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.