Why is Gravity's Rainbow considered Pynch's best when it is clearly Against the Day?
Why is Gravity's Rainbow considered Pynch's best when it is clearly Against the Day?
Why is Gravity's Rainbow considered Pynch's best when it is clearly Against the Day?
>Why is Gravity's Rainbow considered Pynch's best when it is clearly Mason & Dixon?
ftfy
This.
Against the Day is not even that good.
What makes M&D better?
Better writing.
&c. and thus we see reasonable commentary. Against the Day based in the extreme though, in the extreme, so don’t miss out, as such, Thankee.
Good question. I don't think many have read it. The Lovecraft pastiche is one of the most hilarious things I have read, amazing how well he pulled it off considering the cosmic horror was just a hunk of rock (the unknown).
>just a hunk of rock
Did I miss something? I thought it was a big old snake demon thing.
Pretty sure it was just a hunk of Iceland spar, there is a lot of Lovecraftian verbiage regarding looking through it and how the double refraction makes things look and suggests something in it. I am going to reread that bit tonight so I will report back with any required clarification.
Yeah, it was iceland spar, the demon thing is figurative.
Howso?
A big part of it is that is the book which ties the tetralogy together and really allows us to see the big picture he was working towards, the tetralogy being those four books he started writing back in the 60s, GR, M&D, AtD and after my reread I suspect Vineland might be the fourth book but still need to reread that one to be sure. Fourth book could still be unreleased or he may have reduced it to a trilogy, I am currently on the fence with this. The way it draws on what he setup in GR and M&D allows insane complexity that feels almost effortless.
Beyond that the setting and style really plays to his strengths as a writer. At the core you have a family drama done in a revisionist western style with a handful of other plotlines each done as a pastiche of a style big during the time the novel is set. These pastiches each support a theme which is inherent in them (their genre essentially) and as you progress through the novel the pastiches evolve as their source genre evolved which is also the evolution of their respective themes. The evolution is primarily carried out through the interaction between the various plot lines, each time a pair of them (or more) cross paths they pickup a little of the other. Execution of this is done almost flawlessly to the point it is very easy to completely miss it all, it feels natural with each pastiche and plot working together towards their theme and all of them working just as well towards the whole, Pynchon completely drops his reliance on digression and plot tricks carrying everything directly with character, plot and pastiche.
He also gives us a good number of empathetic characters who never feel like they are just tools of the author, they have lives and agency, the whole range of emotion which are complex and conflicted, and most importantly they grow and evolve and learn. The plots are solid and engaging but the novel is carried forward through their interactions and theme, not the plot themselves which keeps everything cohesive and it is not just waiting to see how the plots tie together because they are tied together in otherways from early on.
Because I had diarrhea when reading Against The Day and know I associate it as the diarrhea book.
I was constipated when I read this book so now I associate it with rubber gloves and a plastic spoon
I liked the goofs and the gags
What's so good about it? It's hardly ever mentioned.
ATD is objectively a worse GR
Why
no
It's better because it has old west parts 🙂
The city where they go to recover Webb's body was probably my favorite part of the old west stuff but the western bit was probably favorite part especially when it traveled to Europe with Reef. Reef and the French lap dog was amazingly well written, you pretty much see the light bulb light up above Reef's head and Pynchon does a masterful job of exploiting the suspense, we know what is going to happen and it is all in the delivery.
I hate phone posting, I almost always end up writing like a moron.
Will I enjoy AtD if I loved V, CoL49 and GR but was sort of luke warm with respect to M&D and BE?
Probably, it is the closest he ever comes to writing another V. and that level of narrative complexity but this time he pulls it off and goes even more complex while throwing in the technicality of GR and the pastiche of M&D but each taken further. First 100 or so pages is setting up the pastiches and at times feels a bit heavy handed with it but after that it settles down and the pastiche is mostly kept in the background where it can do its thing.
I don't understand why this isn't more talked about. Because it's so long maybe? Quality wise it's his best work alongside M&D and GR.
I seem to be the only one on IQfy who actually wants to talk about it.
It's strange that for a board that always spams some shit about Pynchon almost nobody talks about one of his most acclaimed books.
Many such pages!