Justin St. Clair on two new books about Thomas Pynchon:
IN MANY RESPECTS, literary criticism is inherently revisionist, so it should come as little surprise that the grand old eremite of American letters should himself be undergoing something of a late-career reevaluation, even before he shoves off, gently or otherwise, into his own good night. Two recent reassessments. . .offer overlapping reconsiderations of Pynchon’s oeuvre and its politics.
David Winters on Jane Unrue's Love Hotel:
We read because we want to be somewhere else, but the best books make us realize that “elsewhere” is where we already are. So, writing can turn toward or away from the known and the knowable, aiming at either information or mystery. One direction reports, reproduces, represents; the other points elsewhere, bringing the unprecedented into presence.
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