Monsterpieces: Thomas Pynchon

Monsterpieces: Thomas Pynchon

[If you read Lit Hub, you know about the continuing, possibly endless discussion of who is the “literary asshole.” I recently ran into one: Ross Barcan, editor of Metropolitan Review, who assigned me Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket some time ago. Two weeks before the novel’s publication date (and three days after I received a copy of the book) Barkan told me “Things change.” I was off the case, someone else would do the review. No explanation or apology, just “Things change.” I’ve been publishing book reviews longer than Barcan has been alive, but I’ve never run into this particular kind of “literary asshole.” So no reprint of my promised Metropolitan Review piece will appear here. The good news is that Open Letters Review has published my review but has requested a 30-day delay before I post it. For the sake of immediacy, here is a link to the review:

https://openlettersreview.com/posts/shadow-ticket-by-thomas-pynchon

What follows are three reviews, one 50 years belated, of long novels by Pynchon, background, should you be interested, for the review of Shadow Ticket.]

Thomas Pynchon

Bleeding Edge

Penguin, 2013

(American Book Review, for an issue about the sixties)

Unless you’re boycotting the Internet, you’ve had the chance to read thirty or more reviews of Bleeding Edge and probably know it’s set in New York City just after the dot.com bust and 9/11, so I’ll keep my description minimal. For details on the novel’s fraying plots, scads of characters, and loco color, and for an almost persuasive reading very different from the judgment here, I recommend Michael Chabon’s long review in the New York Review of Books. If you’re a Pynch-onanist, you’ll read the book—or have already read it—no matter what I say, but Bleeding Edge is far from one of Pynchon’s best novels, and I think the 1960’s may be one reason why.

I mean the mellow yellow version of the California 60’s presented in and through the style of Inherent Vice—daily dope, surfer sounds, and fuzzy suspicion of authority told in a hippy-dippy, loosey-goosey narrative—not the 60’s of high-concept postmodern fiction such as The Crying of Lot 49. Yes, some of the qualities above were present in Lot 49, but it had menace and history that compensated for its California high jinks. And it’s history, I realize now, that gives other Pynchon novels—V., Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason and Dixon, some of Against the Day—their substance and authority, even if earlier times are threaded with 60’s anachronisms. About Pynchon’s history, I think, readers can suspend disbelief, an act more difficult when he writes about a setting readers know first-hand—such as New York in 2001.

Like Pynchon, two website designers in Bleeding Edge are transplants from California to New York. Their DeepArcher site is an inventive virtual world, chaotic but still a “history-free” refuge from the real. Justin wanted the site “to go back in time, to a California that had never existed, safe, sunny all the time”; Lucas wanted something “a little darker,” silences “holding inside them forces of destruction.” Like DeepArcher, Bleeding Edge is a synthesis, but it’s sunny Justin who seems responsible for the book’s mellow sensibility and pastoral sympathies, who makes it an East Coast Inherent Vice, updated to include a passel of computer geeks in Silicon Alley.

From Lucas’s “forces of destruction” unleashed on 9/11, Pynchon is strangely distant, treating the event in a few very general pages and suggesting that it was part of a conspiracy he has imagined. One of his main characters would have been in the towers had he not overslept. Despite the requisite gestures to New Yorkers’ mourning and fear, Pynchon seems to have slept or slipped through 9/11. He complains about the words—Ground Zero--used to describe the ruins, implies that Americans had it coming, and does not allow the event to significantly darken his comic detective plot like the one in Inherent Vice. It’s difficult to understand Pynchon’s evasiveness because he seemed to forecast in the last lines of Gravity’s Rainbow the fall of towers. It and his other historical novels have the power to disturb or, at least, to discomfit, but despite including an “atrocity” Bleeding Edge is bloodless and gravitas-defying, as if Pynchon’s 60’s conspiracy theorizing could not take in the real thing.

