Pynchon brings added currency to 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'  

Superlatives may get people's attention, but they don't do much to reward it. So if one were to hazard, for example, that novelist Thomas Pynchon's foreword to the new Plume edition of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" just happens to be the finest, deepest, sanest new 20 pages around, the case might yet remain something shy of closed. In the wake of such praise, good questions for a skeptic to ask might include "Compared to what?" "Says who?" and, hardest of all to nail down, "Why?"