Pynchon And Other Overrated Writers

I'm not a fan of Pynchon either, but my brother love, love, loves him. Ah well, we can't all have the same taste. Will think on others.

I found Gravity's Rainbow stupifying when I tried to read it many years ago, and thought it was just me. Now I see I'm not alone. I'll have to think about writers I suspect are overrated......

I haven't read anything else by Charles Frazier, but I found "Cold Mountain" way overrated. You could see him reaching and grasping for EPIC rather than staying true to the story and characters.

Nice idea for a thread.

I'm sure this is a controversial thought. To me the most overestimated writer ever (other than Stephen King) would have to be Hemingway. I've had the thing explained to me over and over by his die hard fans, how he pioneered a form of semi-journalistic fiction, how every page tells you what time it is (this is a big deal?), but to me his manliness always seemed like a guise, his characters seem mere cut-outs, his prose always seemed flat and obvious and with the exception of a couple of pieces (every writer has to hit the bell sometime if they keep at it), I could never scare up much interest in his stories.

It's not that I didn't try. I never put the personal kibosh on a writer unless I give him a real chance. Papa let me down big time.

There are so many good writers who are underrated (Robertson Davies, Adistair Grey, Gene Wolfe) that someone getting blown up like Hemingway seems a pity.

But, like I said, I'm sure this thought may bother some... just a personal taste thing, perhaps.

I'd have to agree about Pynchon. What a lot of people missed with Gravity's Rainbow was how hard (way too hard) he was trying to reference Finnegans Wake. Nearly every page has some forced parallel (very forced). The over-arching idea (missile launch --time in suspension --armageddon) could have been reduced to a very short story or impressionist poem. Waste of ink, what he did with it, I believe.

Hemingway seems less fresh to us now perhaps because his style has been so much imitated. His best work, though, I think is still quite strong--though I agree that a lot of it is weak.

I'm glad to see the anti-Pynchonites are standing up to be counted, too.

I also like the comparison that Pychon is to literature what the ukelele is to the symphony orchestra.

I haven't read Pynchon, that I recall. There have been periods of my life in which I read one or two books a week, and since I have some very vague recollections of "Gravity's Rainbow", I may have read it in one of those periods. If so, the vagueness means I wasn't very impressed.

Sozobe, given the length of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, I respectfully submit that you could not have read it plus another book in a week. I also suspect that you would remember reading it one way or another if only for the effort you made turning the pages.

Probably not. I also worked in a used bookstore, and would flip idly through; the vagueness of the recollection is more in keeping with that than having read it.

That is fascinating, Sozobe. Maybe you can tell us what it was like working in a used bookstore--my idea of the dream job!

Fascinating? Dunno about that -- it was often very boring. But as putting-yourself-through-college jobs go, it was great. My boss was and is a good friend of mine and is a wonderful guy, but a sorry salesman. That's part of what I like about him, but it's not exactly good for business. If he didn't like the looks of someone, he'd claim we didn't have the book they were requesting, even if we did. So I did more of the schmoozing stuff; "Oh, you like _____, _______, and _____? Then try ______ -- it's great." The bulk of my job was just the nuts and bolts, though; putting plastic covers on hardbacks (like what they have at the library), erasing pencilled prices after the boss got a bunch of new books somewhere, shelving, organization, picking out good stuff to display in the window, etc. We chatted a lot, but it seemed like I was always busy. Didn't usually have time to sit and read anything while I was working, but would often flip through to get the feel of an interesting book as I was shelving.

Let me see if I understand this, Larry. You, the self-proclaimed lover of literature, and the man with the most refined sensibilities on earth, lead an on-line crusade against Thos. Pynchon.

Why, I wonder. Are his crimes against literature so egregious that you feel the need to expose him? Or is bating people really the game here? I suspect the latter...

Hi all... having posted my dislike of some of Pynchon's work, I feel compelled to mention that I found The Crying of Lot 49 to be very moving, albeit disturbing. For that matter, some of the books that have chafed me, stayed with me and eventually revealed themselves to my hindsight were disturbing in this fashion. Art at its suprising best hurts, nah?

