pynchon's day has come

Pynchon gets mashed in a NY Times book review here.

Publisher's weekly has a few better things to say, and Pynchon weighs in with his own, now official, blurb at amazon.

A bit of history, mixed with myth, about the man himself.

If you really want to dig in to the past, read the wikipedia entry.

But what do i think? Don't know. Haven't read the thing yet. Whether he has put out a book that reads like an imitation of himself, as the times review alleges, or whether he has forged a bright new piece of steel from a heap of slag is neither here nor there. the truth is, his time has passed. the day he has been piling up silence and public avoidances against is the day that he will be no longer relevant to the written world. That day has come and gone, but he doesn't seem to realize it yet, and still lives in fear for that note to sound. If he hasn't heard it, perhaps the response to his new book will make it reverberate in his tone-deaf ears.

As much as i would have liked to re-immerse myself in his oeuvre in preparation for the new novel, i found that i couldn't bear to do it. Whether this is a reflection of a possible maturity i have reached since my undergrad days, or whether i am simply not in the mood, i don't know. What is clear is that his work is not useful to me and my own writing at this point in time. He was, once, something i aspired to become. Now he represents particular pitfalls that i wish to avoid in my own writing. Why the shift? I realized that his work shows several aspects that hamstring me in my own work, namely: indulgence, ridiculous wit, bizarre and implausible plot, underdeveloped characters, and the big one, a sense of mystery that is largely unfounded and which will never pay off in the course of the narrative. So the question of whether or not the new Pynchon novel is a good one is the wrong question to ask. The real question is, why should i read the novel at all? If you can solve that one for me, and justify the massive amounts of time it would take to finish the beast (all 1120 pages of it), then maybe we will have something to talk about.