Pynchon’s focal character, Maxine Tarnow, is an Upper West Side fraud investigator who sees through his usual cast of villainous men, crooks, cranks, and eccentrics with odd names. The daughter of old lefties, Maxine is first described as a post 60’s “wised-up” cynic, but she eventually gains sympathy for the views of her older friend, March, who writes a political blog and praises the idealism of “open source” young nerds: “`I haven’t seen anything like it since the sixties. These kids are out to change the world. “Information has to be free.”`” By novel’s end Maxine shares the disappointed idealist March’s take on the government’s using 9/11 to initiate an everlasting global “War on Terror.” But Pynchon’s political critique is “power to the people” simplistic and paranoid predictable with nothing like the weight of his attacks on multinationalism in Gravity’s Rainbow or imperialism in Mason and Dixon.

For Lucas, the darker of the web designers, DeepArcher is a “`valentine to the Big Apple.’” For Pynchon, this means fondly describing off-beat neighborhoods, weird food and odd merchants, the variety of New Yorkers and their obsessions. He worries that all of Manhattan will become corporate midtown, just as the old anarchy of Times Square was “Disneyfied.” But he rarely has Maxine venture from Manhattan to the truly diverse outer boroughs, and the editorial voice that occasionally displaces Maxine sounds like Justin the 60’s pastoralist, for Pynchon reserves his strongest language to bemoan the very existence of a city, “its seething foul incoherence.” The “bleeding edge” for Pynchon is not the near future but the far past, say the Montauk that Maxine visits--before the tourists, before the fishermen, before the Indians. Or the Hudson’s “ancient estuary exempt from what happened, what has gone on happening” in “bad history.”

Children have a larger role in this novel than in other Pynchon books, and he seems to want his novel to have an “innocence” associated with them and their computer games. He extends his plot with convoluted digressions and cute-meet coincidences, not to suggest some possible connectionism beyond most humans’ ken, but to give himself a merry prankster freedom to include zany inventions, old-movie allusions, and bad puns.

From a Pynchon novel praised by early reviewers for its treatment of 9/11 and Internet surveillance, I expected more, much more. But maybe Pynchon has warned me—and others--not to expect more anymore. At the beginning of Bleeding Edge a documentary filmmaker named Reg Despard abruptly zooms in and out on scenes, causing viewers cognitive dissonance. Pynchon makes fun of an academic who submits Despard’s work to Brechtian analysis and who praises his film for its “leading edge” post-postmodernism. I praised a similar scene of disorienting zooming in Gravity’s Rainbow as a metaphor for the Brechtian alienation effects of that novel’s “epic theater” in my book The Art of Excess. Foolish me. Later in Bleeding Edge, Despard says he just shoots what is in front of him and intends “`no deeper meaning.’” Though Pynchon writes about a “Deep Web” which only a few can enter, Bleeding Edge is mostly Surface Net for all, complication rather than complexity, digression rather than dissonance, a nearly contemporary counter-culture alternative to Tom Wolfe’s right-wing reportage or something like Jonathan Lethem’s surface-coasting Chronic City, a New York novel that includes a character resembling Pynchon. What an unfortunate loop: Pynchon influencing Lethem, who influences Pynchon, who is positively reviewed by New Yorker Lethem in the New York Times.

In an Electronic Book Review essay several years ago, I wondered why no great New York novels have appeared in the last decade, and suggested Pynchon might write one. I thought he had the imagination to challenge the DeLillo of Underworld, the Gaddis of J R, and the McElroy of Women and Men even if those novelists grew up in New York, but Bleeding Edge has only their bulk, not their cultural understanding or aesthetic ambition. Although Pynchon graduated from high school on Long Island and has lived in Manhattan for several decades, Bleeding Edge feels like the product of a pacific California tourist, someone much more persuasive impersonating the dope-smoking P.I. Doc Sportello of Inherent Vice than occupying the mind of a West Side Jewish fraud investigator. What Bleeding Edge chiefly lacks is a hard edge. “Nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist,” Pynchon says in Gravity’s Rainbow. Bleeding Edge isn’t loathsome or bleeding heart, just a lot of wasted energy, entropic. Perhaps Pynchon came to New York to retire, and the novel as a form is for him now just a septuagenarian’s hobby--not work, not art work.

