickens bridging the millennium. Pynchon is a completely unique voice.
>
I have to second this. Ever since I ran into a used copy of V., I became a total fan of Pynchon. Why so much hostility has been heaped upon him is a mystery to me. The same goes for another favorite, the late William Gaddis. Sometimes I think that the critics are a bunch of unimaginative squares... They can't just laugh at the Rev. Cherrycoke, like they are supposed to -- instead, they have to go and talk about paranoia and the sublimatory dialogic of obfuscative meaning!
I think Mason & Dixon ranks among the ten best American novels of the 20th century. It's even better than Gravity's Rainbow.
Why the hostility in his own country against a brilliant writer who has nothing to prove and who has stuck to his work without messing with anybody? It's very strange.
mrt
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