Worth it for the introduction alone. This was my 4th Pynchon, and probably a good time for it. Would probably be a bit anticlimactic if I had saved this for last.

Highlights: "Entropy" and "Under the Rose". Also, a Slothrop relative, wart Doctor makes an appearance.

Good enough writing, but experience enhanced if you're all-in with Pynchon, natch.

After reading Gravity’s Rainbow last year I decided to take this year off from reading any Pynchon, and I almost did it. Back last summer I found this copy of Slow Learner. Now at the midway point through Pynchon’s bibliography I decided this would be a good next pick before tackling the back half.

This collection of short stories covers the early years of Pynchon’s writing career with stories from 1959 to 1964. This collection was initially published in the mid 1980’s and it's always been my understanding that this collection is more so something to tie over Pynchon fans in the drought between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland. Something for the die hards to get a closer look at the master’s methods. Those assumptions are pretty much correct but that’s not to say I didn’t find parts of this collection quite enjoyable.

While not an amazing collection overall, there are elements that are worth checking this out for. First is the introduction done by Pynchon himself, where he admits that these aren't very good stories but it does offer a good reflection on his time in college and directly after writing these. It’s always interesting to read these kinds of introductions, considering he so rarely offers his thoughts to the public outside of his work.

Most of these stories really are just Pynchon working out ideas that would go on to be better utilized in later works, particularly in his first novel V. I would recommend reading this book directly after reading V as there are many similarities here. The stories of goofy 1950s navy men, particularly an early appearance of the character Pig Bodine, were fun to revisit especially after having just watched the Paul Thomas Anderson film The Master a few months back for the first time.

Other early hints are the story Under The Rose, which is essentially a first draft of a chapter in V that would end up being done a lot better in its final iteration. The story Entropy is probably closest to the Pynchon style we come to know. This story has a reputation that precedes it for this reason. While reading it I did enjoy it but I think this reputation overhyped it for me as it is rather short and pretty minimal compared to what Pynchon accomplishes later on.

Overall these stories are not much like Pynchon’s style as we come to know it in later novels. These stories are a lot easier to read and quicker paced. While I didn’t find any to be terrible, most of them are pretty forgettable. I enjoyed the final story, The Secret Integration, best. It is the longest story and offers a really interesting side of Pynchon that I hadn’t read from before. Writing from the perspective of children and their secret organization fascinated by the world of adults, he explores themes of race that were most prevalent around the 1964 Civil Rights Act, while still offering a level of fun and excitement.

I agree with the sentiment that this collection is solely for the Pynchon die hards. I enjoyed it for what it was but in comparison with any of his actual novels that I’ve read this leaves a lot to be desired.

3.50 Stars — Early Pynchon is still very good, even if it’s not Pynchon!!!

A solid collection of eclectic tales of human foibles and relationships, I really enjoyed each individual story in its own right, which is rare in such collections.

The clues of the master-author-to-be are definitely present, the prose shown here seems to stagger rather than expand, TP was trying things on and seeing what most fit.

I particularly enjoyed the passive stylings shown through the later stories and felt as though there was perhaps room for 1-2 more as I was left feeling a little hungry.

‘Un lento aprendizaje’ recoge los primeros relatos de Thomas Pynchon, que escribió entre 1958 y 1964, y en ellos se aprecia esa esencia pynchoniana tan típica. Ya en la larga introducción, Pynchon nos comenta los errores que contienen estos cuentos, típicos en un autor nobel, y de su manía a la hora de documentarse con la lectura de otros libros antes que con la experiencia. En esta introducción, Pynchon también nos habla de las tramas y sus personajes, del humor inherente en ambos, del germen de sus diálogos, que con el tiempo se convertirán en brillantes. Una diferencia entres estos primeros relatos y otras obras posteriores es la inmadurez de ciertas situaciones, pecados de juventud del autor por otra parte.

