>>Faces already under silent assault, as if by something ahead, some Y2K of the workweek that no one is quite imagining, the crowds drifting slowly out into the little legendary streets, the highs beginning to dissipate, out before the casting off of veils before the luminosities of dawn, a sea of T-shirts nobody’s reading, a clamor of messages nobody’s getting, as if it’s the true text history of nights in the Alley, outcries to be attended to and not be lost, the 3:00 AM kozmo deliveries to code sessions and all-night shredding parties, the bedfellows who came and went, the bands in the clubs, the songs whose hooks still wait to ambush an idle hour, the day jobs with meetings about meetings and bosses without clue, the unreal strings of zeros, the business models changing one minute to the next, the start-up parties every night of the week and more on Thursdays than you could keep track of, which of these faces so claimed by the time, the epoch whose end they’ve been celebrating all night — which of them can see ahead, among the microclimates of binary, tracking earthwide through dark fiber and twisted pairs and nowadays wirelessly through spaces private and public, anywhere among cybersweatshop needles flashing and never still, in that unquiet vastly stitched and unstitched tapestry they have all at some time sat growing crippled in the service of — to the shape of the day imminent, a procedure waiting execution, about to be revealed, a search result with no instructions on how to look for it?
>>5324 I would if the protagonist was not a mother of two, super-cool, Inspector Gadget. Besides, now that the Guardian is telling everyone to read it, the chances are that I won't.
Because it's been out for less than 24 hours. Also, I don't care.
The other place's /lit/ has been telling me to read it for months and that's a pretty big red flag right there.
>Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back,
I'll wait for the paperback. My thoughts on Pynchon:
V - Boring, annoying, difficult. Like Alistair Gray's Lanark, this was a crummy and long first novel he needed to get out of his system before he could start for real.
The Crying Of Lot 49 - Magical, dreamlike, sinister - a highbrow literary version of the best Philip K Dick. The best entry point by far.
Gravity's Rainbow - A very difficult book, don't let anyone tell you different. Psychedelic in its effects, rewarding if you have the patience.
Slow Learner - Enjoyable and simple short stories and a preface which humanises this most enigmatic of novelists.
Vineland - Loved it. Political as hell, funny, full of sharp and cynical observations on human behaviour.
Mason & Dixon - Dreary, over-long, genuinely pretentious. A waste of trees.
Against The Day - Crazily ambitious, some stunning prose in this, it would take a better mind than mine to follow all the plot intricacies but well worth a try if you have the stamina.
Inherent Vice - Another relatively simple one like Lot 49 and Vineland. Enjoyable and funny.
