Customer Reviews

Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon

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William M. Plater, a respected Indiana academician and college dean, gives an amazing analysis of Pynchon's fiction up to and including Gravity's Rainbow (the book was written before Vineland and Mason & Dixon) using not only literary references, but philosophical, mathematical, sociological, and mythological as well. He references Pynchon back to some of his own source material such as The Education of Henry Adams and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He delves not so much into the structure of Pynchon's dense prose, but the reasons behind it, the ideas behind it, and where Pynchon resides in the mental and literary landscape. Plater outlines the major themes of Pynchon's fiction (eg, death transfigured, paranoia, reality and its projected image) and weaves them into a very readable and thought-provoking examination of the greatest American writer of the latter 20th century and certainly the archetype of postmodernism. If you read Pynchon, you should also read Plater.

Critics have found Thomas Pynchon's fiction to be as inaccessible as the reclusive author himself. Resistant as Pynchon's art is to definition, Plater has produced an objective, intelligent study of Pynchon's primary motifs, without the pretense of subjective interpretation. He examines the following antheses: illusion/reality, life/death, and order/disorder, all outgrowths of Pynchon's more basic application of thermodynamic principle (entropy and the closed system) to social phenomena. He examines these themes as they emerge throughout the full body of Pynchon's work, thus suggesting its multiplexity. This well-executed study isolates and clarifies the essence of Pynchon's otherwise elusive style. Students of contemporary literature will profit from it.