Pynchon & Rushdie

[BenProfane at aol.com]

I have two newspaper clippings of interest. The first is the sought after
book review in the NYT; the second is an interview w/ Rushdie from the
Washington Post.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------
                  Copyright 1990 The New York Times Company   
                               The New York Times

                 January 14, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 7; Page 1, Column 1; Book Review Desk

LENGTH: 2161 words

HEADLINE: Still Crazy After All These Years

BYLINE: By SALMAN RUSHDIE; Salman Rushdie, the author of ''The Satanic
Verses''
and other novels, is completing a new work of fiction.

BODY:
   
VINELAND 
By Thomas Pynchon. 
385 pp. Boston: 
Little, Brown & Company. $19.95.

   So, he's back, and the question that occurs to you on finishing
''Vineland''
is, what took him so long? Because this doesn't feel like a book written to
break a block; it isn't congested or stop-start or stiff; matter of fact,
it's
free-flowing and light and funny and maybe the most readily accessible piece
of
writing the old Invisible Man ever came up with. It is also not the book we
thought Thomas Pynchon was writing.

   We heard he was doing something about Lewis and Clark? Mason and Dixon? A
Japanese science-fiction novel? And one spring in London a magazine announced
the publication of a 900-page Pynchon megabook about the American Civil War,
published in true Pynchonian style by a small press nobody ever heard of, and
I
was halfway to the door before I remembered what date it was, April 1, ho ho
ho.
What happened to those spectral books? Did they never exist? Are we about to
get
a great rush of Pynchon novels? The answer is blowin' in the wind.  

   Because one thing that has not changed about Mr. P. is his love of
mystification. The secrecy surrounding the publication of this book - his
first
novel since ''Gravity's Rainbow'' in 1973 - has been, let's face it,
ridiculous.
I mean, rilly. So he wants a private life and no photographs and nobody to
know
his home address. I can dig it, I can relate to that (but, like, he should
try
it when it's compulsory instead of a free-choice option). But for his
publisher
to withhold reviewers' copies and give critics maybe a week to deal with what
took him almost two decades, now that's truly weird, bad craziness, give it
up.

   Other things, too, have remained constant in the Pynchonian universe,
where
these are days of miracle and wonder, like ''Doonesbury'' written by Duke
instead of Garry Trudeau, and the paranoia runs high because behind the heavy
scenes and bad trips and Karmic Adjustments move the shadowy invisible
forces,
the true Masters of the Universe, ''the unrelenting forces that leaned ever
after . . . into Time's wind, impassive in pursuit, usually gaining, the
faceless predators . . . [who] had simply persisted, stone-humorless, beyond
cause and effect, rejecting all attempts to bargain or accommodate, following
through pools of night where nothing else moved wrongs forgotten by all but
the
direly possessed, continuing as a body to refuse to be bought off for any but
              
the full price, which they had never named.''

   That's what we're up against, folks, and what Mr. Pynchon used to set
against
it in the old days was entropy, seen as a slow, debauched, never-ending
party, a
perpetual coming-down, shapeless and meaningless and therefore unshaped and
uncontrolled: freedom is chaos, he told us, but so is destruction, and that's
the high wire, walk it if you can. And now here we are in ''Vineland,'' and
the
entropy's still flowing, but there's something new to report, some faint
possibility of redemption, some fleeting hints of happiness and grace. Thomas
Pynchon, like Paul Simon's girl in New York City, who calls herself the Human
Trampoline, is bouncing into Graceland.

   It's 1984 in Vineland County, in northern California. Dates really matter
in
this book. Even the movies come with dates attached: ''Return of the Jedi
(1983),'' ''Friday the 13th (1980)'' (''Everybody was Jason that year''),
''Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961),'' ''Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956).''
We're talking mass culture here, and mall culture, too, because this is a
1984
flowing with designer seltzer ''by Alaia and Blass and Yves,'' and the malls
have names like Noir Center (as in film noir) and the mall rats have names
like
Che. And, in this 1984 that Orwell could never have imagined, the skies
contain
marauders who can remove people from commercial airliners in midair, and a
research lab belonging to a ''shadowy world conglomerate'' named Chipco can
be
stomped into Totality, flattened beneath a gigantic and inexplicable animal
footprint, size 20,000 or thereabouts. This 1984 is also Ronald Reagan's
re-election year, and that, for all the leftover hippies and 60's activists
and
survivors and casualties, could mean it's time for the ''last roundup.''

