This is the thread for explainin' and askin' the point of canonical booxors.

are you meant to have read the books?

I'll take Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon's language will change the way you think, that is, the language you think in. At first it's difficult as hell to understand what's going on, and that doesn't go away, but after awhile, the language becomes the main thing--there's these bursts of description that are amazing (like of Slothrop in the hot air balloon, Rocketman in the Nazi camp, I could go on), but even more amazing to me is the language used to describe what's going on. It'll infect you, lift you up, spin you around, then set you back down on the ground thinking completely differently. Other novels can do that, too, and certainly there's a slew of poetry that does, but I've never read anything that so intensely changes the language of my thoughts for the lighter.

I hated Gravity's Rainbow. I want someone to explain to me the attraction in A Confederacy of Dunces. I thought it was witty perhaps, but beyond that ?

Anyone want to tackle The Catcher in the Rye? I completely missed its greatness, apparently.

JC, I'm sad. SJ, I'm with you, and on top of that, I don't understand why Franny & Zooey's not the one people jizz all over.

A Confederacy of Dunces made me laugh almost from start to finish without being heartless. It's perhaps too long but full of near-perfect comic scenes. If you don't think comedy's worthwhile, well... er... then no, maybe you wouldn't love it so much. Maybe I have a puerile sense of humor. Or maybe some people have a greater number of wires stretched between the profundities of the soul and the laff button than others. Maybe you get more out of books that make you cry.

Totally agree on 'A Confederacy of Dunces". One of the very few books that I've had to stop reading on the tube cos I was making a fool of myself laughing out loud, (and dangerously close to pigeon-holing fellow passengers and telling them.."let me just read you this one bit...". The real joy was finding a book labelled a 'comedy' that was actually funny, rather than just wry..or fantastical..

I am from new Orleans, so "A Confederacy of Dunces" held a great deal of attraction to me from the outset. There are scenes that must read better if you are familiar with the odds and ends of the city. For example, Ignatius pushing the Lucky Dog wagon through the French Quarter. If you have not seen one of those wagons, the absurdity may be lost on you. "Ignatius" is a name that would actually happen in New Orleans, because of its almost universal Catholicism. I would also argue that "Confederacy" was a novel of ideas, not just comedic vignettes slapped together. A novel originating in the south that has both "Confederacy" and "Dunces" in the title is borderline heretical just sitting on the shelf. I keep waiting for the film version to see who they get to play Mirna Minkoff.

I think Drew Barrymore's going to be Mirna Minkoff and Will Farrell's going to be Ingatius.

Drew Barrymore? I don't see it. I was thinking of a Helena Bonham Carter-type. Rats.

Will Farrell's hardly ideal either. It could have been worse though: Adam Sandler.

On Confederacy of Dunces--I also heard that Mos Def is playing, what was his name, Jones? The Whoooo-eee guy? Looking forward to the movie, anyway.

On the book's appeal: I just think it's one of the aptest portraits out there of the kind of person who can't navigate the real world, because s/he has a private mental world that makes sooo much more sense and which surrounding dunderheads, damn them all, can't comprehend. If such a character has no resonance for you, I'm not sure you'll like the novel. For a reader who finds that kind of bumbling funny, in a Laurel and Hardy way, the book works great; for a reader who, while laughing at Ignatius, is also scared by a sense of "I can *almost* relate to this creep," it's both funny and usefully disturbing. :) For those kinds of readers, COD has to be one of the great comic novels. Ignatius's bumbling introversion (mixed with a weirdly canny, manipulative streak, making him even more interesting) is archetypal.

Catcher in the Rye--I'm absolutely at a loss to explain this one; it's been a favorite of mine so long I can't really even articulate why. A lot of the symbolism and characterization is fairly simple; I think you have to take it as a beginner's literary novel. But God, parts of it are *so* *beautiful* ... (degenerates into gibbering and pointing and incoherence.) I guess it's also one of the novels that makes me laugh out loud (Holden's anger and sarcasm, the sniping at hypocrites, etc.) Franny and Zooey may well be the better book--probably is the better book. But it's harder to understand when you're 16, so Catcher gets read and understood earlier and becomes more of a formative moment for people, I think. (Just judging from my own story.)

