/lit/ - Literature

What does /lit/ think of Pynchon? I used to be a huge fan but as I get older I start to wonder if I was just desperate to be edgy.
Nothing compares to the experience of reading it, but beyond that was it just schizo ramblings?
Or is that its literary value given the time period?

>>14002287
>This is my first book by him and I have to admit at the outset - I'm not too impressed.
It's his potboilerest book. Even Vineland, which is commonly regarded as his worst, was more earnest (being bad mostly due to excess fluff clogging up the good bits; I remember reading something similar about either Bleeding Edge or Against the Day).
>Its style is beautiful for more than 10 pages, but then divulges into pointless meandering and referencing the culture and products of the time.
Although, like I just said, he sometimes does this overmuch, I liked it in Inherent Vice because there was a real sense of the 60s' grounding in decades prior, in the music and film of the 50s and 40s. Most 60s fiction fails to properly engage with that. Digressiveness is also a standard trope of the tradition Pynchon is writing in, maybe first cemented by the likes of Swift and Burton and Sterne.
>Did I make a mistake by having this as my first Pynchon novel?
It was my first and I liked it but had similar complaints about meandering and poor plot resolution. After reading The Crying of Lot 49 I realized that those things are stylistic decisions, and that in Inherent Vice he simply watered down his style (again, potboiler, riding the coattails of contemporary Californian weed lmao culture) to such a degree that it looks like awkward writing rather than something intentional. I like to recommend that people read his "California trilogy" (Lot 49, Vineland, Inherent Vice) as a "backdoor" into his work, given that they're his easiest books and they all grapple with similar themes, and then chipping away at the rest of his work chronologically as far as one can stomach (i.e., V., Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, etc.). But if you hate Inherent Vice so much you might be better suited to just going straight to V.; at the very least try Lot 49.

You're in for the crying of lot 49!!!!!

Does /lit/ have any tattoos? Bonus points if they're /lit/ related

Didn't see that coming?

Thoughts?