You know, I don't consider myself a conservative stick-in-the-mud, but I just read my first Thomas Pynchon novel, and that's sure how I felt. See what happens when I get shoved outside my comfort zone? I've always loved to read, but this was certainly something new. I'm used to your standard novel - standard conflict, standard exposition, standard climax - you get the picture. A nice normal story arc, easy to follow, easy to analyze. Pynchon knocked me on my ass! What the hell is going on here? I asked myself. No standard stuff here. The novel was all over the place, with observations from Oedipa, the main character, about life, love, the postal service, sex, drugs, men, business - the list goes on and on. And is she having a paranoid fantasy, is her dead ex-lover playing a posthumous practical joke on her, or is she really involved in some underground scheme to foil the U.S. Postal Service, traditional love, and the gods know what else.
And even though Pynchon - through his mouthpiece Diblette - tried to discourage me from analyzing the novel, by the gods I did my best. Well, I had to write my essay on something. But it was a puzzle to be sorted out anyway. I had to try to extract some kind of meaning from it. Ha! I really don't want to give it - or what I think it is - away. My own convoluted little brain added its own ideas to the mix and came away with the meaning best suited to me. That might be just what Pynchon had in mind.
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