Thomas Pynchon

Against the Day

Penguin, 2006

(Book Forum)

To reward the meta-generation faithful and, I suspect, to test reviewers’ persistence, Thomas Pynchon has inserted on page 853 of his new novel a lightly coded, only slightly tongue-in-cheek abstract of Against the Day, a passage that pleads to be quoted:

The Book of the Masked . . . [was] filled with encrypted field-notes and occult scientific passages of a dangerousness one could at least appreciate, though more perhaps for what it promised than for what it presented in such impenetrable code, its sketch of a mindscape whose layers emerged one on another as from a mist, a distant country of painful complexity, an all but unmappable flow of letters and numbers that passed into and out of the guise of the other, not to mention images, from faint and spidery sketches to a full spectrum of inks and pastels . . . visions of the unsuspected, breaches in the Creation where something else had had a chance to be luminously glimpsed. Ways in which God chose to hide within the light of day, not a full list, for the list was probably endless, but chance encounters with details of God’s unseen world.

More concretely, Against the Day is a family saga, set between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the early 1920s, that traces the adventures of American miner Webb Traverse’s four children, Frank, Lake, Reef, and Kit, in the still-wild West, in revolutionary Mexico, in London, Göttingen, and the Balkans, in “Inner Asia” and outer Siberia. Early on, union activist Webb is murdered in Colorado by the hired guns of plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe. Mine engineer Frank goes after the two killers, one of whom marries Frank’s sister, Lake. Cardsharp Reef pursues Vibe, who attempts to co-opt brother Kit by financing his mathematical education at Yale and in Germany. With its initial Western setting, hard-bitten, colloquial characters, labor sympathies, and violence, Against the Day could have been an old-fashioned naturalistic novel by Norris or Dreiser, or maybe a more newfangled proletarian fiction by Dos Passos or Steinbeck, a Book of the Masked that discloses the human faces behind the roles that American capitalism foists on wage slaves.

Except Against the Day is a Pynchon Production, which means the Traverse clan meets all manner of scientists, anarchists, erotic explorers, and spiritual crackpots--and then, coincidentally, keeps running into them on three continents. At Yale, Kit studies with the physicist Willard Gibbs, whose work is preparing the way for twentieth-century thermodynamics. In Göttingen, Kit meets the beautiful Yashmeen Halfcourt, a disciple of the mathematician Georg Riemann, another precursor of Einstein.

The more mundane Reef has a son with a con woman named Estrella, then abandons them for Europe, where he blunders into Balkan politics, the “distant country of painful complexity.” Reef falls in with Yashmeen and Cyprian Lightwood, a young British spy. They wander around in or are chased out of Venice, various parts of Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, and what used to be Yugoslavia, never staying in one place long enough to understand much about it. In the language of geometry, which is pervasive in the novel, Pynchon is plotting the prewar “unmappable”--radical new science and tangled old politics--on two overlapping planes, “layers [that] emerged one on another.”

Or three planes, if one considers the quirky permutations of sexual relations among the Traverses and the characters they meet. The bisexual Yashmeen, the homosexual Cyprian, and Reef form a decadent triangle similar to that depicted in Pynchon’s first novel, V. Lake engages in a threesome with the two men who killed her father. When Reef brings Yashmeen to the US after the war, they find that Frank and Reef’s Estrella are now a couple. Soon after meeting, Yashmeen and Estrella have sex. No accident, of course, that all this takes place just around the time Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams.

