Critical Reception
Critics have read the book as both an "exemplary postmodern text" and an outright parody of postmodernism. "Mike Fallopian cannot be a real character's name", protests one reviewer. Pynchon himself disparaged this book, writing in 1984, "As is clear from the up-and-down shape of my learning curve, however, it was too much to expect that I'd keep on for long in this positive or professional direction. The next story I wrote was The Crying of Lot 49, which was marketed as a 'novel,' and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up until then."
Read more about this topic: The Crying Of Lot 49
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“An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark—that is critical genius.”
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