Slow Learner: Early Stories
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Compiling five short stories originally written between 1959 and 1964, Slow Learner showcases Thomas Pynchon’s writing before the publication of his first novel V. The stories compiled here are “The Small Rain,” “Low-lands,” “Entropy,” “Under the Rose,” and “The Secret Integration,” along with an introduction by Pynchon himself.
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This collection is good for completists but I could have lived with just “Entropy” and “The Secret Integration” (but I did love “Entropy”). Also pretty sure “Under The Rose” is almost entirely contained in “V”.
An infuriating book in some ways.
A collection of early, mostly not-so-good short stories, as Pynchon makes clear in his Introduction.
A Small Rain just kind of lies there. I found it hard to give a damn about the characters.
Low-lands is really a kind of fantasy: sort of like a Behind-the-Looking-Glass view of a favorite Leonard Cohen song.
I just didn't get Entropy.
As Pynchon mentions in his Introduction, Under the Rose was lifted largely from an 1899 Baedeker's guide to Egypt for a writing seminar he was taking at Cornell. It reads like an Baedeker-obfuscated parody of John Buchan, who Pynchon also mentions in his Introduction. Anyway, it inspired me to start The Thirty-Nine Steps, which is infinitely better written, better paced, clearer, and engrossing.
But, finally, at the end, The Secret Integration was a sort of gem, a redeeming feature of this book for me. A surprise ending in more ways than one.
