I only say, don't be impressed, because a lot of people seem to talk about Pynchon in terms that seem to indicate there's something impressive about reading Pynchon. Which has kind of put me off reading him, thus far. And I never have. Because I can't help but escape the sense that in some sense, he and I are rivals.
Anyhow. Vineland is so far a pretty good book! Funny in parts, kind of warmly, humanly amusing. Not at all what I expected! I'm not sure I could articulate what I expected.
I guess: dense, rewarding thickets of prose to pick one's way obsessively through, ever so often starting back in shock each time a gaunt, grim, long-featured looming postmodernist text golem leaned its way forward out from the subtext, suddenly visible, to regard you balefully for about a minute or so before slowly withdrawing - back into the gray average of the page, which would only slowly resolve again into its constituent black and white. This apparition, I picture as looking more or less exactly like Angus Scrimm from Phantasm.
But you know, so far at least, it hasn't really been like that at all!
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