   Listen closely now: Zoyd Wheeler, father of beautiful teen-age Prairie,
whose
mother, Frenesi Gates, went off with the arch-baddie Brock Vond, Federal
prosecutor and psychopath, collects mental disability checks from the state
by
jumping through plate-glass windows once a year. The novel begins with such a
jump, and thereafter fragments into myriad different narrative shards (but,
at
the end, the pieces all leap off the floor and fit miraculously together, as
if
a film were being run backward). Prairie is obsessed with her vanished
mother,
and so is everyone else in the novel: so is Zoyd, so is Brock Vond, who was
her
lover and who turned her from a radical film maker, the child of a
blacklisted
and Wobbly family, into an F.B.I. sting specialist, and turned her toward her
own dark side. Frenesi, meanwhile, is out of sight, having been axed by
Reaganomics from the slashed F.B.I. budget, so that at the center of this
novel
by the master of vanishing acts is a largely invisible woman, whom we learn
about through the eyes of others.

   Now then: Vond appears to be after Prairie, maybe to use her against
Frenesi,
so Zoyd, as he dives for cover, sends her into hiding as well. Prairie's
odyssey
takes her closer and closer to Frenesi, by way of a band called Billy Barf
and
the Vomitones, whom she follows to a mob wedding where she meets her mother's
old friend, the Ninjette Darryl Louise (DL) Chastain, who was once obliged,
by
the mob boss Ralph Wayvone, to try to assassinate Brock Vond by using, during
the sexual act, the Ninja Death Touch, also known as the Vibrating Palm,
which
the victim never feels and which kills him a year later, while you're having
lunch with the police chief - except that Vond, skilled in eluding death
(''He's
the Roadrunner,'' says Wayvone, admiringly), manages to send along in his
place
the Japanese private eye Takeshi Fumimota, who gets the Vibrating Palm by
mistake; and, as if that weren't enough trouble for Takeshi, he's also being
chased by the same malign forces that arranged for the Chipco stomping, which
         he investigated.

   And anyhow, through DL and Takeshi, Prairie gets to find the doors to her
mother's past, on computer records and in film archives and in the memory of
Frenesi's old friends, and we reach the story's dark heart, namely the events
that took place in the 1960's at Trasero County's College of the Surf, which
renamed itself, after the fashion of those loon-panted days, the People's
Republic of Rock and Roll. And we hear, as Prairie hears it, how her mother
betrayed the leader of this little revolution, who rejoiced in the name of
Weed
Atman, and who now, after death, still roams the forests of northern
California
as a Thanatoid, a member of the undead, unable to find peace. And eventually
Prairie's search for Frenesi, and Brock's search for Prairie and Frenesi
(which
takes him, along with a huge strike force, to Vineland) come to a climax,
complete with helicopters and Thanatoids and family reunions and an old woman
and an old man who can remove your bones and leave the rest of you alive. You
get the picture.

   It either grabs you or it doesn't, I guess. It grabbed me. I laughed, many
times, out loud, often at Mr. Pynchon's absurdly brilliant way with names (a
manufacturer of microchip musical gimmickry is called Tokkata & Fuji, which
to
my mind is as funny as the German town in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' named Bad
Karma)
and at the little songs with which I'm happy to report he's still littering
his
texts, high points of this particular set being the Desi Arnaz-style croon,
''Es
posible,'' and Billy Barf's ''three-note blues'' called ''I'm a Cop,'' with
lyrics that are, unfortunately, unprintable here.

   There is enough in ''Vineland'' to obsess the true, mainlining Pynchomane
for
a goodly time. One could consider, for example, the significance of the
letter V
in Mr. Pynchon's oeuvre. His novel ''V.'' was actually V-shaped, two
narratives
zeroing in on a point, and ''Gravity's Rainbow'' was the flight path of a V-2
rocket, a deadly parabola that could also be described as an inverted V. And
here's the letter again - what does it mean? - with all the death imagery in
this novel, with its use of old Amerindian death myths. Are we being told
that
America in 1984 is in fact the land of the dead, V-land, the universe beyond
the
zero? One could do a number of further riffs on the more allegorical of the
names: Weed - marijuana, and Atman - soul; and, hey, Frenesi turns out to be
an
anagram of ''free'' and ''sin,'' the two sides of her nature, light and dark,
just as the hero of ''Gravity's Rainbow,'' Tyrone Slothrop, could be made to
reveal his essence anagrammatically, turning into ''sloth or entropy.'' Sure,
it's still working, that ole anagrammar.

