Thomas Pynchon's short story "Entropy" is what kick started my interest in modern (well, post-modern) literature and it's a little odd to see it again, not quite as good as I remembered it (though still good) and ripped to shreds by the author in the preface.

So what is there to say? Some of these stories are just good, some are pretty darned good and some are outright wonderful. It is a collection of short stories that I would recommend for those too tentative to dive right into V. or are not quite sure who this Pynchon fellow is. I mean, it worked for me.

This might change later, but right now, I'm less interested in What Pynchon Has To Tell Me than I am in How Pynchon Became Pynchon. I'm sure I'll eventually get around to the Boners & Bombs book, but I'm burningly curious about how one wills oneself into the person that writes that sort of book. The issue is all the more curious when reading "Slow Learner," a collection of five of Pynchon's earliest short stories, four of them written while still in college, and annotated in the present day (1984) by the author in the form of a skeptical, slightly embarrassed 20 page introduction. I tore into the stories first, winding around back to the analysis afterward so that I could enjoy the works on their own merits first.

The collection starts with "The Small Rain" (1959), a surprisingly linear and conventional tale of a wannabe lifetime enlisted man and his time spent helping out when his troop is called down south for disaster duty. Nathan "Lardass" Levine plans to spend his life in the military, but everyone around him sees he could probably do better, if he wants. The story has a Salinger feel to it, probably one of the first hints for folks who thought Pynchon might in fact be Salinger under a pseudonym. Our author dismisses this work as hopelessly hack, its contrived accents ringing false and its attempts to shoehorn literary motifs into a slight story its greatest crimes. It's not as bad as all that, but I'd be hard pressed to imagine reading it a second time.

Strangeness creeps in with "Low-Lands," originally published in 1960. Dennis Flange is kicked out of the house (presumably for good) by his wife for the crime of inviting the garbage man downstairs to drink and tell dirty jokes in his man-cave. The two join a junkyard operator, who takes them to a back room where they drink wine and tell stories about their enlisted days. (Pynchon bemoans the casual racism and sexism of his characters, noting that it probably was less of an ironic and more of a legitimate set of prejudices of his younger self.) This is also the start of Pynchon's funny names -- there's Dennis Flange and also Pig Bodine and the junkyard-man Bolingbroke. Flange is brought out of deep sleep by Nerissa, a magical little person who takes him to her trash-city deeper in the junkyard. It's all very dreamy and strange, but elements of later stories are definitely starting to come out.

"Entropy" (1960) gets the vast brunt of Pynchon's mortification. It's set in the wee hours of a multi-day lease-breaking college party, as guests come and go, exclaiming pseudo-profundities and pantomiming silent string quartets for the entertainment of the drunken assemblage. "I was more concerned," writes Pynchon in the intro, "with committing on paper a variety of abuses, such as overwriting. I will spare everyone a detailed discussion of all the overwriting that occurs in these stories, except to mention how distressed I am at the number of tendrils that keep showing up. I still don't even know for sure what a tendril is. I think I took the word from T.S. Eliot. I have nothing against tendrils personally, but my overuse of the word is a good example of what can happen when you spend too much time on words alone." The most exciting part of these stories is watching the author, in retrospect, come to terms with the rookie mistakes we all make in our attempts to get our thoughts and ideas and personality as clear on the page as we can. For me, I find the story to be an amusing look at the time, the heedless weirdness that came at the tail end of the '50s, when young people started to reach for their first tastes of decadence and freedom. If it's overstuffed with incomprehensible digressions about the nature of entropy, well hey, who hasn't held court on stupider subjects at a college party? It's also the first funny story we've seen so far.

I had a hell of a time with "Under the Rose" (1961) from start to finish. The story takes place in the late 1800s, just as we're about to become to the 20th century. Its about spies in Egypt and surrounding areas who are assigned to track a dignitary, and it involves love triangles, romantic rivalries, friction between the old guard and the new ways, and a bit of slapstick. Not only is the prose style someone archaic, but Pynchon insists on using every possible street name, city name, and the exact path to get to each. He notes that he had probably pilfered a fair amount of this from an 1899 guidebook to modern Egypt. The writer and his first attempts to write something that's outside of his realm of experience. This is also a Golden Age of Weird Pynchon Names, so you'll find yourself re-reading the names Porpentine, Moldweorp, Voslauer, and the most Pynchon name of all, Bongo-Shaftbury, with maddening regularity. This is the first story where Pynchon lets himself off the hook more than I did. I found this an awful, tedious slog towards nothing in particular. A few tumbles down the stairs and police fracases at the opera later, and I really couldn't figure out what more I knew about the spy Porpentine at the end than I did at the beginner, other than, to quote Danny Glover, that he's Getting Too Old For This Shit.

