Less like a kitchen appliance, more like a … book
You may remember that Thomas Pynchon was covered by Time back in October — without even sitting down for an interview — when the magazine featured a piece on the difficulties of promoting a book by such a reclusive author.
Time is looking at Pynchon again, with a review of his yet-to-be-published novel, Against the Day. The reviewer spends a fair-sized paragraph comparing the novel to his toaster: “At 3 lbs. 6 oz., Against the Day weighs just 3 oz. less than my toaster. But my toaster doesn’t offer the tantalizing music of Pynchon’s voice, with its shifts from comic shtick to heartbroken threnody, its mordant Faulkneresque interludes, its gusts of lyric melancholy blown in by way of F. Scott Fitzgerald, its ecstatic perorations from Jack Kerouac.… On the other hand, my toaster makes toast, and nothing quite so graspable ever pops out of this predictably bewitching, predictably bewildering book.”
(As both the Guardian blog and GalleyCat point out, this Time review was published in advance of the book’s November 21 pub date, and in defiance of the review embargo.…)
Related links:
Read “Pynchon vs. the Toaster” here
Click here for what the Guardian blog has to say
