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?
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Ethics of Rhetoric in Times of War
What we say matters. And the way we say it matters. This is especially true in times…
How the State Failed Noelia Castillo
On March 26, Noelia Castillo, a twenty-five-year-old Spanish woman, was killed by her doctors at her own…
The Mind’s Profane and Sacred Loves
The teachers you have make all the difference in your life. That they happened to come into…
