FT review

Sat Dec 2 15:58:12 CST 2006

I'm so got-damn tired of all of these ATD features pushing the  
"recluse" angle. I refuse to be interviewed or photographed, don't  
divulge my place of residence, and never make public appearances,  
either. That doesn't make me a recluse. It means I'm normal.
I can't tell if all of these critics are hacks, blind sheep, or both.  
Sheesh.

> 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 The Financial Times Limited 2006
>
>
>

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