Jerome Weeks complains about Pynchon and writes (even though he admits that he hasn’t read the entirety of Mason & Dixon), “His best work remains The Crying of Lot 49. There’s something to be said for succinctness.”
I couldn’t agree more (on the succint part, that is). Which makes me wonder why Weeks didn’t just type “I hate Pynchon” and hit the Publish button.
Jack Green’s manifesto holds true in the 21st century.
About a month before Gravity’s Rainbow was published, Richard Poirer published a 12,000 word review of it in Saturday Review, which invoked Ulysses and Moby Dick and Orson Welles (though not Don Ameche, where the “Kenosha Kid” was concerned) and set the tone for subsequent criticism. Imagine a mag editor greenlighting something like that now. Orthofer’s complete-review.com notice, the most intelligent writeup the book’s gotten so far, is under a thousand words. So it looks like even with the unlimits of cyberspace, the detailed analysis of Against the Day will be left to the doctoral candidates and the post-here, post-there P-nuts of waste.org.