The final story is noteworthy, as it's the only one to have been written and published after Pynchon's first novel, "V." "The Secret Integration" (1964) is the longest story in the batch, and the best by a long margin. Made up of real, fascinating people (kids, mostly...again with the Salinger comparisons) in a time in which everything is changing, it tackles the notion of racial integration from a really interesting set of angles. Pynchon may lambaste himself for making the kids occasionally stupider than they need to be and transplanting his hometown locations and experiences to a more tony New England climate, but there's not much else to dislike here. The kids are still kids, they have fun with their secret inner lives, but also with their inventions, their adventures, and their increasingly ambitious pranks on the town. They see their parents acting horribly to the black family that just moved in, and they want to lash out, but don't quite know how yet. Their one black friend, Carl, is a natural fit for the group, and the four of them are as thick as thieves. The give and take between childhood innocence and the first realizations of the grotesqueries of adulthood is handled as well here as any author I can think of that specializes in this time of life, and the twist at the end comes completely out of nowhere. This story alone makes the book a must-read.

There are so many books on the market about how to write better (and I've read plenty of them), but there are precious few about how not to write. That's why books like this and the recently published "Drivel" (a collection of early, terrible writings by people we now consider great, like Gillian Flynn, Mary Roach, Dave Eggers, and Chuck Palahniuk, seem like such useful tools. No matter where you are in your attempts to write gooder, you can't help comparing yourself to writers that seem to be on another planet altogether. How did they get there? Were they always there? How do I do that? Alas, these books don't contain a magic skeleton key that will help you unlock your great inner writer. They can be comforting, but they all basically tell the same story: to be a good writer, you just need to write more, and if you can, find ways to not suck so much. And don't get too embarrassed by what you wrote before. Everyone started out writing about Crazy College Students and their invisible sonatas.

Not an ideal Pynchon introduction, so stalled for now. I need a screaming across the sky I guess.

Even more interesting than the stories themselves, is Pynchon's introduction in which he reveals much more than he usually does, either before or after, about his writing goals, his perceptions , his general existence. “The Secret Integration” grows on me with each re-reading.

The last story is one of my favorite short stories that I have ever read.
This collection really isn’t Pynchonian in style, except for maybe Entropy, which would be similar to the least interesting parts of Gravity’s Rainbow, but they are genuinely good on their own. The introduction as well is great, just for the insights into the standards he holds over his writing. The critiques he has for these early stories don’t really hold for me, as I found them all (except entropy) enjoyable and, at times, masterful. Even if you dislike his novels, you may enjoy these stories as they almost all are very accessible.

I'm not finished yet, will probably change the review stars, but want to jot down my early thoughts. This isn't the correct edition I have, but I can't find any others listed on GR. Maybe it's the weird , unexpected source from which I got this early collection of TP short stories, which , I think from reading the author's forward, was his first published collection.

My odd source was my local recycle shed. See, I live way out in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, and we have to tote our own trash and have no monthly garbage fees, as a result! I kinda dig it: it's not that big a deal to drop a bag of trash and sort out the recyclables every Sunday on our way to the Food Lion grocery store. Kinda cathartic. Every once in a while, I drop off some some detritus from my life that's clogging up the works, like an old pan, table, piece of tech, or shirt I haven't used in a while...into a brilliant local thing called the recycling shed. You can drop off your personal extras, and look through other persons' detritus, and take them if they tickle your fancy. I love the communism of it, but don't let the locals hear me call it that!

One day, a few months back, I dropped off some crap, and looked through the books lined up on the shelves. I was heartened to realize someone had taken my cast off Norton Anthology of American Lit and extraneous ratty copy I'd had of 1984. Then I spied a gem...what? Thomas Pyncheon??!! A pristine, possibly unread copy, of a book I've never heard of, with a high end cover and unbroken spine? What free treasure is here? It was called SLOW LEARNER, and it was apparently Pyncheon's first published book of short stories.