Here's one for the explainers: Martin Amis, esp. Money and London Fields. I felt like London Fields was ponderous and I just didn't see what I was supposed to find so interesting about the characters. (I did like The Information.)

Thanks to the people who are willing to explicate Gravity's Rainbow--I "read" it (raked my glazed eyes over it) when I was 19, didn't get a damn thing, and have never been able to decide whether to give it another shot or not. I'll turn to this thread if/when I ever do.

Great idea for a thread, by the way.

Don't worry, London Fields is ponderous and I say that as a former big Amis fan, I don't understand it's reputation though the Keith Talent character may have given it some hipster cachet among Mockney New Lad types. I haven't really liked a novel of his since Money (and I've read them all) so maybe you can explain to me why you liked The Information which I thought was typical late-Amis: some good ideas and jokes bogged down by loads of pretentious twaddle about physics stolen from whatever serious tome Martin happened to be reading at the time.

Excellent arguement in favour of Catcher In The Rye. I know I should have grown out of it by now but "My God you should have been there" still gets me.

On The Information--well, the stuff about physics *was* lame (as much as people hate Yellow Dog, at least it mostly eschews all that). But the Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner action between Richard and Gwyn was just awfully funny to me, yet I was still able to be horrified at how awful Richard got to be (and how awful Gwyn turned out to be), which had to take *some* work on Amis's part. Also, all of Gwyn's phony affectations for the cameras were funny to me (the staring-wide at everything). I wouldn't argue that it's the greatest novel ever written or anything.
So--ignore the physics, enjoy the bitchiness, I guess.

otto, can you provide more concrete examples of what you mean about Pynchon's language? I've read it twice and loved it each time, but I have no clue what you mean.

Opening it up completely at random, without choosing which paragraph's good ~
"This evening he is orbiting someplace near the Grosser Stern. It is long after curfew. Odors of woodsmoke and decay hang over the city. Among pulverized heads of stone margraves and electors, reconnoitering a likely-looking cabbage patch, all of a sudden Slothrop picks up the scent of an unmistakable no it can't be yet it is it's a REEFER! A-and it's burning someplace close by. Goldshot green of the Rif's slant fields here, vapor-blossoms resinous and summery, charm his snoot on through bushes and matted grass, under the blasted tress and whatever sits in their branches."
I find one that I think features some things that get me--the narrative voice changes three times over the course of the paragraph, starting out pretty standard, and then in the third sentence moving into his hep-cat send-up routine in the third, and then in that last sentence shifting into masterful description "goldshot green of the Rif's slant fields, vapor-blossoms resinous and summery," charming his snoot? The main thing though is the interpellation in the narrative of reactions from Slothrop's point of view, as though Slothrop is the narrator, but so alienated by all the weirdeness from everything that's going, he refers to himself in the third person. Anyone who went to an American public school can relate to that, and nobody I've read's nailed it like Punchon has.

Overall the language is so hyper, so funny, so casual and yet so masterful, just reading one paragraph gives me a buzz. The pile-up effect of seven hundred+ pages of this got me, during the first go-through, writing emails and things in sub-Pynchonese. I couldn't help it, I couldn't take formal one-note diction very seriously after Gravity's Rainbow. I doubt that explanation's concrete enough, and it's not like I could do Pynchon justice here without quoting another three pages. Burroughs writes about language being a virus and Pynchon's is a mutant.

My take on Gravity's Rainbow, which happens to be my 2nd favorite novel (1st: Ullysses, 3rd: Infinite Jest):

I love novels that wrench me emotionally in two or more, preferably wildly opposing, directions. The directions of wrenchment (wrenchitude?) GR produces for me are:

1. Cold, grim horror. Examples: Pirate Prentice's opening dream, in which rather than taking them to salvation as promised, the train takes the rocket-refugees to Hell. The overarching (no pun intended) theme of the novel -- whereas the rainbow in the Bible represents God's promise of salvation, "gravity's rainbow" -- the arc of the rocket -- represents the opposite. The Nazi seance. And what about the end, in which you and I are sitting in the "theater" of the novel, staring at the empty screen, waiting for nuclear annihilation to fall on our heads? Brrrrr.

