What do You think about Slow Learner: Early Stories (1995)?
Very interesting stuff. I'm a bit surprised Pynchon even published this; one would think that if he were really as embarrassed as he professes to be in the preface, that he wouldn't collect them--perhaps (perhaps!) this modesty is false?As for the stories, they are very rough and I found myself getting distracted and falling asleep while reading them. They required a real force of will to finish them, something I didn't have on most attempts. There are, however, flashes of brilliance scattered throughout, and Pynchon's bizarre personality is in every word. I was really blown away by the ending to the first story (p. 47-51), written while Pynchon was in college and published in the Cornell undergraduate journal. It's the best part of the collection, I think, other than the preface. I can't imagine having written this well in college--I most certainly did not."Lowlands" also is hilarious and highly enjoyable. Imagine getting tossed out by your wife and meeting the perfect woman...except she's a midget gypsy at the trash dump. She's perfect, albeit to scale. Lots of laughs."Entropy" is very good, and contains in it two spots where genius shines through--p.83 and p.90-91. "Under the Rose" is almost unreadable. I felt a little embarrassed too, reading it, as it reminded me of some of my own tough-guy type stories from the past. Ick.Only pick this up if you are hardcore--that is, have no life. It's not an enjoyable read you can take to the beach. It's frustrating, rough, and requires some love and work. But it does show how far ahead Pynchon was of every other young scribbler despite it all; I can only envy him.
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Lisa gave me this collection of short stories for my birthday a few years ago. I feel badly that it took me so long to get around to reading it, but it just didn't look like it'd be my sort of thing. It kind of wasn't. I've never read any Pynchon before. These were his early stories, all published in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They felt... thicker... than the sorts of stories I usually read. I did like the bit of a flair of fantasy that runs through a few of the otherwise perfectly ordinary stories--the beautiful midget gypsy girl who lives in the tunnels under the garbage dump, the new boy in town who turns out to be a little different. The book includes an introduction by Pynchon where he discusses the stories, his influences, the flaws he sees in the stories, and what he likes about them anyway. I probably shouldn't have read that first but I can never resist. I'm sure that colored my reading a bit--there were places where I thought, oh yes that is clunky just like Mr. Pynchon said, when otherwise I might have just read on through and not noticed it. The dialogue really is a bit clunky in places and I would have caught that, I'm sure. Some of the stories didn't really feel structured in a way--I guess I feel that, when I get to the end of a story, I want to be surprised and not surprised at the same time, because the ending should be natural and in a sense inevitable, but should also have something of the unexpected. These stories didn't seem so much to be building towards their endings as to be some pages about some guys who we start reading about and they go and do some things and then they stop. Not that the stories were uninteresting or unplotted, just not necessarily structured in a way I enjoy.The exception was the last story in the book, "The Secret Integration", which was terrific and was worth reading the whole book to get to. (Mr. Pynchon says in the introduction that he's pretty content with how this story holds up, but that the next thing he wrote after this story was The Crying of Lot 49 "in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up till then". This is not an overwhelming argument for me to go pick up The Crying of Lot 49.)Overall: Props to Mr. Pynchon for a really entertaining and candid introduction, and also for one excellent story--one of our five definitely isn't bad. I'll say three stars.
—Roxanne
Only actually good story the last one ("Secret Integration"). I actually got this because I wanted to see if I got Pynchon early enough whether I could understand him. Have decided it really doesn't matter. His stuff all sounds the same: plodding, pointless and dull. Like so much of that fatuous picaresque '60's crap. Not helped any either by a smirking, posturing intro--wherein he criticizes himself for all sorts of inane trivial egghead reasons. And how can somebody who gets their stuff published in college come off as a slow learner? Unless he's trying to say he's really an even bigger genius than we already give him credit for...what insincerity. And he talks about incorporating the vernacular, but then he turns out to be just another fussy, pedantic stiff.
—TrumanCoyote
