In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Joseph Bottum reviewed Thomas Pynchon’s new novel Inherent Vice :
“Inherent Vice” is the closest to beach reading that Thomas Pynchon has ever produced. Of course, take-to-the-beach best sellers are nearly always genre fiction: thrillers and mysteries and romances. They’re usually competent, typically easy and strictly conventional books: novels by courtesy; narrower in purpose and range than what novel writing is supposed to allow. That doesn’t make them bad. It just makes them small. Which raises a question: If the 72-year-old Thomas Pynchon, high-flying author of such iconic works as “V.” (1963) and “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973), is reduced to writing genre fiction—in this case, a mystery-thriller with an overlay of irony—who is left to write novels? Real novels, that is?
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