[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.