WRB—Oct. 1, 2025

“glib affect”

The Washington Review of Books taught me language, and my profit on ’t
Is I know how to curse.

Links:

Reviews:

• Two in Bookforum:

  • Christian Lorentzen
    reviews the new Pynchon novel (Shadow Ticket, October 7) [Today’s Upcoming book.]:

    I will be surprised if Shadow Ticket, a sentimental slapstick adventure novel, nostalgic to the point of gooeyness but never quite crossing over into the corny, a soft-boiled noir including a few too many jokes about cheese, isn’t met with general acclaim by reviewers. It wasn’t always the way. I’m old enough to have worked as a deckhand at a magazine where a critic gave up reading Against the Day (2006) out of exhaustion if not quite disgust and then had the temerity to admit it in print. Reviewing pages have been thinned by the forces of history and technology; few Pynchon skeptics anymore bother to take the time to read the novels and register their objections. Right-wing literary pages where these broadsides found a welcome home hardly exist today, and to the extent that they do they are probably as open to Pynchon’s fiction as they are to anything familiar if once radical that now counts as Americana. Pynchon had his admirers in the establishment from the start: in 1963 George Plimpton called V. “a brilliant and turbulent novel” by “a young writer of staggering promise.” Pynchon’s most authoritative, perceptive, and insightful defender and interpreter was Richard Poirier, who took to the pages of the London Review of Books in 1985 to reject the criticisms of the juvenilia collected in Slow Learner lodged by the author himself in his introduction. Writing in the Saturday Review on Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973, he argued: “Readers who get impatient with this book will most likely be too exclusively literary in their responses rather than not literary enough. They’ll stare at designs without listening to voices, wonder about characters when they should be laughing at grotesques, and generally miss the experience in a search for the meaning.” Oh, meaning, that silly thing, forget about it.

    [One cool trick: if you write 900-page systems novels nobody will ever comment on how sentimental and gooey they are. (In part because, as Lorentzen says, nobody is running negative reviews of Pynchon anymore.) This doesn’t just apply to Pynchon—a lot of the systems novelists give the impression that they really like all the cultural detritus they put in their novels. (And Pynchon certainly does, what with the absurd names.) A bit later in the review Lorentzen quotes Gore Vidal:

    To my ear, the prose is pretty bad, full of all the rattle and buzz that were in the air when the author was growing up, an era in which only the television commercial was demonically acquiring energy, leaked to it by a declining Western civilization.

    This is one difference between the likes of William Gaddis (born 1922) and William Gass (born 1924), who grew up too early for television to be part of their childhood and could regard it as evidence of “a declining Western civilization,” and Pynchon (born 1937), who takes it as part of life. “Generally miss the experience in a search for the meaning” would also describe a failure to watch TV.

    Lest this seem like the musings of a Pynchon opponent, I will say that The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is one of the books I recommend most frequently; it is perhaps the definitive portrait of the way a certain kind of man, when offered the choice between helping a woman and retreating into his goofy hobbies, will pick the latter. —Steve]

  • Ryan Ruby reviews Francesca Wade’s biography of Gertrude Stein (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, October 7):

    “Stein is less a writer in the conventional sense than a philosopher of language,” Wade argues, correctly in my view. Seen from this perspective, the tension between Stein-the-writer’s-writer and Stein-the-bestseller that underpins the conventional narrative of her career simply disappears. What can be emphasized instead is the underlying continuity in Stein’s writing, from the experimental results of “Normal Motor Automatisms,” the medical paper on hysteria and double consciousness she coauthored as a student at Radcliffe in which the style of Three Lives and The Making of Americans is already apparent, to the semi-Platonic typologies of the “writer-scientist” narrator of The Making of Americans, to the literary-cubist poems of Tender Buttons, to the critical essays “Composition as Explanation,” “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,” and “Poetry and Grammar,” to the meditations on words and the people who write them that are scattered throughout the Autobiography. From start to finish, Wade writes, “words were her medium and her subject.” To read her, as is often done, as though she herself was her subject is not just to miss something crucial about who she was, it is “to miss the pleasures her work can offer.”

    [We linked to an earlier review in WRB—May 3, 2025.]

    Ruby, later on: “More than any other writer, including Joyce and Pound, Stein invented high modernism, and—if you take Fredric Jameson’s word for it—postmodernism, too.” Maybe this is just to repeat “words were her medium and her subject,” though. Words weren’t the main interest of Joyce and Pound, after all.

    Glimpse behind the curtain: it was really hard to pick just two pieces out of the new Bookforum. You should look through the rest. —Steve]

• In the local Post, Ariella Garmaise reviews two internet novels (Moderation, by Elaine Castillo, August; and Bonding, by Mariel Franklin, July):

  In her book of essays How to Read Now (2022), Castillo made the familiar case that everything is political, literature included. But in Moderation, she only maligns the politics of those who misuse virtual reality—that the technology itself might be a problem is a possibility the novel never seriously raises. The adverb “politically” appears frequently to refer to, among other grievances, the height difference between Girlie and her love interest William (“politically irritating”), the fact that Girlie’s cousin has a white girlfriend (“politically inconvenient”), and a doctor asking Girlie if she prefers the forest or the beach (an “ostensibly politically neutral question” that is in fact “a little land mine around class and leisure time”). Girlie examines the “queer undercurrent” of virtual reality and discerns that video games might help those suffering from PTSD, but that’s about as far as her interrogation goes. One gets the sense that Castillo is more invested in the Twitter politics of one’s dating life than the implications of a virtual reality technology whose goal is to connect lonely users while leaving Girlie and William kissing via full body haptics in separate rooms.

  “You taught me language, and my profit on ’t / Is I know how to curse,” Caliban says bitterly to Prospero in The Tempest. The internet, likewise, may have taught Castillo how to write, but she mostly knows how to reproduce its tone: She is too absorbed by the personality typologies of Instagram, the glib affect of ChatGPT, and a persistent techno-optimism to even curse the industry as Caliban might. The language of Big Tech has disrupted her prose.

  [The second paragraph there is one of the most cutting I’ve read in a while. —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• I again exhort our public intellectuals to attend to college football (this time to understand shame, or the lack thereof, in America)

• R.I.P. Tony Harrison

• Hannah expands on my thoughts last week on Marvell with a Poem by Emily Dickinson

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by telling your friends about us. —Steve]