Then there is the fourth dimension, which some characters identify as time, but which others associate with the spiritual, the “invisible,” or “God’s unseen world.” God said, “Let there be light”; Against the Day collects ways our ancestors attempted to track light back to its source and replaced religion with alternative lights. There is the light of relativity, the odd light of electromagnetic storms, the light of the mysterious Tunguska event of 1908, when a meteorite struck Siberia or God announced a coming apocalypse. (The presumed source of Pynchon’s title is the verse in the Second Epistle of Peter, which states the heavens and earth are now “reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.”) For turn-of-the-century unbelievers, there is the dynamite flash, the diffracted light of Iceland spar, the reflected light of magicians’ mirrors, the “light writing” of photography and movies, the cities’ new electric lighting that makes the heavens invisible at night.

Of these four dimensions, the science is occasionally fascinating, the political plotting painfully coincidental, the sex generally gratuitous, and the spiritual possibly profound. But despite its partial achievements, the novel as a whole resembles the zeppelin that appears in its first pages, a giant bag of imaginative hot air, as the inflated language of the abstract implies. The Traverse family and social circumstances frequently are mere ballast that keeps the fiction from floating out into the ether of pure invention. Pynchon cheerfully admits the antigravity quality of his novel by way of the “Chums of Chance,” five youthful balloonists who go on Tom Swift–like exotic expeditions that are described in a series of “boys books,” the titles of which Pynchon supplies. The Chums appear in various locales, have counterfactual experiences (such as touring the desert in a sand submarine), and become somewhat more pessimistic about twentieth-century life as the novel proceeds. Scrupulously apolitical at the outset, by the end the Chums are giving aid to wartime refugees. Finally, though, they meet five female “Ætheronauts” and settle into banal middle-class life.

Too much like the Chums’ balloon, the novel is a vehicle of tourism, repetition, and entertainment. As always, Pynchon is a master purveyor of compressed atmospherics, the “spidery sketches” of the abstract: the minute, webbed details of physical setting, what people are eating, drinking, smoking, wearing, and hearing--and the feelings his characters project upon their surroundings. He has to do atmosphere well because his characters frantically change locations (they are the Traverses, after all) and his narrative rapidly shifts focus among the four siblings, their lovers, the acquaintances of the lovers, the sidekicks of the acquaintances, the crazed people met in bars, the voices of their dreams, and so on. Sympathy is expressed for members of the underclass wherever they are found--in Chicago slaughterhouses, Colorado mines, Italian tunnels, Mexican fields--but Pynchon rarely lingers long enough in a scene to dramatize the cause and effect the naturalists unmasked. American political life is thus rendered with a boys’-book Manichaeanism; Europe may be treated with more complexity, but characters who behave like distracted tourists never really inhabit their exotic destinations. In V., Pynchon mocked “Baedekerland,” but that’s what he gives us now.

Although Against the Day reuses only one Pynchon character name I recognize, O. I. C. Bodine, a seaman, it redeploys numerous types, situations, and references from earlier Pynchon novels. He has a character say, “Steal from the best,” and the author does. The prewar intrigue from Vienna to Venice is similar to the political machinations in V. Characters who distrust the London postal system communicate through gas connections, even more dangerous than The Tristero in The Crying of Lot 49. The Euro-wandering, mostly done by the clueless Traverses, especially the Yale-bought Kit, is like that of the Harvard-conditioned Slothrop of Gravity’s Rainbow. Against the Day also brings back the word entropy from all of Pynchon’s work. Maybe in its recycling, this new novel is supposed to be literary “negentropy,” but the reuse is too cutely self-chummy, a Pynchon Revue that treats readers who don’t recognize the old songs and dances like chumps.

