Suggestions (Gale Online 1)

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This is available online with a New York Public Library card, so I
thought I'd post it, in parts.

Source: Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.

    Perhaps the most significant biographical fact about Thomas Pynchon
is his anonymity. Pynchon is so reticent about himself and so wary of
publicity that it is unclear even what he looks like: the most recent
published photographs of him come from his high school annual. For a
time it was commonplace to compare him with J. D. Salinger, another
famous American novelist who evades public scrutiny, but the comparison
proved inadequate: Salinger, at least, can be located, while Pynchon
keeps even his whereabouts a secret from everyone but his closest and
most loyal friends. A former Cornell classmate, Jules Siegel, hinted in
a 1977 Playboy article that this reclusiveness stems from the kind of
paranoia that characteristically informs Pynchon's fiction (and has been
termed "Pynchonesque"), but other evidence suggests that in his personal
life this daring and iconoclastic writer is merely intensely private and
intensely shy.
    It remains true, however, that Pynchon's work strikes many readers
as intensely difficult. This difficulty needs emphasizing inasmuch as it
is not an extrinsic characteristic-- one that a more careful author
could have avoided, or one that the reader can circumvent with a good
plot summary. Indeed, much of the difficulty arises precisely because
Pynchon's plots resist summarization, just as his narrators resist
reduction to a single identifiable voice and his range of reference
seems virtually endless. The radical disruptions sometimes amounting to
outright denials of narrative sequence in Gravity's Rainbow led the
Pulitzer Prize editorial board to refuse to grant the fiction award to
Pynchon for that novel, although the nominating jurors--writers
Elizabeth Hardwick, Benjamin De Mott, and Alfred Kazin--who recommended
the award had been unanimous in their choice. While the controversy was
raging, however, Edward Mendelson was writing in the Yale Review,
"Pynchon is, quite simply, the best living novelist in English," and was
ranking Gravity's Rainbow with James Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Mann's
The Magic Mountain as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth
century. It is clear that difficulty may provoke reflection as well as
reaction. Pynchon still has vocal detractors, but as Khachig Tololyan
writes in the New Orleans Review, "It is no longer possible to be
seriously interested in contemporary American literature and yet to
claim jauntily that one `just can't get through' Thomas Pynchon's books."
    In fact, the structural difficulty central to these books early
became a theme, so that to a degree all Pynchon's novels are about
difficulties in reading--and about "reading" as a metaphor for all the
ways in which people try to make sense of the world in which they find
themselves. In Pynchon's work, the act of reading parallels the act of
deciphering a world problematically constructed of codes. Treating The
Crying of Lot 49, Frank Kermode observes in an essay collected in
Seymour Chatman's Approaches to Poetics, "What Oedipa is doing is very
like reading a book," and the statement applies as well to Herbert
Stencil in V. and to any number of questing heroes in Gravity's Rainbow.
The notion of "reading" experience as a way of discerning meanings
occurs as early as the 1960 short story "Entropy," in which, as Joseph
Tabbi observes in a Pynchon Notes article, the undergraduate Pynchon is
already working to create an imaginative order in art that would engage
randomness and indeterminacy in modern life and in the changing physical
world." In V., published in 1963, apparent randomness and indeterminacy
are qualities of the fictional universe that confronts the reader as
well as the characters, and the central action of the quest is
disconcertingly similar to the reader's own act of interpretation.
    In a wider sense, "reading" is the process by which people make a
story out of experience and call it history. As Tony Tanner remarks in
his article "V. and V-2," collected in Edward Mendelson's Pynchon: A
Collection of Critical Essays, V. is very much aligned with the short
story "Entropy" in its concern for the possible running-down of history,
for a gradual decline, which the narrator terms decadence. But while
Pynchon's work "is certainly about a world succumbing to entropy, it is
also about the subtler human phenomena the need to see patterns which
may easily turn into the tendency to suspect plots." Tanner's synopsis
plays on a double meaning inherent in the word "plot." In one sense a
plot is a story line, the bare outline of "what happens" in a work of
fiction. In another sense, however, a plot is a conspiracy, an
underlying story of secret manipulation that reveals "what really
happened." Insofar as history is "plotted" it may entail both of these
meanings: if it tells a story it may do so precisely because someone has
created that story, arranged things to produce certain results. A
conspirator and an author clearly have something in common if the pun is
taken seriously. Perhaps history itself has authors. Perhaps crucial
events take place because somebody planned things that way.
    (continued)

Source: Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.