Slow Learner

Five stories, dating from 1959 through 1964, four of them written while Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow) was still in college - plus an introduction that's fetchingly modest about this gathering of juvenilia. ( . . . My best hope is that, pretentious, goofy and ill-considered as they get now and then, these stories will still be of use to somebody, someplace, with all their flaws intact, as illustrative of typical problems in entry-level fiction, and cautionary about some practices which younger writers might prefer to avoid. ) The Small Rain - about an Army detail cleaning up after a deadly Louisiana hurricane - introduces a highly hip, literary, and ironic main character who, in different guises, will show up in all the other stories as well. LowLands introduces Pynchon's yet-to-be-developed interest in the poetries of physics, as does Entropy. Under the Rose - Egypt, 1890s, colonial and baroque - is abrim with rather pointless erudition (siphoned, Pynchon confesses in the introduction, from an old Baedeker guide). And A Secret Integration offers some whiz-kids involved in cultural subversion in the cause of liberal values; while there's one credible, three-dimensional character here (an alcoholic jazz musician), this piece also bites off a bit more than it can chew. Both stories, though, do point the way to the novelist Pynchon was to become - with foreshadowings of his problematic encyclopedic qualities. And, throughout, there's the nascent sense of Pynchonesque display: alert intelligence, quite in-the-know and savvy, easy for a reader to admire - but not quite participate in or feel with. Intriguing material for Pynchon fans and critics. (Kirkus Reviews)