[dadarecit]

tbh, Pynchon is overrated, pretentious and tedious. If he were an engineer, he’d be the kind that implements event driven microservices architecture just to recommend new items for users.

Sure, he so smart - but if he so smart, why he so stupid?

[shever73]

I've only started reading Pynchon lately. I'd seen too many comparisons to James Joyce, and I struggled and gave up on Ulysses at least 4 times.

Anyway, I picked up a copy of V at a second-hand bookshop recently and, so far, I'm enjoying it. It's definitely densely packed and not a quick read, but I think he's just carrying on the post-modernist tradition of Proust and Joyce.

[dumpsterlid]

You can fault Pynchon for many many things (though I love him) but "carrying on a post-modernist tradition" is probably the last thing you could possibly fault him for.

Pynchon is one of the most esoteric artists I have ever encountered in any medium. He did take a lot of inspiration from how Henry James writes in a sentence/paragraph level (see Pugnax the talking dog who reads Henry James all day in ATD) but his work ends up being something entirely different.

[dmreedy]

All I can think of is a quote from the McSweeney's article elsewhere on the front page right now.

"we are proud to bring the written word into the future with revolutionary technology that delivers the one thing readers are most passionate about: efficiency."

For me at least, postmodern literature isn't just about conveying a message or an idea. It's about conveying a vibe, a state of mind. And that kind of pseudo-telepathy might even require the meandering and the density and the apparent overcomplication to deliver you enough context to align your neurons into something approximating where the author's were at.

[dumpsterlid]

"And that kind of pseudo-telepathy might even require the meandering and the density and the apparent overcomplication to deliver you enough context to align your neurons into something approximating where the author's were at."

Absolutely, postmodern literature is an extension of modernism (i.e. To The Lighthouse or Ulysses) in that it is focused on describing the moment to moment experience of consciousness, except postmodern literature like Pynchon's work dials everything up until the replicated experience of consciousness is the experience of a psychedelic state.

This results in confounding literature where it is difficult to deduce what is real, what the point is, and to orient oneself. This is unavoidably a necessary part of inducing such an intense mental state in the reader.

[slothtrop]

I don't understand pretentious as a critique, it's only ever a projection. Either something works or it doesn't, works don't "pretend" anything.

[MontyCarloHall]

Sure they do; they pretend to be more sophisticated than they actual are.

[websitejanitor]

Pynchon doesn't pretend to be anything. His material mostly consists of low culture, obscenity, and engineering nerd stuff he finds interesting. He lived through the beat and hippie countercultures and draws from them for his characters and settings.

I think people get hung up on the difficulty of his writing. He writes word puzzles and he's having as much fun with it as he can.

People like his work because they have fun untangling the obscure mess he puts on the page.

[slothtrop]

It's either sophisticated (in the eye of the beholder) or it isn't. Art doesn't "pretend". You can only take it at face value.

[cantSpellSober]

A common response.

> According to the standard kvetch about his work, his prose is overly dense [1]

Neil Stephenson gets the same criticism a lot, but I still enjoy a lot of his work.

> [Pynchon] can write some truly poignant scenes of longing, love, and loss

Don't get too caught up in the details, and don't hope for endings.

https://pleasekillme.com/thomas-pynchon/

[computerfriend]

But he was an engineer.

[frontierkodiak]

He was a technical writer at Boeing, IIRC