Pynchon es claramente reconocible en estos relatos. Si bien empiezan con un estilo iniciático, en un entorno humorístico, según van avanzando el estilo va perfeccionándose y haciéndose más propio de su manera de escribir. En ‘Lluvia ligera’ aparece el ejército y soldados que están casi siempre de broma; ’Bajo la rosa’ es una historia de espionaje que recuerda sobre todo a ciertos pasajes de su novela ‘V.’; en 'Entropía' se alude a las leyes de la termodinámica; ’Tierras bajas’ es una anécdota puramente pynchoniana, donde Dennis Flange acabará de la manera más surrealista; y ’La integración secreta’ (mis favoritos este y ‘Bajo la rosa’) recoge el afán de un grupo de jóvenes por conspirar contra los adultos, su pueblo y el orden establecido, donde brilla con luz propia el personaje de Grover.

Los cinco relatos recogidos en ‘Un lento aprendizaje’ van mucho más allá que las meras anécdotas, la ironía y los chispeantes diálogos. En ellos, Pynchon intenta incluir sus opiniones, encuadrando a sus personajes en un entorno claramente institucionalizado donde buscan un objetivo y, sobre todo, la libertad como individuos.

Sin duda, vale la pena leer estos primeros cuentos del genial Thomas Pynchon, que junto a ‘La subasta del lote 49’ son sus libros más asequibles.

Delinquent Juvenilia

It’s almost inevitable that any author will consider their juvenilia as inferior to their later or more mature works (especially if they made the transition from short stories to fully-fledged and ambitious novels).

Thomas Pynchon is no different in his perspective on the five short stories in this collection (which were originally published between 1959 and 1964. Only the last story was published after one of his novels n  (“V.”).n

From “Under the Rose” to "V."

It’s generally known that Pynchon was working on all of his first three novels at the same time, but chose to prioritise them differently, both in terms of completion and publication.

However, it became apparent from reading the short story “Under the Rose” (1961) (the fourth in this collection) that there is a creative link between at least this story and the third chapter of “V.”

Both works are set in colonial Egypt (Alexandria and Cairo). Both feature the characters Victoria Wren, (the daughter/wife/mistress of) Sir Alastair Wren, Eric/Hugh Bongo-Shaftesbury, Goodfellow, Porpentine and Lepsius. Some of the text is common to both works, although they stand separately. Thus, to criticise the short story is to be equally critical of at least part of the novel. Pynchon himself acknowledges as much when he writes in the Introduction:

n  “If only for its good intentions, I am less annoyed with ‘Under the Rose’ than with the earlier stuff. I think the characters are a little better, no longer just lying there on the slab but beginning at least to twitch some and blink their eyes open, although their dialogue still suffers from my perennial Bad Ear...Today we expect a complexity of plot and depth of character which are missing from my effort here.”n

Pynchon would certainly remedy these deficiencies in “V.” itself, though I think his claim to have a bad ear is unduely harsh, and probably even inaccurate.



From "Weird Crews" and Gangs to the "Whole Sick Crew"

Pynchon is most critical of his first story, “The Small Rain” (1959). It features a company of army men of different levels of responsibility and intelligence. They’re based in Louisiana, when a nearby community is wiped out by a hurricane and they are charged with recovering the bodies of the dead. You could say that this is the beginning of the Pynchonesque collective concept of “the whole sick crew”, which would later feature in “V.”, as it does in later stories in this collection, like Dennis Flange and his “weird crew” in “Low-Lands” (1960) and Grover Snodd and his “gang” of delinquent boys in “The Secret Integration” (1964)

Integration into the Collective

The last of these stories concerns the integration of coloured people into society and school, while the army setting of “The Small Rain” arguably recognises the importance of the war to greater understanding of other races and creeds (Nathan ‘Lardass’ Levine, a graduate of CCNY, is described as ‘the Wandering Jew’).

(Mis-)Entropy

I had never previously read the story “Entropy” (1960), although I had suspected that its importance to Pynchon’s ouvre might have been exaggerated by academics and critics. The Introduction certainly provides plenty of fodder for this opinion. Pynchon responds to the story with a “bleakness of heart”, describing it as an example of a “procedural error…to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.”