2. Laugh-out-loud hilarity. Examples: The banana breakfast. Pirate fighting the giant adenoid. Slothrop being forced to eat hideous candy by the mother of the girl he's trying to seduce. The PISCES schemes for psychically defeating Hitler. Nixon giving us a Volkswagen tour of L.A. Slothrop diving down the toilet to retrieve his mouth-harp. "Fickt nicht mit der Raketmensch!" The under toad. etc., etc.

3. Awe and wonder. Examples: Tchitcherine and his brother meet each other on the road without realizing it. Slothrop dissolves and "becomes a crossroads." The gorgeous, poetic descriptions: "No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into -- they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass ... certain trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, smells of naptha winters, of Sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero ... and it is poorer the deeper they go ... ruinous secret cities of poor, places whose names he has never heard ... the walls break down, the roofs get fewer and so do the chances for light. The road, which ought to be opening out into a broader highway, instead has been getting narrower, more broken, cornering tighter and tighter until all at once, much too soon, they are under the final arch: brakes grab and spring terribly. It is a judgment from which there is no appeal." etc., etc.

GR resonated in my mind for a long, long time after I read it, with eerie, cold echoes as from a deep well. To me it is the great novel of nuclear paranoia and dread, but that seems inadequate... perhaps just as Infinite Jest is a great novel about the human condition seen though the lens of addiction and the pursuit of happiness, GR is a great novel about the human condition seen through the lens of nuclear paranoia.

I'm still stuck on JD Salinger's ss "A Perfect Day for Bananafish".

Whatup with that?

btw, who coined "joyconvey"?

Rah! I am so totally pleased with how this thread is going. And the Gravity's Rainbow stuff is great, it really does make me want to give it another shot, which I guess can't be too far from the point. More!

Catcher In The Rye - I'm glad Phil answered this first, and so well, because I'm utterly the wrong person to do so; I read it at sixteen and liked it a lot, but I'm really not at all sure I'd have that much time for it nowadays. But at the time, it was all about the smallness of the thing, Holden in a deerstalker hat, the graffiti on the wall. I don't think that after all these years of glutting myself on Raymond Carver and Clarice Lispector it'd still feel the same way at all, but, y'know, High School's where they set you 'Romeo & Juliet' and 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles', and that. The ungrandness seemed fresh, exciting. I really identified with how he didn't actually hate his parents at all.

Ann, there are no matches on google, so I guess the answer is me! Or did you recognise it from somewhere?

Glenn, that lucid GR appreciation more than makes up for my typo-riddled drivel. It's tough for me to discuss Pynchon's language, in the way I set out to, because I feel so overwhelmed by it. Suffice it so say, Gregory, GR rules in ways Glenn describes well, and I think I might read it again now.
By the way, I do think the paranoia Pynchon relates, in addition to the obvious bomb threat, is the coldwar willies, the nascent red scare that turned America surreal so quickly after WWII. The after effects still percolate, hence my American public school comment about the self self-alienated. Anyways.

Hey Gregory -- it vaguely rang a bell, but if I've seen it I've only seen it here, I'm pretty sure, so it quite possibly was you!

Never in my life have I seriously intended to read Gravity's Rainbow again, but now I'm hanging by a thread. Thanks.

I've never understood the appeal of Catcher either, although that's probably because I never went through an angsty period in my teens, and it seems like the angsty teens are the ones it most appeals to.

My favorite book ever is Brave New World, and I've had several people tell me they thought it was very dry, especially the beginning and all its lengthy description of reproduction. I love it because I love dystopian lit. I love dystopian lit, because it is so pertinent. It wouldn't take much for the American society, especially in this age of technology and scientific advances, to slip over into a nightmare world like those portrayed in Brave New World and 1984. It's unlikely, of course, but the possibility is there anyway. So dystopian lit is scary because it could happen, and I just find that really appealing. Hence my love for Brave New World.

Oh, and this isn't a classic by any stretch, but it is very popular. I didn't get House of Sand and Fog. Actually, I more than didn't get it, I hated it, and I'm so irritated that they made a movie out of it, because it was the whiniest book, with the whiniest, pettiest set of characters I've ever read. I wanted to smack all of the characters (and the author, frankly) over the head, and I warn everyone who asks to stay away from this crap.

Did anyone like this book? Can you tell me why?

House of Sand and Fog"....
Remember how she kept going to the movies.
The whole time I was reading it I kept wanting to go to the movies...