FT review

[Robert Mahnke]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/31b225b2-81a9-11db-864e-0000779e2340.html


Invisible man


By Ludovic Hunter-Tilney 

Published: December 2 2006 02:00 | Last updated: December 2 2006 02:00

Thomas Pynchon is the greatest disappearing act in American literature. He's
one of the country's most celebrated but least- known novelists, a writer of
vast, fiendish bestsellers who refuses to be interviewed or photographed,
won't divulge where he lives and never makes public appearances.

Other authors have disappeared from view - Harper Lee and J.D. Salinger, for
example - but none has matched Pynchon's tantalising brand of invisibility.
Facts about him are skeletal. We know that he was born in 1937 and grew up
in Long Island; that he studied at Cornell and served briefly in the US
Navy; that he worked for Boeing writing technical documents in the early
1960s while writing his first novel, V. Then nothing: just gossip, guesswork
and fugitive nuggets of information, such as that he's thought to be married
to his agent and living in New York.

His masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow (1973) is lauded as the postmodern
equivalent of Moby-Dick. A cult author, he produces novels at a snail's
pace: Against the Day, his new novel, is his first since Mason & Dixon in
1997. His books are apocalyptic, dark comic fantasies that depict the modern
world as unstable and chaotic, a place of multiple conspiracies and
secretive networks of power. It was a vision which chimed with a cold war
audience: he was acclaimed as an important writer from the publication of V.
Gravity's Rainbow won the National Book Award in 1974, though its
recommendation for a Pulitzer was vetoed by the award's advisory board on
the grounds that it was "unreadable" and "obscene".

Since the end of the cold war his fiction has developed a gentler edge.
Vineland (1990) was possibly his most autobiographical book, focusing on an
ageing hippy who bore, one assumed, a caricatured resemblance to Pynchon.
Mason & Dixon, about the 18th-century surveyors whose eponymous line
separates the northern and southern US, was uncharacteristically tender in
its portrait of its central characters. But Against the Day is a return to
the sprawling, picaresque setting of his earlier books.

Pynchon doesn't so much attract readers as fans. His refusal to
self-publicise lends him an aura of mystique which both provokes and is a
source of delight to his enthusiasts, a somewhat geeky, mostly male army of
obsessives who indulge in endless Pynchon- related speculation. One
outlandish theory in the 1990s identified him as the Unabomber. Another
wondered whether Salinger and Pynchon were the same person, doppelgangers
perhaps - doubling is a common trope in Pynchon's novels. ("Not bad. Keep
trying," Pynchon allegedly responded.)

His novels are exhaustingly, exhilaratingly anarchic. He's a writer of big
books - Against the Day is the biggest yet, at 1,100 pages. His plots
unravel in multiple different directions yet often peter out in mysterious
dead-ends (the ellipsis is a favourite Pynchonian tool). His characters tend
towards the two-dimensional, ciphers for an authorial intelligence whose
frame of reference is staggering and esoteric, like an unruly encyclopaedia.

His pages are dense with scientific and high cultural references. The Crying
of Lot 49 (1966), set in 1960s California, touches on Jacobean tragedy and
Habsburg postal systems. Gravity's Rainbow uses its second world war setting
to make fevered meditations about rocket science and the militarisation of
the western world.

Against the Day takes place at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, a
similar timeframe to V. The new novel's characters are exercised by obscure
theories concerning the transmission of light waves and baffling
mathematical conundrums such as the Riemann hypothesis. These archaic or
specialised intellectual concepts intersect with Pynchon's sci-fi interest
in imaginary worlds and parallel universes. Luckily, in the age of the
internet, Pynchon is easier to read: when stumped, one can go online to look
up "quaternion", say, and discover that it's a form of algebra invented in
the 19th century. Aha, illumination - sort of. After a few pages of this
sort of exegesis, Against the Day begins to seem like some huge gnostic text
for the Wikipedia age. Unsurprisingly, Pynchon's web presence, in the form
of mailing groups and websites devoted to his work, is rivalled by few
contemporary novelists.

His novels are deeply intellectual, but they're also funny and crude.
Pynchon's relish for Rabelaisian low comedy results in scattered episodes of
scatology and pornography; his characters rejoice in ludic names such as
Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin and Fleetwood Vibe. There are hopeless puns and
frequent outbursts of singing. The prose swirls between a zingy, hepcat
joshing, and intricate, intense sentences whose boundlessness resembles a
hallucinatory Henry James.

It's an extraordinary narrative voice, a product as much of T.S. Eliot as
Jack Kerouac - and an acquired taste which many choke on. Pynchon doesn't
lack detractors, who lambast him for literary ill- discipline and lament his
characters' lack of depth. The critic James Wood, for example, included
Pynchon in a measured but hostile critique of what he called "hysterical
realism": an attention- grabbing postmodern folly which mistakes manic
energy and stylistic tics for the true measure of life itself.

Complaints that Pynchon's characters aren't realistic or that he doesn't
write like Philip Roth miss the point. It's like forcing us to choose
between Ulysses and Sons and Lovers. Why not both? Pynchon is not the brash,
artificial writer his critics caricature him as. He is a postmodernist in
his love of parody, the tonal shifts between high and low, the presence of
real historical figures playing walk-on roles. But his writing conveys a
powerful urge for transcendence and a desire for meaning, "some expression
of a truth beyond the secular," as he writes in Against the Day. His novels
don't lack humanity, it's just that they address the subject in a different
fashion from the rounded character-portraits of realism.