   But what is perhaps most interesting, finally, about Mr. Pynchon's new
novel
is what is different about it. What is interesting is the willingness with
which
he addresses, directly, the political development of the United States, and
the
slow (but not total) steamrollering of a radical tradition many generations
and
decades older than flower power. There is a marvelously telling moment when
Brock Vond's brainchild, his school for subversion in which lefties are
re-educated and turned into tools of the state, is closed down because in
Reagan's America the young think like that to begin with, they don't need
re-education.

   What is interesting is to have before us, at the end of the Greed Decade,
that rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been
doing
to itself, to its children, all these many years. And as Thomas Pynchon turns
his attention to the nightmares of the present rather than the past, his
touch

becomes lighter, funnier, more deadly. And most interesting of all this is
that
aforementioned hint of redemption, because this time entropy is not the only
counterweight to power; community, it is suggested, might be another, and
individuality, and family. These are the values the Nixon-Reagan era stole
from
the 60's and warped, aiming them back at America as weapons of control. They
are
values that ''Vineland'' seeks to recapture, by remembering what they meant
before the dirt got thrown all over them, by recalling the beauty of Frenesi
Gates before she turned.

   Thomas Pynchon is no sentimentalist, however, and the balance between
light
and dark is expertly held throughout this novel, so that we remain uncertain
until the final pages as to which will prevail, hippie heaven or Federal
nemesis. And we are left, at the last, with an image of such shockingly apt
moral ambiguity that it would be quite wrong to reveal it here.

   Vineland, Mr. Pynchon's mythical piece of northern California, is, of
course,
also ''Vinland,'' the country discovered by the Viking Leif Ericsson long
before
Columbus. It is ''Vineland the Good''; that is to say, this crazed patch of
California stands for America itself. And it is here, to Vineland, that one
of
America's great writers has, after long wanderings down his uncharted roads,
come triumphantly home. 
 
INCHES FROM THE EDGE

    Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge represents a transition, in the
metaphysics
of the region, there to be felt even by travelers unwary as Zoyd. When the
busful of northbound hippies first caught sight of it, just at sundown as the
fog was pouring in, the towers and cables ascending into pale gold
otherworldly
billows, you heard a lot of ''Wow,'' and ''Beautiful,'' though Zoyd only
found
it beautiful the way a firearm is, because of the bad dream unreleased inside
it, in this case the brute simplicity of height, the finality of what swept
below relentlessly out to sea. They rose into the strange gold smothering,
visibility down to half a car length. . . .

   Trees. Zoyd must have dozed off. He woke to rain coming down in sheets,
the
smell of redwood trees in the rain through the open bus windows, tunnels of
unbelievably tall straight red trees whose tops could not be seen pressing in
to
either side. . . . The storm lashed the night, dead trees on slow log trucks
reared up in the high-beams shaggy and glistening, the highway was
interrupted
by flooding creeks and minor slides that often obliged the bus to creep
around
inches from the edge of Totality. Aislemates struck up conversations, joints
appeared and were lit, guitars came down from overhead racks and harmonicas
out
of fringe bags, and soon there was a concert that went on all night, a
retrospective of the times they'd come through more or less as a generation,
the
singing of rock and roll, folk, Motown, fifties oldies, and at last, for
about
an hour just before the watery green sunrise, one guitar and one harmonica,
playing the blues. 
 
>From ''Vineland.''

GRAPHIC: Drawing (pg. 1); photo: Thomas Pynchon in the 1953 Oyster Bay High
School yearbook. (''Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary
Sources'') (pg. 36)
                                                                    



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------

                              The Washington Post
                                 Copyright 1990

                           Wednesday, February 7, 1990

                                      STYLE

                                 TONY KORNHEISER

                        The Secret Life of Salman RUSHDIE
                                 TONY KORNHEISER

      Last night, I'm sitting in the den watching "Family of Spies"
 (I'd always wondered what happened to the Walker Brothers after "The
 Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore"), minding my business, gazing at a bag
 of Hawaiian kettle potato chips, when the phone rings.

      It's Salman.

      Again.

      "Sally, Sally, Sally," I tell him. "You've got to stop calling
 me."

      I can't get rid of him. He's like the flu.

      "Have I told you the one about the cabdriver and Princess Anne?"
 he says.

      "Twice."

      "You're busy, aren't you?" he asks.

      "Yeah," I lie.

      "Well, let me speak to the kids."

      It's like this every night. He calls at all hours, from who
 knows where. He must have gotten his hands on a WATS line.

      The first time I was flattered. Of course, I didn't believe it
 was him.

      "How do I know you're Salman RUSHDIE?" I asked. I thought of
 the trick they use in World War II movies, where to see if the man is
 really a German spy they ask him, "Who plays first for the Brooklyn
 Dodgers?" But even RUSHDIE would know the Dodgers moved to L.A.

