But yeah, the early previews of the Pynchon novel are starting to come in. Like, with this one, right here (via):
I’ve been enjoying the new Thomas Pynchon novel, Inherent Vice. The most striking thing about is that if you had handed me the first 30 pages, I would have staked my life I was reading the opening of the new Elmore Leonard.
...
In some ways it’s a surprise to see Pynchon, one of the most sophisticated, high-caste and demanding of American writers, dancing naked; on the other hand it isn’t, because there’s something about the crime novel, the thriller, hardboiled noir , whatever you want to call it that literary novelists find fascinating and often irresistible.
I don't know, I know there's that need to call Pynchon sophisticated and high-caste, but I do worry that talk like that scares more people off the trail than is healthy. I mean, bananas. Funny. Right?
In other news, I seem to be doing a lot with hardboiled mystery type books lately. Which is weird. I was never particularly a fan of the style though I also never had much against it either. Just, something that never much struck me as something I needed to explicitly go looking for. But now it's like every which way I look I'm reading one or reading about one. Weird.
Like, there's an author right now whose backlist I'm reading in its entirety (or close to its entirety) in preparation for a kind of big review I plan to write for later this year. (Hint: no, it's not Pynchon, which is cool, because I don't think I could handle that, what with the making of wetness in the pants reading new Pynchon might entail.) But this author I'm reading has me all curious about mystery stuff, now, more so than I've ever been. New avenues to explore! Always, new avenues to explore.
2 comments:
I'm very curious about which "hardboiled mystery type books" you're reading or reading about these days. I have a long-standing interest in the genre, but it seems to be taking over my reading like never before these days. Mostly crime fiction in translation, but delving a bit into the history of the genre in North America and Britain as well.
I should say I'm probably using the terms horrifyingly interchangably and/or loosely...like The Final Solution by Chabon was hardly "hardboiled" but did fit into the mystery universe, to me...though maybe Yiddish did? I'm also interested in the new China Mieville book, which I believe is a mystery-ish book? And there's a couple by this author I'm working through now...and the Pynchon is coming up...and a couple others I swear I was interested in or have recently read but can't immediately recall...
Probably not that much in reality but more than I usually encounter, myself...
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