Introduction: It's so strange reading Pynchon as Pynchon, directly addressing the reader. Because there are no interviews, no letters, no photographs even, he's become to me a mythic figure, something rather than somebody. But in this introduction (which really should be read as an afterword, if you're spoiler-phobic), he writes pretty casually and frankly about his early days as a writer. And he's not a fan of his juvenilia, which he makes abundantly clear as he dissects each story, pointing out his embarrassment over his "tin ear" for dialogue or the faux pas of originating a story from a theme, rather than letting the theme and story arise naturally from its characters. Seeing how self-critical he is over these stories, it makes me surprised and thankful that we have this collection at all. Maybe he was running a bit low on funds and needed a quick payday, which is absolutely fine with me.

The Small Rain: I never would have guessed this was written by Pynchon. It feels more like a Hemingway/Heller/Kerouac hybrid. Interesting by virtue of its dissimilarity, but not something I particular enjoyed or will remember much about. Two stars

Low-lands: This, on the other hand, feels very much like Pynchon, like it could have been lifted straight out of V. It contains at least one great character and one really strange but awesome set-piece. As Pynchon himself says, it's more of a character study than a story, but I'd say it's a really nice character study. Four stars. 

Entropy: I read all the words and knew most of them, but put all together the way they were, I really have no idea what this was. And there wasn’t enough fun or interesting to make me care enough to figure it out. Two stars. 

Under the Rose: Fits right in with V. In fact, I read almost the whole story before realizing I was reading about characters and events that also appear in V. (Pynchon rewrote this story into a chapter of his first novel.) At times it becomes too convoluted, but it's mostly an enjoyable spy story inhabited by strange/pitiful/goofy/terrifying characters. Three stars.

The Secret Integration: Stands a bit apart from the rest of Pynchon's work; there are no tedious, paranoid ramblings or cartoonish chase scenes or fuzzy dream sequences. This is a relatively straightforward story of kids dealing with the civil rights era and their parents who are stuck in the past. It's one of the best things I've read by Pynchon, which raises the question: do I like Pynchon best when he's being the most un-Pynchonesque? Five stars.

This one is definitely for the die-hards and completionists, Slow Learner: Early Stories is probably most intriguing to Pynchonites merely for the introductory material where we learn a lot about Pynchon's fictioneer-ing process (and progress) from the man himself. When the intro opens with the author warning of the "juvenalia" that lurks in the stories in the collection, he's kind of put himself into a defensive position. Sometimes this is a rhetorical move, but in Pynchon's case, turns out that there's fair reason for the reader to be warned. At least 3 of these stories are mediocre, one is good, and the other is clearly superior.

Even the better stories here offer only the slimmest glimmer of Pynchon's heights across all of his fictions. So the real value here for the Pynchonite is to see the progress of a genius in growth. There's a reassuring thing to see The Master struggling with mediocre short stories early in his career, as if to remind you that greatness can be a process. That said, I think most fans of Pynchon would best be served reading Slow Learner last, as I have. With a view of the full breadth of all of his work, it's really a good way to learn how he arrived with books like Gravity's Rainbow and even Inherent Vice (with the kind of surreal spy/detective story in "Under the Rose").

There is no more new Pynchon for me. This is profoundly sad. Re-reading Pynchon is always a delight, but if Mr. Paranoid's listening, throw us a bone, man!

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.

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.

31. Slow Learner : Early Stories by Thomas Pynchon
published: 1984 - stories originally published 1959, 1960, 1961 & 1964
format: 193 page paperback
acquired: March 13
read: May 30 - Jun 4
rating: 4 stars

A much nicer reading experience than I expected. The self-deprecating introduction really sets the tone, downplaying expectations and welcoming the reader to just relax a bit and enjoy the flawed stories. These five stories include the first four stories Pynchon published. They were apparently no minor item, as they got noticed and put Pynchon on the map of a small literary crowd before his first book came out.

The introduction alone was worth the book. Pynchon is notoriously reclusive, but his introduction is very open. He complains about how amateur these works are and expresses regret over the things he forced into these stories to try to make them more literary. This self-criticism is somehow both a bit in mock and very sincere. It's also spot on, interesting, and charming.

The Small Rain 1959
A low level army tech takes a minor roll in hurricane response. The hurricane was unexpected, deadly, and actually happened. The response becomes body recovery. This was my favorite story as it works on a simple level - an unusual and casual, almost accidental confrontation with death. It just manages to become more than it is.

Low-Lands 1960
A man's wife kicks him out of the house. He spends a night in a garbage dump with the overseer. There is a lot of Greek mythology references and a element of horror. Curious.

Entropy 1960
Actually a kind of cool story that involves a wacky party and the odd young couple one floor below, pondering entropy. But, if I can pretend to give analysis, and this kind of story will encourage you to pretend to do the same, the point seems to be his use of the word entropy in a story context - both giving new meaning to and coloring the entire story. It's one of those interesting ideas I find hard to grasp of all at once. The wild parties become something that cannot hold, if you like. They expend more than what can be replaced. And they become directional, leading toward an end, without ever touching on this directly. Not sure I have it right, or close, but it makes sense to me. It also really defines the sense of everything in V. and Gravity's Rainbow - for him it's a foundational concept.

"The cosmologists had predicted an eventual heat-death for the universe (something like Limbo: form and motion abolished, heat-energy identical at every point in it); the meteorologists, day-to-day, staved it off by contradicting with a reassuring array of varied temperatures.

But for three days now, despite the changeful weather, the mercury had stayed at 37 degrees Fahrenheit."

Under the Rose 1961
A take on the tricky world of Fin de siècle espionage, where principals seems to play an important, but hard to define roll. This becomes a chapter in V., with some differences. I didn't like it in V. and I didn't like it any better as a standalone. I found it a snobbish effort.

The Secret Integration 1964
This story actually post-dates V.. The story is, in a nutshell, boys behaving badly. But Pynchon adds and works on a complicated racial element. The boys "integrate" themselves with an imaginary black boy, patting themselves on the back for their forwardness, until the town's reality weighs in too heavily. It's both great and not, depending on how you look at it, and there are many different ways. I thought the racial element was forced.

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.

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

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

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 ...

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.

Worth the read for Pynchon's introduction to the book and the story "Entropy." I think the best introduction to Pynchon is "The Crying of Lot 49" followed by "V." I'd say read this if you are a completionist. As for a starting point, it could work, but I still think his novels outpace any of his stories.

I read this because Gravity's Rainbow has claimed me as a victim five times now. I've yet to get past page 250. One day.