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Chapter 43 - Book Reviews and Reception

from Part III - Approaches and Readings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 May 2019

Inger H. Dalsgaard
Affiliation:
Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
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Summary

Eight novels published over fifty years would naturally elicit a variety of reader responses, but Thomas Pynchon’s works in particular have presented mainstream reviewers with unique challenges, resulting in widely divergent opinions and interpretations regarding such seemingly basic matters as plot, character, tone, genre, and career trajectory. For one thing, the books tend to be big, their combined length and density leading some critics to throw up their hands in despair at being able to comprehend them. In place of reasoned argument, these critics give us crazily proliferating lists of contradictory attributes in imitation of Pynchon’s own epic catalogs. Thus Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is described as “bonecrushingly dense, compulsively elaborate, silly, obscene, funny, tragic, pastoral, historical, philosophical, poetic, grindingly dull, inspired, horrific, cold, bloated, beached, and blasted.” Meanwhile, Against the Day (2006) is “audacious, bodacious, entropic, synoptic, electric, eclectic, entertaining, hyperbraining” as well as “rambling, shambling, self-indulgent, non-refulgent, overlong, full-of-bad-song, seriously-scattered, plainly mad-hattered.”

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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