At the end of the novel, “Psychical Detective” Lew Basnight complains about the movies turning “wild ancient days into harmless packages of flickering entertainment.” The abstract refers to “dangerousness,” but the characters’ occasional, rather cheap foretellings of trench warfare and poison gas cause few shivers, particularly since the war itself is passed over in a few pages. Perhaps an episode of haunting explains why this tale seems safe: The Chums find themselves visited by “Trespassers,” spirits from the Chums’ future, our present, beings “so fallen, so corrupted,” one of the Chums says, “that we--even we--seem to them pure as lambs.” The spokesman for the Trespassers is a Mr. Ace, who sounds suspiciously like the Mr. Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow. He tells the Chums that those who “came to understand the simple thermodynamic truth that Earth’s resources were limited . . . were denounced as heretics,” and that’s why the Trespassers have become “seekers of refuge” in the past. Instead of time-traveling into our dangerous future, as Cormac McCarthy has done in The Road, heretic Pynchon has trespassed back a hundred years to an era he has rendered harmless by his mode of representation.

Perhaps I should have said this earlier: Gravity’s Rainbow is the most important novel I’ve ever read. I’ve taught nearly all of Pynchon’s novels to unwilling undergrads and grads. And I once wrote, “Nothing succeeds like excess.” That is to say, I’m not James Wood, waiting to gouge anything by Pynchon (or DeLillo or just about any postmodern writer). But Against the Day lacks the ferocity and fear of Gravity’s Rainbow, the long-developed characters and the comedy of Mason and Dixon. The only readers (besides responsible reviewers) I can imagine finishing Against the Day are the Pynchonanists, the fetishizing collectors of P-trivia. I hope I’m wrong. I hope some future scholar will read the novel twenty times and either illustrate how it recapitulates the whole history of narrative or demonstrate how every piece fits together into a fourfold design that will replace four-base genetics as a model of all life. As the author himself says in his abstract, “visions of the unsuspected.”

Gravity’s Rainbow at 50

(Open Letters Review)

“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”

Those are the first two lines of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow released fifty years ago last month.. Although “too late” (for many humans) is a refrain in the novel, I believe it’s never too late to urge people to read what I think is the most important American novel published in, yes, the last fifty years.

The screaming is the sound of rockets raining down on London in World War II. Nothing to compare that sudden death from the air to then, but now we can see daily photographs of the death and destruction rocketing down on Ukraine. Palestinians occasionally launch rockets into Israel, but Ukraine seems to be the first extended rocket and drone war, asymmetrical until recently when Ukraine began sending armed drones into Russia. We don’t need Gravity’s Rainbow to feel the horror of death without warning, but on this anniversary of its publication we would do well to read or read again a novel that predicted and continues to illuminate fundamental forces of our own time.

Writing about 1945 in the late 60s and early 70s, Pynchon was using the then recent past to comment on what he called, in German, the “Raketen-Stadt,” the rocket city or state that the United States had become—with the assistance of German engineers who launched the V-2s--in response to Russian success with rocketry that could deliver nuclear payloads across vast spaces. In the novel, Hiroshima is alluded to only on a found sheet of paper, but Pynchon imagines a potential future apocalypse when the novel ends with a rocket bearing down on a movie house in Los Angeles. For the patrons, it is too late.

Perhaps MAD—Mutual Assured Destruction—has made nuclear holocaust unlikely, but rocket terror persists in Ukraine where fear of guided and random missiles has displaced millions from their homes and country. Pynchon wrote about that, too. The beginning of Gravity’s Rainbow describes in affecting detail the nighttime evacuation of children from London. The rest of the novel follows displaced other Europeans, even Americans, Africans, and Russians who wander through what Pynchon calls the borderless “Zone” beneath the rockets’ paths. The characters are like the London children, Hansels and Gretels out too late in the night without their happy ending.

Gravity’s Rainbow is a massive novel dense with historical, economic, political, social, and religious analyses of how rocket states came to be, but Pynchon’s most profound perspectives are anthropological and ecological. The “World just before men,” Pynchon writes, was “Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive, it was such a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth’s body that some spoiler had to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God’s spoilers. Us. Counter-revolutionaries. It is our mission to promote death. The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures.”