The story itself is based on superficial notes Pynchon took from his reading of scientific texts, not some profound pre-existing knowledge (“Since I wrote this story I have kept trying to understand entropy, but my grasp becomes less sure the more I read”). Here is what Pynchon says in the story itself:

n  “‘Nevertheless,’ continued Callisto, ‘he [Willard Gibbs] found in entropy or the measure of disorganization for a closed system an adequate metaphor to apply to certain phenomena in his own world. He saw, for example, the younger generation responding to Madison Avenue with the same spleen his own had once reserved for Wall Street: and in American ‘consumerism’ discovered a similar tendency from the least to the most probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos. He found himself, in short, restating [Willard] Gibbs’ prediction in social terms, and envisioned a heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like heat-energy would no longer be transferred, since each point in it would ultimately have the same quantity of energy; and intellectual motion would, accordingly, cease.”n

An Expansion of Possibilities

This quotation establishes a context of social science, rather than a wholesale adoption of information or systems theory.

It also echoes Pynchon’s comments in the Introduction about the position of his generation between Modernism and what would (or might) succeed it:

n  “We were encouraged from many directions - Kerouac and the Beat writers, the diction of Saul Bellow in ‘The Adventures of Augie March’, emerging voices like those of Herbert Gold and Philip Roth - to see how at least two very distinct kinds of English could be allowed to coexist. Allowed! It was actually OK to write like this! Who knew? The effect was exciting, liberating, strongly positive. It was not a case of either/or, but an expansion of possibilities. I don’t think we were consciously groping after any synthesis, although perhaps we should have been.
“The success of the ‘new left’ later in the ‘60’s was to be limited by the failure of college kids and blue-collar workers to get together politically. One reason was the presence of real, invisible class force fields in the way of communication between the two groups.”n  
n

Old Left Nuances

I’ve argued elsewhere that Pynchon’s support or sympathy for the Old Left surfaces in n  “Vineland”n and n  “Bleeding Edge”.n To focus exclusively and obsessively on Pynchon’s Post-Modernism and paranoia is to place him in a category within which he doesn’t always belong or sit comfortably, and to underestimate the nuances of his political concerns as an individual and an author.

It’s interesting in this context that Pynchon describes as “mighty influences” Edmund Wilson’s n  “To the Finland Station”n and Machiavelli’s “The Prince”.

It’s also worth highlighting that Pynchon sought “an expansion of possibilities” in contrast to John Barth’s “literature of exhaustion”. The answer was and is to be found in the writer’s individualism rather than their compliance with (by now tired Post-Modernist) proscriptions.

Any book that starts out in the preface saying that what you are about to read sucks and then makes a series of apologies about how bad it is and how much he learned and how smart he actually is and on and on with the pretentious 'I really am one of the greatest writers in the 20th century, you just won't be able to tell from the shit you are about to read' litany.
That is just self indulgent and embarassing.

But, he was right, it all pretty much didn't do a lot except bore.

I bought an Elvis Costello re-issue album once that did the same thing. I thought, well, no one ever says anything about this album, I'll give it a shot. Then the first line of the liner notes read: 'Congratulations, you just purchased my worst album ever'

I mean really, couldn't you put that on the cover? And for that, I am a little upset at EC as well.

La introducción es sencillamente genial. El propio Pynchon, va desmenuzando, cuento por cuento, con veinte años de distancia, todos sus aciertos y errores, anécdotas de sus procesos de escritura, obteniendo unos inmejorables nostálgicos consejos de escritura. Demostrando que siempre es mejor intentar y fallar que rendirse. Pero él de fallar, ni de cerca con estos cuentos (salvo quizás los dos primeros) bueno... en el primero sí creo que falla.
Eso sí, contradictoriamente, pienso que es mejor leer la introducción después de los cuentos. Quizás sea por mala costumbre mía, pero no me gusta enterarme mucho de qué va la historia de un libro, más bien me gusta sorprenderme, para bien o para mal (sorprenderse siempre es para mejor); prefiero no entender nada al principio y armarme una idea por allí, a medio camino. Detesto las sinopsis y los textos en la contraportada o cosas así. Y en ese sentido creo que es un error partir por la introducción (aunque suene ilógico) porque limita la capacidad de asombro. Aunque se entiende que puso el texto al principio como unas disculpas anticipadas, un parche antes de la herida.