Perhaps this aspect of Pynchon's work, a VERY gritty urban realism has some real power to it.

He would not be the first writer to not write to his stengths.

D'Artaganan: I never claimed to have the most refined sensibilities on earth. What does "bating people" mean? Do you mean "baiting people"? Well, if you do, was I doing that with my earlier thread that suggested that Virginia Woolf might be overrated too? Or am I simply getting a discussion going by suggesting a provocative topic? I submit that if I am stimulating discussion--and I am, look at both threads for proof--then I am doing my job.

For those who want to know more about Pynchon
A good source:

Home page of Pynchon reviews
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_reviews.html

Louis Menand, one of the best and most thoughtful writers around, author of the wonderful "Metaphysical Club," seems to think quite a lot of "Mason & Dixon" which he called "An astonishing and wonderful book" in the NYRB.

Larry -- You seem to have had some difficulty with Pynchon in general, and with Gravity's Rainbow. These references might help you:

Baedeker, Karl, Baedeker's Northern Germany, published by Karl Baedeker, Leipzig, 1897:

Brewer, Dr. Ebenezer Cobham, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, Centenary Edition revised by Ivor H. Evans, Harper & Row, 1817; On-Line Version

Cambridge Dictionary of Science and Technology, Cambridge University Press, 1988

Cooksley, Peter G., Flying Bombs, C. Scribner's Sons, NY - 1979

Hofstadter, Douglas, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, Basic Books, Inc., NY, 1979

Hume, Kathryn, Pynchon's Mythology, So. Illinois Univ. Press, 1987

Huson, Paul, The Devil's Picturebook, New York: C.P. Putnam's Sons, 1971

Huzel, Dieter K., Peenemünde To Canaveral, Prentice-Hall, Inc. - 1962 Johnson, David, V-1 V-2, Scarborough House - 1991

Jung, Carl, Volume 8 of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, "The Soul and Death", 1960; originally published in April 1934.

Kennedy, Gregory P., Vengeance Weapon 2, Smithsonian Institution Press, Wash. DC, 1983

Kingsolver, Barbara, High Tide In Tucson: Essays from Now or Never, Harper Collins, 1995

McIntyre, Ruth A., William Pynchon: Merchant and Colonizer 1590-1662, Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts, 1961

Martin, James S., All Honorable Men, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1950

McGovern, James, Crossbow and Overcast, William Morrow & Co., Inc., NY - 1964

Moore, Thomas, The Style of Connectedness: Gravity's Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon, University of Missouri Press, 1987

Neufeld, Michael J., The Rocket and The Reich, Free Press - 1995

Nichols, William, ed., The Third Book of Words to Live By, Simon and Schuster, 1962

Penguin Dictionary of Physics, Valerie Illingworth, Ed., Penguin Books, 1977

Prelinger, Elizabeth, Käthe Kollwitz, Yale Univ. Press - 1992

Rilke, Ranier Maria, Duino Elegies, translated by C.F. MacIntyre, University of California Press, 1961

Sasuly, Richard, IG Farben, Boni & Gaer New York, 1947

Schauffler, Robert Haven, Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music, Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1929

Schmalenbach, Fritz, Käthe Kollwitz, Hans Köster Königstein im Taunus, 1965

Stark, John, Pynchon's Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1980

Tölölyan, Khachig, "War as Background in Gravity's Rainbow," in Approaches to Gravity's Rainbow, ed. Charles Clerk, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983

Walton, Henry, Germany, Thames & Hudson, London - 1969

Weisenburger, Steven, A Gravity's Rainbow Companion, The University of Georgia Press, 1988

There are more, if you need them.

Tartarin:

Your pretentiousness and pomposity are outstanding. What makes you think I had "difficulties" with Pynchon? I never said so. I think he is a vastly overrated writer, and the existence of a secondary literature on him proves nothing except that the Ph.D. mills keep grinding away. There is a secondary literature on Alice Walker, too, but that doesn't make her a good writer or transform THE COLOR PURPLE from an illiterate, slovenly performance into a masterpiece.