ON THE DAY – stop – FUCK AMERICA – stop – THANKS FOR NOTHING – stop
This is the point: books are not made of "positions." They are not made of "arguments." Anyone can say they believe anything, in print, and the ostensible righteousness of their avowed beliefs does not make a book good. If it did, what glorious years for Democrats we would be living in, what a Belle Époque for every city council candidate who pretended to care about abolishing the police for 20 minutes 5 years ago.
A book is made of words. If the words aren't worthwhile, it doesn't matter what "argument" they "articulate," and it sure as FUCK doesn't matter what "story they tell." I will kill the next man who tries to talk to me about "telling stories." You sound like Kamala Harris.
Pynchon's novels from VINELAND onward are, without a doubt, better than 99% of other novels written in English during the same period. That is a pathetically low bar. The first time I picked up VINELAND, which is a solidly good book, after having read GR 3 times back-to-back-to-back, it felt like watching Kennedy's brain lurch out of his skull. If I know you're the man who wrote those first 3 books, and you want to publish VINELAND, do it under a fake fucking name. And if you want to write a book about AMERICA, now or any time, you better be ready to fucking die over it, and you better burn my fucking eyes out by the end of it.
William Burroughs never exactly wrote a book like GRAVITY'S RAINBOW – nobody has, and Burroughs wasn't trying to – but he knew whereof he fucking spoke until the day he died, and he died in shithole Kansas, a house I've been to half a dozen times, because Lawrence, KS is soaked with several hundred years of blood you'd better smell and taste before "America" occurs to you as subject matter, and because it was a day's drive from a fucking methadone clinic. And Burroughs did not supply anyone with Correct Ideas, and he did not do it from a brownstone he owned on the Upper East Side; he said
LOOK AT THE PRISON YOU ARE IN, WE ARE ALL IN. THIS IS A PENAL COLONY THAT IS NOW A DEATH CAMP. PLACE OF THE SECOND AND FINAL DEATH. ... NOTHING HERE NOW BUT THE RECORDINGS. SHUT THEM OFF, THEY ARE AS RADIOACTIVE AS AN OLD JOKE.
Ask some teenage boys in Afghanistan about the CIA retirement program. See what "stories" they've been told.