In the front was an interesting and insightful self-analysis of this early work by the author himself. He agonized over his lack of form, young writer's naivete, and general embarrassment that was quite refreshing to see in a novelist so well known for his avant -guardism and difficulty. I had started my interest in Pyncheon with, to me, the easily understood symbolism of THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (really should re-read that one, but can't find my copy) and graduated to GRAVITY"S RAINBOW--what the hell, but brilliant!! In SLOW LEARNER, the seeds are there, but you can also feel what Pyncheon cringed about. Not that it's bad! but just not quite his later form--any writer would be proud to call this collection theirs! More later when i finish, but lots of army years reminiscing ...

The introduction is definitely an important part of the Pynchon canon, and the stories themselves, though Pynchon discounts them as juvenilia, are pretty good in their own right. "The Small Rain" is the weakest of the lot, and oddly the most fascinating part is the one Pynchon is most ashamed of; the sex scene between Levine and the country girl may reek of the sort of flowery prose belonging to many an amateur author, but it hints at the greatest to come in V. and GR. "Low-lands" is good as a first look at the classic Pynchon character, Pig Bodine, and it is notable for the proto-Slothrop-ness of Dennis Flange, who would rather drink with his buddies and have sex with a gypsy girl than try to have a serious relationship with his wife. "Entropy" + "Under the Rose" are essentially proto-V. ("Entropy" being prototype for the Profane side of the novel, and "Under the Rose" evolving later into one of Stencil's stories), and that novel is of course superior to these two early tales, but as with the first two in this collection, they are great as early hints at what will be to come in Pynchon's career. The collection's real highlight (after the introduction) is "The Secret Integration," perhaps Pynchon's most blatant social commentary, but an excellent coming-of-age tale, with a great Pynchonian twist

pynchon is funny. no, no, he's very funny. no, no, no, actually, pynchon is mocking-funny. yes, he's a mock-comic writer. but, this book as a high form of pynchonesque mocking art topples even his expectations. no, seriously. he's just so good at it that he surpassed himself in this book. there are five early short stories of pynchon in this book, but, imho, that introduction is actually the best one. yes, real events as story. he catered it like that. and, in a very funny way, goddamn him! now, the stories clearly showed if pynchon didn't change his narrative style, english literature would've forgotten him easily. but, there are clear traces of pynchon fun in the stories but due to his the then literary inexperiences, it fell apart, sometimes. so, the actual rating of this book is 3.5 stars but a half star is also alotted for the applause of how pynchon knows the art of self-mocking (i may be wrong)! it takes a lot of guts to publish your failure in the peaktime of your success. but, then again, the art of self-mocking is very much underrated.

En "Slow Learner" de Thomas Pynchon tenemos los relatos de un universitario aprendiendo, lentamente, a escribir, con todos sus defectos y virtudes, empezando con un prólogo maravilloso escrito por el propio escritor en el que desvela todo lo que no le gusta de la forma en que escribía al principio, y lo poco que le gusta también, desde luego. Aún así cada relato es una muestra embrionaria del talento monstruoso de un escritor sin igual tratando temas de todo tipo, desde la muerte y sus modos de afrontarla al racismo y pasando por la entropía ("He found in entropy or the measure of disorganization for a closed system an adequate metaphor to apply to certain plenomena in his own world") y una fabulosa historia de espías a lo John Le Carré. Todos los cuentos son buenos y algunos son simplemente magistrales como. Aquí tenemos lo primero que escribió el maestro y sus temas, su estilo, su forma de escribir están aquí para que empecemos a disfrutarlos desde ya.

The Small Rain — 3 stars
Low-Lands — 3 stars
Entropy — 4 stars
Under the Rose — 5 stars
The Secret Integration — 4 stars

Entropia el'integrazione segreta sono molto belli.
Scrittura molto difficile.
Le prefazioni sono migliori dei racconti.

These stories are sadly not too great. Pynchon gives some elusive personal details and wisdom about writing in the introduction, but even his commentaries don't make many of these stories worth reading. It's kinda fun to watch him shape up from juvenalia to the writing style he has in Lot 49/Gravity's Rainbow. Still, they're not too good