Primitive technology was invented to promote life, extend life. But, for Pynchon, the rise of technology—like the thrust of the rocket escaping gravity—ultimately led in the twentieth century to new and efficient and uncanny ways to “promote death.” In Gravity’s Rainbow, rockets are not just advanced weapons but metaphors for all corporate industrialism that mines the coal and pumps the oil to build towers and fuel machines that seem to promise rising above the “living critter” planet Earth to achieve a high-tech transcendence (which some of our grandiose billionaires are proposing now with off-planet life).

The climactic event and symbolic summary of the novel is the launch of a German rocket with a young man inside, an act of murder and suicide. Humans have been committing murder for millennia. It’s the suicide that our industries have now enabled on a planetary scale that is new. For Pynchon, World War II was just an accelerated incident in humans’ long-running global war on nature. If this seems a truism to all but Republican lawmakers now, remember please that Pynchon was writing his radical environmental novel five decades ago. It is indeed getting late here on this planet heated by that coal and oil.

And rockets are still screaming across the sky from east to west. Ironically and tragically, Putin is using the Nazis’ rocket power to, he has said, “de-Nazify” the government of Ukraine that is led by a Jew. Like the Nazi characters in Gravity’s Rainbow, Putin uses phallic rockets to demonstrate Russian macho mastery and to reclaim territory for the sacred Russian empire that was dissolved when the Soviet Union fell. Pynchon anticipated rocket mysticism, showing through his characters’ erotic and spiritual obsessions that rockets are more than weapons. They are symbols of godlike patriarchal power like the Biblical plagues sent raining down from heaven.

Lest I scare you away with the profound gravity of Gravity’s Rainbow, know please that it is also an encyclopedia or rainbow of humor, what scholars call “the carnivalesque.” Pynchon includes a Huck Finn-like Innocent Abroad as protagonist, a large gallery of fools and frauds, slapstick chase scenes, movie parodies, Catch-22 absurdities and Monty Python stupidities, as well as bawdy songs, Proverbs for Paranoids, and word play worthy of Nabokov, with whom Pynchon studied. I should also mention goofy conspiracies and plenty of sex scenes to please just about every taste (and tastelessness). But be not fooled: the hurdy-gurdy carnival is present to conduct you into the big tent, where gravity-defying high-wire acts of human rocketry occur.

In the space I have I cannot begin to describe Pynchon’s plot in which several main characters from different nations quest for the mysterious rocket 00000, a kind of Grail in the rocket state. As in a medieval romance, the characters move through settings both super-realistic and magical and ultimately hallucinatory. Some get close to the 00000, but they are too late. It has been launched.

I also can’t summarize or even list all of the essays and books that have been written about Gravity’s Rainbow, ways of supporting my assertive thesis about its importance, both philosophical and literary. But I will insist against some critics that Pynchon doesn’t belong only to the professors (like I was) and that the novel, sometimes called heartless, is deeply empathetic to the victims of rocket states, those who Pynchon called the “preterite,” the unchosen.

I can mention forerunners such as Moby-Dick and William Gaddis’s The Recognitions and coeval admirers such as the systems-influenced novelists Joseph McElroy and Don DeLillo, whose Underworld is the closest in orientation and achievement to Pynchon’s novel. For literary influence, I can report that Gravity’s Rainbow is referred to within four of the most ambitious American novels of recent decades: Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, William Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. If you have read and appreciated one or more of these science-influenced mega novels, consider that it may be time to go back to the writer Powers called “Pop Pynchon” and Wallace called the “patriarch.”

If you are somehow unacquainted with any of Pynchon’s work, avoid the sloppy Inherent Vice and begin with the short satiric novel The Crying of Lot 49 or the long humorous ramble of Mason and Dixon. But the one that drills deepest and rises highest, the one that comes closest (Ukraine) and spreads furthest (the whole planet), the one that delves furthest into past and future, the one that could alter your brainscape (if it’s like mine) is Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s not too late. In the final words of the novel, “Now everybody--”