I for one would have loved to have had the author as my AP teacher. Senior year was when I discovered (in the Columbian sense) David Foster Wallace, who would not exist as such without Pynchon. It would be a couple of years and attempts before I could get into Pynchon, but when I got to it, Gravity's Rainbow was an ecstatic experience.<p>David Foster Wallace writes (in an essay collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) about the connection for him between higher math and logic and writing fiction. About the "click" that happens when things fall into place. For several years, I chased exactly that in fiction, before returning to my teenage passion for programming. I was immensely pleased to find the same "click" in software. The same challenges of world creation, of collecting, balancing and combining incongruent, contradictory and abstract thoughts in my head before committing them to screen.<p>What I'm suggesting is Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and, let's add, William Gass, are programmers' writers.
Thomas Pynchon is everything that's wrong with postmodernism. I get that he's difficult and I get that he's creating an internal system of signs but come the fuck on, already. It's literature to prove a point. It's the problem with assholes like Derrida who drone on endlessly in what is—has got to be—a massive practical joke/performance art project.<p>And that's, in its own way, _awesome_. The problem is that people take it seriously. People read the tea leaves of these chaotic texts and derive their own meaning (which means they're falling for the ruse). I have a deep problem with post modernism in literature and elsewhere because of the nature of the joke. It's a virulent meme that has made both art and literature indigestible and that's a shame.<p>Markets sort of win out and we get real art from television and popular entertainment these days. It's just sad that the legacy of postmodernism is a sort of flypaper trap for minds that would have been put to much better use elsewhere.
I'm sorry, the first sentence of <i>The Crying of Lot 49</i> may be long – somewhat run-on – but it's not really at all difficult to understand. After running into that misstatement, I'm not sure I want to read much more. After the author then throws out the $20 word "profluence" (which wiktionary calls obsolete or rare) where "flow" or nothing at all would serve at least as well, I become convinced of it.<p>Which is not at all to say that the novel is not worth reading, and rereading.