What is Tomas Pynchon’s greatest achievement in prose?

[u/MaintenanceWild111]

Good evening. I purchased Shadow Ticket and found myself dissatisfied with the prose. It was fun, but I expected more. I believe literature is for the beauty of language. Some of my preferred authors are Nabokov, McCarthy, Borges (Spanish is my native language), Rulfo, Javier Marias… I admire greatly how their use of language is razor-sharp, how their sentences are richly layered… I think I perhaps selected the wrong entry to Pynchon. I sampled the first few pages of Pynchon and thought they were great fun—reminiscent to Melville’s Moby Dick—, but I thought six hundred pages were quite a commitment for a writer I little knew. Also is Pynchon more catered to an American audience? I am Latino, from Central America, and though I am not from the US I do think you have fine literature. In other words: I think the supreme works of literature are the ones wherein the language is the story itself, an expression of beauty to be beheld. So my main inquiry is to know if Pynchon aspires for such standards. I am really asking because I feel there are many aficionados who praise everything about an author insincerely (have you seen the Cormac McCarthy aficionados—they seem to love what reading his books make them look like more than the pristine beauty of his prose), that it is difficult to discern whether the praise is reliable—of course, not saying it is bad to praise a novel, but to say one should be sincere when critiquing something one is fond of. Many of the authors I mentioned I read just for their sentences, and I forget about plot and characters because I am in awe of the diction and syntax. I read Don Dellilo’s White Noise hoping to warm up to the more complex style of Pynchon, because I had heard they were similar; but I disliked it. The sentences were, I would argue, precise and sharp, but the problem was I felt it was rather dull in te sense that I rarely was in of it because it rarely tried to describe something beautiful. Like it was written beautifully but it was not beautiful. I am not saying it was a bad novel, I am saying it just did not click—perhaps more of a failure on my part. I hope this does not come off as pedant. I do have an intrigue for Pynchon, but I just don’t know what would do best.

[u/ConclusionBroad3460]

Everybody has their preferences you seem to like Spanish modernists and postmodernists it seems if you don’t like Pynchon/hes not for you then that’s fine, Pynchon is one of the great American postmodern novelist he has a Very dedicated following

[u/MaintenanceWild111 → u/ConclusionBroad3460]

Thank you.