/lit/ - Literature

Good Lord, do I hate this book.

This is very, very late Thomas Pynchon, when he was hopped up on marijuana and television. Consequently, the entire book reads like a very, very long, barely edited transcript of a stoned East Coast intellectual rambling incoherently for hours in turn of the century English, because that's exactly what it is. The narrative is simplistic, is buried underneath clouds of irrelevant and soporific detail, and frankly isn't very interesting to begin with. The characters are wooden and uninteresting. The entire book is less about actual storytelling and more about talking at great length about arcane Victorian traditions without actually getting to the point. For all of the thousands of words in this book, very few of them actually have meaning. This book adds nothing to either literature in general or to Pynchon's reputation, and only came to be because he was delirious and lonely before getting married.

This is possibly one of the most tedious, overwrought books I have ever read. On that negative note, I have enjoyed other books by Thomas Pynchon, mainly The Crying of Lot 49, which was actually quite good. It appears that his late works, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day etc, are in his most annoying, self-indulgent style, and most of them are practically unreadable.

And this book is indeed unreadable. Thomas Pynchon's style is overly wordy and verbose, his sentences go on for paragraphs. I found myself having to stop reading in the middle of a sentence just to keep track of what he was saying. This book is so wordy that it took me several months to finish it, and several times I found myself angrily throwing this book against the wall. How can anyone endure this? I have read other author's who are very wordy, such as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, but never have I encountered writing so painfully excruciating.

The plot isn't very interesting either for that matter, there's very little action in this book, and it seemed that Pynchon liked to "suggest" rather than describe actions or a scene, which doesn't work very well when your writing style is like verbal diarrhea. What sounds like an interesting plot comes off like hot air in Thomas Pynchon's writing style.
I was really looking forward to reading more Thomas Pynchon after The Crying of Lot 49 but this book ruined him for me. I can safely say I probably will never read any more Thomas Pynchon again, thanks to this abomination. And as far as this book, actually publishing this turgid mess as a novel was a crime against humanity.