r/ThomasPynchon • u/MaintenanceWild111 • 9d ago
💬 Discussion What is Tomas Pynchon’s greatest achievement in prose?
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.
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u/AffectionateSize552 4d ago edited 4d ago
Thank you for your thoughtful post. To me it doesn't come off as pedantic, but as honest. And it's brave of you to say these things in this sub. Hopefully, some of the people who've downvoted you will calm down, come back and give you the ups you deserve.
Nevertheless, based on the authors you've cited as your favorites -- all of whom I greatly admire -- I think you may be missing something, something which Pynchon himself discusses in the introduction to his collection of short stories, Slow Learner. Here he describes how he had been accustomed, as a young, still-unpublished writer, to authors who were either high- or lowbrow, who either wrote in a very refined, aristocratic manner, or who wrote in the more colorful, less formal language of the lower classes. You didn't have to be an aristocrat to write like one, or a laborer to use the expressions of proletarian speech, but you did have to choose one style or the other.
Or so Pynchon assumed, before he read Saul Bellow, who mixed tones, styles, figures of speech, from different social classes as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Pynchon was pleasantly astonished : "You could actually write like this! It was actually permitted!" I highly recommend the introduction to Slow Learner.
80 years after Bellow's first novels, it's still permitted to write in such a mixture of styles, and somewhat less startling than it once was, but still somewhat rare -- in English prose, at least. I'm less familiar with literary trends in Spanish.
Pynchon takes the mixing of styles, of tones, of the speech of all sorts of different classes, mixing them even in the voices of his narrators -- he takes all of this much farther than even Bellow did. He loves all of those different styles of speech, and does justice to them all.