The Pynchon Principle

Recently, in between bouts of class-assigned reading, I made time for Thomas Pynchon's 1990 work Vineland, finishing it last week while enjoying my oh-so-brief Fall Break (I may have stated in my last post that said break was a week-long affair. That was wishful thinking). I've been big on Pynchon for years, and I always meant to get around to Vineland (indeed, this was probably the third time I'd attempted to read it, and on the second time I purchased a copy). Indeed, it and Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby were the last two books I purchased from the now-defunct McClure's Bookshop in downtown Clemson.

Vineland feels to me like a dry run for Inherent Vice (2009, and soon to be a major motion picture). It's good on its own merits (if not great), but it feels like something that Pynchon returned to for Vice with much greater returns on the reader's investment. Then again, when I read Vice last year, I was having a crappy summer, and I felt like the book was a godsend to what ailed me. So I might have a profoundly deeper attachment to it than I ever will to Vineland. Inherent Vice is Pynchon's Rubber Soul, to use the Beatles as an analogy; in turn, Vineland is Help!: The Soundtrack to the Major Motion Picture.

Both books deal with the ramifications of the Sixties counterculture, and what was wrought by the rising tide of conservatism in the wake of such acts as burning draft cards, protesting the Vietnam War, and Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. Funny how relevant such thoughts seem, what with the recent election results (if you're a Democrat like me, this past Tuesday was like having the "Darth Vader theme" on repeat in your mental iPod as you watched the election results). I've long considered Richard Nixon our most fascinating president, and not in a good way (he's the mirror image of "good old" Ronald Reagan, whose chief personality trait was Not Being Nixon). Nixon managed to win the presidency (twice!) by appealing to our baser instincts, our more unrestrained fears; Pynchon quite naturally (as someone whose speciality is humor-tinged paranoia) returns to the well of the Nixon years for material, at least in these two books (Bleeding Edge marks his entrance into the Bush Era, positioning 9/11 as the result perhaps of a videogame-esque conspiracy). Nixon is a tired punchline at this point for us liberals, as Watergate pretty much did him in (though it's chilling to consider that the whole scandal broke in June of 1972, and Nixon was still re-elected by an overwhelming majority).

But Pynchon is, in many ways, the child of the counterculture. He was born in 1937, so he's a little old for the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the Sixties, but he managed to make it his own with The Crying of Lot 49. In 1973, he brought to the world Gravity's Rainbow, a book nominally about the end of the Second World War which, quite honestly, I find hard to categorize. It's just so batshit insane that reading it (and liking it) made me feel like I was joining an exclusive club. I didn't get all of it, but it felt like that was okay; the point was just to go on the ride.

I think that's what brings me back to Pynchon every few years, makes me seek out one of his books that I haven't read yet (a list which is starting to shrink in favor of the ones I have). I don't honestly recall when I first realized that Pynchon was around, and a writer I might want to read. I know that I picked up V. once from the library when I was a teenager, but I didn't get too far into it (I'd be on the flip side of thirty before I finally got around to it). Mason & Dixon came out when I was in high school, and I remember checking it out a few times (but only getting so far before feeling like the sheer length of the book stood against me in my efforts to read it); I have a hard-to-find-apparently paperback copy that I bought recently at a used book sale, I might save that for December. Gravity's Rainbow I remember buying at the old Clemson Newstand back in the day, The Crying of Lot 49 was probably a thrift-store buy that I got but didn't read until it came up on the reading list for my 20th Century Lit survey course (always nice when it works out like that, you don't have to buy a copy because you already had it), and I tackled Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge last year or so. With Vineland under my belt (and M&D purchased, if not read), that leaves Against the Day and Slow Learner (a collection of his short, early fiction).

The question "who is your favorite author?" came up in my Fiction Workshop class recently, and I opined that, right now anyway, it's Lethem. And it is, for sure. But favorite writers are in some ways like favorite musicians or actors; the list is always changing, depending on the older you get (and perhaps the more sophisticated your tastes are, or just a matter of losing sight of whatever it was that made you like that author in the first place). I've read a lot more authors over the past ten years than I'd have thought I would, in terms of those whose existence was a mystery to me until I began to look beyond the usual favorites. I think it's a process of maturation to cast away some of your favorites in anything because they either don't speak to you anymore or you've just outgrown them (and realize how ridiculous you look in Hammer pants...not that I ever wore Hammer pants, that's just an example). Thomas Pynchon is an author to whom I return after years at a time, so it might be a while before I tackle Mason & Dixon or Against the Day (both of which are heavyweights, literally). But I'll tackle them, by goodness. Pynchon looks at paranoia with a demented sense of humor, and I think we could all use something like that right about now. I'm just thrilled/nervous about the Inherent Vice film, I can't wait to see it and I'm terrified that it's gonna suck. But such is the bargain we strike with anything we care about artistically.