Dudo poder decir algo más interesante de lo escrito por Pynchon en su prologo. Y, contradiciéndome con lo dicho hace poco, ni lo intentare. Solo diré lo evidente:
Son cinco cuentos escritos en un periodo de seis años por un veinteañero Pynchon. Y al estar ordenador de forma cronológica se aprecia con claridad el aprendizaje del autor. Es indudable que cada cuento supera al anterior. También se percibe como el surrealismo comienza a incorporarse en la narración del autor, al principio de forma irregular, pero integrándose de forma orgánica a la prosa de Pynchon hasta convertirse en parte inherente de su estilo.

Agradecido, señor Pynchon.

Lisa gave me this collection of short stories for my birthday a few years ago. I feel badly that it took me so long to get around to reading it, but it just didn't look like it'd be my sort of thing. It kind of wasn't. I've never read any Pynchon before. These were his early stories, all published in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They felt... thicker... than the sorts of stories I usually read. I did like the bit of a flair of fantasy that runs through a few of the otherwise perfectly ordinary stories--the beautiful midget gypsy girl who lives in the tunnels under the garbage dump, the new boy in town who turns out to be a little different.

The book includes an introduction by Pynchon where he discusses the stories, his influences, the flaws he sees in the stories, and what he likes about them anyway. I probably shouldn't have read that first but I can never resist. I'm sure that colored my reading a bit--there were places where I thought, oh yes that is clunky just like Mr. Pynchon said, when otherwise I might have just read on through and not noticed it. The dialogue really is a bit clunky in places and I would have caught that, I'm sure. Some of the stories didn't really feel structured in a way--I guess I feel that, when I get to the end of a story, I want to be surprised and not surprised at the same time, because the ending should be natural and in a sense inevitable, but should also have something of the unexpected. These stories didn't seem so much to be building towards their endings as to be some pages about some guys who we start reading about and they go and do some things and then they stop. Not that the stories were uninteresting or unplotted, just not necessarily structured in a way I enjoy.

The exception was the last story in the book, "The Secret Integration", which was terrific and was worth reading the whole book to get to. (Mr. Pynchon says in the introduction that he's pretty content with how this story holds up, but that the next thing he wrote after this story was The Crying of Lot 49 "in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up till then". This is not an overwhelming argument for me to go pick up The Crying of Lot 49.)

Overall: Props to Mr. Pynchon for a really entertaining and candid introduction, and also for one excellent story--one of our five definitely isn't bad. I'll say three stars.

Especially ambivalent 4-star-Pynchon here. Intro, great, first two stories are fine, next two, unreadable, last one, The Secret Integration, both deceptively (which he isn’t usually, ie bashful — about being either of those things) surreal and political Stand By Me -esque story + rare instance of Pynchon offering a kind of key in the ending that kind of unlocks the whole rest of the story. Pretty great, made me want to give five stars until I remembered the garbage that preceded it. #ChickLit #SummerRead #NowBackToDeLillo

hard to rate a bunch of separate stories, but the intro was great. time for gravity's rainbow. i'm scared

Pynchon is a little too hard on himself in his estimation of these five stories, all but one published before his first novel. We can forgive this, since he wrote the goddamn things, but we can just as easily argue with him since we're reading the goddamn things.
I'd read "Lowlands" before, in one of those baffling, half-turgid little small-press limited runs and quite liked it, but it's in "Under the Rose" and "The Secret Integration" where Pynchon begins to stake his claim in those weird nooks and crannies of the world-soul. These two are very much fragmentary portions of larger works that you wished he had once written and this points up the problem with the other stories: Pynchon writes epic best. His writing is explosive, hard bop junkie skydiving and I find the short story framework too confining for him.
Nevertheless, these (with the exception of the terrible "Entropy"--a kind of Beat paean, impenetrable and Swedish Chefian) are really good. You want to pat Pynchon on the back and hand him a french fry.

Really fascinating getting to read Pynchon writing about himself and just, owning up to his mistakes. That introduction is one of the most helpful things I've ever read as a young writer, and gives me some hope that eventually I'll stop fucking up and write something halfway as good as anything he wrote.

The stories themselves are fine, at their best they contain the humor and great line work of Pynchon's novels, but they're all also kind of half-baked and sloppy, with barely a trace of his politics. It's remarkable that a guy as private as Pynchon republished these stories frankly, but I'm awfully glad he did. That being said, I can't recommend reading this without having read a few of the big novels and becoming a fan of some degree of his writing.