I wanted to briefly comment on Boris Kachka’s piece at Vulture on Pynchon and his new novel Bleeding Edge. Kachka’s work is, on the whole, nothing new. It’s not a bad piece, but pretty much any biographic piece on Pynchon falls into the same old trap: there’s no there there. Pynchon’s left such a meager trail that the story generally falls entirely to hearsay and speculation and Kachka is inevitably caught in that snare. Despite Kachka’s premise that Pynchon has fully ceased the wandering that marked the years when he wrote V. and Gravity’s Rainbow and returned home to New York to a life of luxury and comfort, there’s a real failure to show much of anything new (besides a brief review of Bleeding Edge that I purposefully avoided) in this piece. Continue reading “Interlude – Pynchon’s Trail” →