review 'o P doc

[pynchonoid]

<http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,942894,00.html>

Diary 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Missing person 

Saturday April 26, 2003
The Guardian 

· At the launch of Thomas Pynchon's latest novel,
Mason & Dixon (1997), his publisher staged an unlikely
Thomas Pynchon look-alike contest in New York.
Unlikely because nobody knows what the reclusive
novelist looks like (he was last photographed about 40
years ago). Was he the mysterious, white-suited man
who watched the contest from the back of the room and
spoke in an unconvincing French accent? Or is he the
ageing hipster caught on camera by a CNN reporter?
These questions and more are mulled over by an
assortment of Pynchon's fans, critics and
acquaintances in Thomas Pynchon - a Journey into the
Mind of [P.], a German documentary that opens at the
ICA in London on Friday.

Directed by Fosco and Donatello Dubini, it's a
thoughtful and disturbing portrait of America at its
most paranoid: the assassination of JFK (did Pynchon
meet Lee Harvey Oswald on a train and was Oswald part
of a government mind-control experiment?), Timothy
"turn-on, tune-in, drop-out" Leary (was he a CIA
stooge?), Operation Paperclip (when the US military
rounded up Nazi scientists and brought them to
America), the Vietnam war, the Cuban missile crisis,
and so on. There is even some unpleasant footage of a
ginger cat on LSD.

Pynchon's counter-culture credentials are at odds with
his past. He served in the US Navy and worked at
Boeing during the era of the Minuteman
intercontinental ballistic missile programme. Is
Gravity's Rainbow (1973) a confession, an attempt to
expiate some past sin? What exactly are his reasons
for staying out of the public eye? Is he just
exceptionally shy or does he have something to hide?
(When Gravity's Rainbow won the National Book Award,
his publisher sent an actor to accept the prize.)

In the course of the documentary (which has an
excellent soundtrack by The Residents) we discover
that Thomas Ruggles Pynchon (born May 8, 1937) is 6'2"
tall, has blue or maybe green eyes and unusually pale
skin that never tans; he occasionally goes shopping in
drag to evade detection and wrote Gravity's Rainbow
late at night, in long hand. At one point an
ex-girlfriend even hunts down his old flat on
Manhattan Beach, California. "Do you realise how
important this is?" she says as they squeeze inside
the cramped interior. "This is a historical moment."IP


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