James Wood On Pynchon's Characters

James Wood in a letter to the LRB:

Speaking for myself, as a hostile reviewer of Against the Day, the question has nothing to do with whether you consider Pynchon’s characters fully rounded in a 19th-century sense (19th-century characters not being all that rounded, anyway, in the end); or whether you ‘sympathise’ with them: does one ‘sympathise’ with, say, Peter Verkhovensky, or Stavrogin, or Verloc, or any of the people in a Michel Houellebecq novel? Surely the issue is not what a novel’s characters are (round, flat, major, minor, caricature, sketch etc) but what a novelist does (or doesn’t do) with them: what is seriously at stake in the entire novel of which they form the fabric. And what Pynchon does with his characters, increasingly, is juvenile vaudeville. If you like that, fine.

True and false. There have been plenty of people who have decried the last two Pynchon books (and those before them) for Pynchon's "flat" characters, although I'd also agree that certain people, for instance Wood, don't like Pynchon's characters for other reasons. (Although, Wood does cite Sam Anderson's "review" as one of those, which is a little ridiculous.)

Not so sure I'd agree with the "increasingly juvenile vaudeville." Granted, I haven't made a study of Pynchon's oeuvre, but I tend to find all of his characters fairly juvenile vaudeville. I'd say the difference isn't so much in that but in the freshness of the ideas behind them, which seems to have soured a bit in these last couple books.