In so far as his books are reducible to a single theme, they're about
systems of knowledge and power, which in Pynchon's universe are linked in
sinister and underhand ways. Secret societies and conspiracies are the
motors of his fitful plots; paranoia is a key motif. A shadowy, technocratic
"They" lurk unseen behind human progress and history, warping it to deadly
ends. Brought up in an era of Communist witch trials and cold war panic,
Pynchon comes across as a rejectionist: all systems of belief or politics,
he suggests, are inherently flawed.

Even mankind's crowning achievements, science and the expansion of the known
world, are shown, pessimistically, as agents of exploitation and corruption.
In Gravity's Rainbow, scientists build death-dealing V2 rockets as the
second world war approaches its climax: their knowledge is the war booty the
allied victors fight over after the fall of Berlin. Mason & Dixon registers
disillusionment with the mapping of America "into the Network of Points
already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing
all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities
that serve the ends of Governments."

In Pynchon's novels, knowledge equals power, though not in the emancipatory
way it was understood by Victorian reformers. Technology, perverted by
mankind's darkest impulses, becomes in his bleak view of history an
instrument of enslavement.

If there's such a thing as a Luddite novel, then Against the Day is it. Even
in an age of 900-page Harry Potter tomes, its gargantuan size and complexity
are fabulously impractical. You'll need to go on holiday to read it, and
then take another to recover. I reckon it's almost 500,000 words long; not a
patch admittedly on the million-plus words of Clarissa but close enough
behind War and Peace for Tolstoy to feel Pynchon's breath on his neck.

The action opens in 1893 at the Chicago World Fair, a celebration of
Columbus's discovery of America. It culminates 1,100 pages later in the
immediate aftermath of the first world war. Along the way we ricochet
between countless subplots and make lengthy excursions to Europe, the
Arctic, Asia and mysterious otherworldly points beyond. Hundreds of
characters throng the pages. In an author's note published before the novel
came out, Pynchon wished the reader "good luck". It's needed.

The taming of the American west is one of the themes of this book, mirrored
by Europe's impending collapse into war and modernity. The plot hinges on
the death of Webb Traverse, a miner who scrapes a living in Colorado but has
a secret double life as an anarchist bomber engaged in class warfare against
the mine-owners - a game of cat-and-mouse Pynchon depicts as a continuation
of the civil war. It is the latest chapter in America's "terrible" history
of "exile and migration, the white man moving in on the Indian, the eastern
corporations moving in on the white man, and their incursions with drills
and dynamite into the deep seams of the sacred mountains, the sacred land."

When hired thugs murder Traverse, his sons vow revenge, but they go about it
in such a dilatory fashion as to make Hamlet look like Arnold
Schwarzenegger. The three of them drift off separately to Mexico and Europe,
their paths occasionally converging and separating, usually in Venice
(Pynchon has a thing for the letter "v", which triggers in him arcane
geometrical riffs about lines converging on a single point). Other
characters emerge and disappear: Cyprian Latewood, a gay English spy, Lew
Basnight, a Chicago private eye who gets involved in an occult society
called T.W.I.T., an airship crew of plucky lads called the Chums of Chance
whose adventures are written up in popular boy's-own action books...

The range of references is typically dazzling and customarily abstruse. The
writing is replete with archaisms such as "absquatulate" and bears much
evidence of Pynchon's notorious enthusiasm for lists, veering unpredictably
between being breathtaking and arduous.

So far so typical. To read Pynchon is to slalom between incomprehension and
sunbursts of illumination unlike any encountered in other novels. Yet I read
this one with a degree of sadness. This is partly because its preoccupation
with the passage of time suggests that as Pynchon approaches his seventies
he is contemplating the final disappearance which awaits us all. But it's
also because Against the Day doesn't measure up to the majesty of his early
novels.

What's missing in the new book is the undercurrent of menace and foreboding
he brought to V, Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49 - the sense of
some hidden totalising organisation imposing its will on the world, reaching
its tentacles deep into everyday life. As if untethered from the cold war
era in which he wrote his best books, Pynchon now fails to bring even the
illusion of purpose to his otherwise hyperactive fictional world. The robber
baron who ordered Traverse's death rapidly fades from view; intimations of
impending apocalypse, ruined cities and the like, flash by without any clear
idea of how or why they will occur.

The only conflict in the novel that commands attention is between the
anarchists and the bosses. This is mainly phrased by unusually declamatory
characters who sound like they've wandered in from a Jack London novel -
such as a Finn who laments finding the same poverty in the land of the free
as his Tsarist homeland: "same wealth without conscience; same poor people
in misery".

Pynchon's antagonism to rapacious capitalism and his sympathy for the
underdog are genuine enough; the problem is that he fails to parlay it
convincingly into fiction. For once the novelist with the mind of an
encyclopedia seems without answers. In that context the novel's retreat into
sentimentality at the end - love and settled domestic life as a form of
transcendence - represents a retreat from the world. There remains much to
admire in the workings of his singularly brilliant literary consciousness,
but the suspicion remains that Pynchon's self-removal from public life now
extends to the page.

AGAINST THE DAY

by Thomas Pynchon

Jonathan Cape £20, 1,104 pages

FT bookshop price: £16

Copyright <http://www.ft.com/servicestools/help/copyright>  The Financial
Times Limited 2006

 

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