Title: Imbalanced, inessential
Product review: This book, Pynchon's earliest published short story, puts on display the traits that will make Pynchon one of the finest English-language writers ever: a free-wheeling imagination; a catholic, encyclopaediac store of knowledge; a troubled morality; and a capacity to be damn funny.If you've read _V_ or the short story "Entropy", you've seen this setup before: a college party and a protagonist operating within that system. There are very good reasons it was left out of _Slow Learner_: the humor is forced, the ideas aren't fully formed, and the whole thing is an exercise in imperfection. Which is not to say it's meritless -- the protagonist and the plot live in my brain still, two years since I first read it.It can be found online, however, and even if it couldn't, thirty dollars is a bit steep for a piece like this. If you must get it, get all of his other published fiction first.
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