...Engels, The German Ideology (1845-46) A good many newspapers and magazines have accompanied their reviews of Vineland, Thomas Pynchon’s fourth novel, with the same 37-year-old photograph of the author grinning goofily from his high school yearb...
My review of Thomas Pynchon’s lamentable Inherent Vice, for Slate (August 3, 2009). Much less lamentable — actually quite good in spots — is Pynchon’s more recent Bleeding Edge, which I prefer to everything of his since Vineland. But even mor...
This review originally appeared in the July 14, 1997 issue of In These Times. — J.R. Pynchon’s Tangle Mason & Dixon By Thomas Pynchon Henry Holt 773 pp. $27.50 It’s always been one of the paradoxes of Thomas Pynchon’s fiction that he com...
From the Chicago Reader (December 1, 2006). — J.R. Against the Day | Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press) Thomas Pynchon’s 1,085-page Against the Day does a lot of things. Some it does well, some it does badly — and some are impossible...
This is by far the most challenging book review I’ve ever had to write. I wrote it during my extended stint in Paris (1969-74), after requesting the assignment from an editor at The Village Voice. I was already a big Pynchon fan by then, havin...
From the Chicago Reader (October 6, 2006). — J.R. Pynchon freaks can be divided into two categories: those fascinated by his work, who respect his wish to be known through it, and those fascinated by his life, who see his writing as an illust...
In anticipation of my review of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice that will appear in Slate on August 3, here is the first review I ever wrote of a Pynchon novel, published in my college newspaper and signed “Jon Rosenbaum”. In fact...
...d to reprint an irate letter of mine in The New Review (London, July 1976), responding to F.S. Schwarzbach’s review of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in the June 1976 issue that he also planned to reprint in Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essa...
...a film reviewer, so any attempt to write about books for them was discouraged. I did make a point of reviewing two of Thomas Pynchon’s late novels for them ( Vineland and Against the Day ) –- having previously reviewed Gravity’s Rainbow for the...
...erson film (the most boring, and possibly the least persuasive in relation to period), just as its source is the worst Thomas Pynchon novel (the most sluggishly written, superficially felt, and glibly cynical in its multiple disenchantments, especial...
...playing the combined precision of Griffith’s montage and Feuillade’s mise en scène, recall a key line from Thomas Pynchon’s great paranoid novel Gravity’s Rainbow half a century later “lf there is something comforting —...
...s been driving me batty lately. It isn’t only among moviegoers; many fiction readers are equally afflicted. Visiting a Thomas Pynchon chat room lately in conjunction with a recent prepublication reading of Against the Day, I find other Pynchon freaks...
...ICANS (C i neaste, Fall 2006) Review of Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (Stop Smiling, 2006) Review of Pynchon’s AGAINST THE DAY (Chicago Reader, December 1, 2006) Review of WALT DISNEY: THE TRIUMPH OF THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION...
...articipation means accepting chaos: “If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia,” declares Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow, “there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not ma...
...ving Fun Yet? Are We Not Sick? [on SAFE] Aria Army of Shadows Around the World in 1,085 Pages (on Pynchon’s AGAINST THE DAY) Arresting Images [THE BLOODY CHILD] Arsenal Art Film by Numbers [THE COOK,...