Jan’s Comments (group member since Oct 15, 2008)

Jan’s comments from the Thomas Pynchon group.

Yeah, I already wrote it in!

Michael, enjoyed both Chabon's review and your review of his review.

I'd put this in the same category as Inherent Vice. If that was a love letter to Southern California, this is a love/hate letter to New York City. Both books masqueraded as noir detective stories. This one's themes include late capitalism, the Internet, 9/11, and privacy vs. surveillance. The delirious paranoia of this (and all of Pynchon's) novels prefigures Snowden's recent revelations.

It left me unsatisfied. It didn't have the reach of Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon or Against the Day, but neither did it have the lightness of touch of Inherent Vice. There was less poetry and more japery than in Pynchon at his very best. Even though it's one of his weaker novels, it's still pyrotechnic, complex, timely and, at times, transcendent.

Yes, Steve, thanks. I'll put Dahlgren on my to-read list.

I love Against the Day, too. Does anyone on here like Umberto Eco? He's not nearly the genius that Pynchon is, and his novels are really just a method of explicating his ideas about history, I think, but his postmodern narration in The Prague Cemetery was fun for some of the same reasons I like Pynchon.

I recently read the last few hundred pages of Against the Day with the aid of the Pynchon Wiki. Has anyone else used this? There's one for each of Pynchon's novels. Did it make the book better or worse for you?