I have now read 3 of Thomas Pynchon's novels and am working on the fourth. I know of no-one else on earth who can match this feat.
The problem is that this achievement is less than admirable when one of the novels, The Crying Of Lot 49, is little more than a short story, clocking in at 127 pages. I read it last night, and was somewhat underwhelmed. It was written in 1964 and I guess things have changed since then. I got told it was all about conspiracies and government agents and was a page-turner par excellence, instead it was dreary, dull and plodding. There was some clever wordplay and the stucture was a bit 'out there' but nothing that you wouldn't encounter in any of a number of 'modern' novels.
Still, the story was solid and i'ts not like it took more than a couple of hours to read, so i'm satisfied.
I'm now working on "Against The Day' which is shaping up to be fantastic.
1 comment:
I think the story is that he wrote it for the money and not much else. That's why it reads like a missing chapter of GR that perhaps should have stayed missing. Amusing in parts, but far from his best.
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