Ice Cold

Happy summer everyone. I assure you I am reading Speedboat, but I do not like it! And so I can't think of much to say about it. It's just ice cold, man. Too cool for school. It's hard core New York city, stone cold, blank faced, bump-into-you-on-the-street-and-not-look-up-from-the-sidewalk stuff. Step-over-a-drunk-on-the-sidewalk stuff. Intellectualizing-sadness stuff. I mean to say - it's boring.

I understand what Adler was aiming at. She's obviously very very smart. And she's trying to capture the whip smart, independent, single youth of NYC. Fine. But it's leaving me cold. Maybe it's just me.

I think I'm looking for the hard on the outside, soft on the inside reality of 99% of people but she's writing characters that are hard on the outside and blank on the inside.

From a review on Slate:  "Speedboat belongs to a genre of '70s women’s fiction, in which a damaged, smart woman floats passively yet stylishly through the world." [...] "In all of these Smart Woman Adrift novels, there is a radical fragmentedness, a supremely controlled tone, a shrewd and jaded observation of small things, a comic or wry apprehension of life’s absurdities, and pretty yet melancholy vignettes of the state of being lost."

Yes, I know. That's the whole point. I think I'm looking for love in the wrong book. The real fear: I would have loved this book when I was 19. It's got that disaffected youth vibe, like Catcher in the Rye for girls with good jobs.

Also, Speedboat feels like an object of the 70s. It was trying to be cool, reflecting the culture as a whole. Now, it's cool to be candid. Irony is out. Sincerity is in. Emotional honesty is all the rage. The importance of the honest individual. You can see it on TV with shows like Parks and Recreation or in all the raw, cathartic memoirs like Wild, Life After Death, et. al.

Sorry, I'll keep reading it. Maybe I'll change my mind.

Late Pynchon

I finished Bleeding Edge last week. It was...good.

Thomas Pynchon is a certified genius and a literary giant. Some of his earlier books, V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow are amazing perfect masterpieces that will twist up your brain for years. This is the problem. He was too good.

It seems like he's in cruise control now. Where his earlier books were capital-L Literature, his newer work is just fiction. Vineland, Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge are probably his 3 weakest books. But they're good books! Just not Peak Pynchon-level good. His early work is so dang good that his later stuff just seems like filler.

Frustratingly, he's shown sings of old self in his new work. Lots of people liked Mason & Dixon. (I didn't care for it, but still..) Against the Day was really great too.

I hope that he knows. I hope he's just easing into retirement. Tossing out pretty decent books with little effort. Making bucks.

Kurt Vonnegut (so good!) famously gave all his books grades, A-F, like a report card. And he knew which ones were good and which ones weren't. I hope Pynchon is similarly self-aware.

This is blasphemy, but here's how I would grade him:

V. (B+)
The Crying of Lot 49  (A)
Gravity's Rainbow  (A+)
Vineland  (C)
Mason & Dixon  (B-)
Against the Day  (A)
Inherent Vice  (C)
Bleeding Edge  (B-)