![]() and Gravity's Rainbow, I measured out the decades in his books: Vineland in my 30s, Mason & Dixon in my 40s, and on through Against the Day, Inherent Vice, and now Bleeding Edge. Daniele Dainelli/Contrasto via ReduxĪfter looping back to pick up The Crying of Lot 49, the slim novel Pynchon wedged between the monumental V. “Bleeding Edge” concerns itself with the Internet world in the wake of the dotcom bubble and subsequent events surrounding 9/11. I always looked forward to the next one, like waiting by the mailbox for a letter from some exotic, mysterious uncle. The crazy thing is, though, that while Gravity's Rainbow frustrated me to no end, it didn't put me off Pynchon. As soon as he finished it, he'd start again, as though the novel were some literary Rosetta stone that would eventually yield its secrets. ![]() I knew a guy who read Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's dense, convoluted World War II novel, over and over for about 10 years. And nobody was hotter than Pynchon, and no group more obsessive than his fans. Still, that was the style, so before it was displaced by Dirty Realism (Raymond Carver & Co.), Difficult Fiction was what you read to keep up with what was hot. ![]() It was the heyday (we're talking the '70s here) of what hindsight would have to call Difficult Fiction: Robert Coover, John Barth, and Donald Barthelme were surrealists, fabulists, and word wizards who enchanted you with labyrinthine fictions, though they never made it easy. and Gravity's Rainbow in college-not for credit, but just because I wanted to. I've been reading Thomas Pynchon all my adult life, starting with V.
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