      "Prove you're RUSHDIE," I said.

     He began reciting: "It was during one of these playful sessions
 at the end of a working day, when the girls were alone with their
 eunuchs and their wine, that Baal heard the youngest talking about
 her client, the grocer, Musa ... "

      I realized he was reciting from "The Satanic Verses." I begged
 him to stop. "You must be Salman RUSHDIE. You know the words.
 Everybody else who bought the book left it on the coffee table
 unopened."

      I had to laugh when I saw this week's cover of Newsweek bragging
 about this EXCLUSIVE! interview with RUSHDIE. In London, the
 Independent claimed the same thing. Exclusive? The guy has been
 calling me for months. If I'm not home he'll leave stupid messages
 with my wife-puns on his name, like: "Tell Tony I've gone Salman
 fishing." Or: "Salman's spawning, will call later."

      The guy is totally around the bend, probably cabin fever after
 being locked away for so long.

      "I want to be invisible," he told me last week.

      "It's been done," I said. "Claude Rains."

      "Seriously, how could I be invisible in Washington?" he asked.

      "Buy a gray suit, and fold into all the other lawyers walking up
 and down K Street."

      "And how could I be invisible in L.A.?"

      "Have your agent book you on 'Sajak.' "

      I don't know how he came to call me in the first place. He
 swears it was by accident-that he was trying to reach that place in
 Bethesda that delivers pizza and videos, and he got me instead. And
 he's been calling ever since. Last month he called from his plastic
 surgeon's office to tell me he was almost done with the makeover, and
 soon he'd be ready to walk among us again.

      "I'm really excited," he said. "They gave me Abbie Hoffman's
 nose, Barbara Hershey's lips, Georgette Mosbacher's eyebrows and
 Mariel Hemingway's breasts."

      "What are you coming back as?" I asked.

      "The chorus in 'La Cage aux Folles.' "

      Just to update you on what Salman has been doing to keep busy,
 he watches a lot of cable TV. He loves Nickelodeon, never misses
 "The Patty Duke Show" (once he called and sang, "But Patty's only
 seen the sights a girl can see from Brooklyn Heights ... " in Hindi).
 He's faithful to "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd," although no one
 in the compound will watch with him anymore. He thinks ESPN's Dick
 Vitale is "a genius with the alacrity of a water sprite and the
 persistence of a jackhammer." And he listens to '60s rock. A few
 weeks ago, when he was writing a review of "Vineland" for the New
 York Times Book Review, he must have called 20 times to make certain
 he had the Paul Simon and Dylan lyrics right; he used a bunch in the
 review. "Sally," I said, "you don't want me, you want Waxie Maxie."

      The wildest thing he's told me was about a dinner he had
 recently with J.D. Salinger and Thomas PYNCHON. They'd flown to
 England to cheer him-incognito, of course, Salinger posing as a DEA
 agent, PYNCHON in a green satin ball gown. They ordered in, and sat
 for hours drinking and swapping stories.

      "My mother is Greta Garbo," PYNCHON claimed.

      "That's ridiculous," Salman said.

      "What's more," PYNCHON continued, "for the last seven years I've
 been Jane Fonda."

      "Stop it," Salman insisted.

      "I believe him," Salinger said. "I've written all of Anne
 Tyler's books."

      "I really admire her work," Salman said.

      "Thank you," said Salinger.

      "Did you like 'Vineland?' " PYNCHON asked Salinger.

      "Didn't understand a bloody word of it."

      "I didn't actually write it, you know, Capote did before he
 died."

      "Oh."

      Salman recounted every bizarre exchange and costume change. It
 turned out there were other guests at the dinner, including Marie
 Osmond, Michael Dukakis, Warren Beatty, Gabe Kaplan, John Anderson
 and Vicki Lawrence, a missing persons theme party apparently.


      I couldn't let Salman go without asking about PYNCHON.

      "What does he look like?"

      "You know that Oyster Bay High School yearbook picture they
 always run?" he said, then started laughing. "That isn't him."

      "What?"

      "No. He paid a kid to sit in at the photo session. Even back
 then he wanted to disappear."

      "So what does he look like?" I asked again.

      "Like Leonard Nimoy, only shorter."

      "And who's the stand-in kid in PYNCHON'S picture?"

      "Salinger."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------

Hope you all enjoyed.

                                /l
                              /  l/l
 l>--------------------------   l l
             /  \             \  l\l
             \_/               \l

Later, 
BenProfane (Chuck).