Inside the List

[Dave Monroe]

December 10, 2006
TBR
Inside the List
By DWIGHT GARNER

ALL-PYNCHON EDITION: Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the
Day” steps onto the fiction list at No. 13. It may
stay awhile — his last novel, “Mason & Dixon,” spent
eight weeks here in 1997.

Pynchon is famously camera shy. So Entertainment
Weekly recently asked a forensic artist to project,
based on Pynchon’s 1955 high school yearbook photo,
what the writer might look like today. (Image is at
left.) The result is fascinating but a little creepy.
Pynchon looks vaguely like a sex offender. Will this
sketch finally flush Pynchon out of his lair and in
front of, say, Marion Ettlinger’s ennobling camera? If
only to get this police-blotter image out of our
minds?

LOVE SICK: As this issue was going to press (and
speaking of sex offenders), Pynchon was reported to be
in the running for the Bad Sex in Fiction Prize,
handed out annually by The Literary Review in London.
Pynchon’s memorable lines, from “Against the Day,”
involve a sex scene between a man and a spaniel.
“Ruperta had trained her toy spaniel to provide
intimate ‘French’ caresses,” is about all that’s
printable here. Alas.

RARITIES: Signed copies of Pynchon’s novels are as
rare as Pynchon sightings. Want to buy one for the
Pynchon geek in your life? Expect to pay dearly. A
first edition of “The Crying of Lot 49” (1966) —
Pynchon is said to have signed it for a “fund-raiser
given by the church-related school attended by his
son” — can be had online for a mere $51,000. A first
edition of “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1972), signed to
support a public radio station in Southern California,
is selling for $45,000. And a first edition of “Mason
& Dixon,” which Pynchon signed for a “religious
charity,” is a relative bargain at $20,000.

HE GOT AROUND: Pynchon makes an offbeat cameo in Peter
Ames Carlin’s recent biography, “Catch a Wave: The
Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian
Wilson.” According to Carlin, Pynchon visited Wilson’s
Southern California house in the late 1960s with a
friend and “sat in stunned, unhappy silence while the
nervous, stoned pop star — who had dragged him into
his then-new Arabian tent to get high — kept kicking
over the oil lamp he was trying to light.” Wilson was
apparently afraid of Pynchon, and Pynchon was shy. An
onlooker observed: “Neither of them really said a word
all night long. It was one of the strangest scenes I’d
ever seen in my life.”

GARCIMARQUESIAN: Pynchon isn’t much known as a
literary critic, but in April 1988 he did review, in
the Book Review, Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “Love
in the Time of Cholera.” It was a rave. “The
Garcimarquesian voice,” Pynchon wrote, has “been
brought to a level where it can at once be classical
and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and
curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and when
called upon, take off and soar.” Pynchon’s first lines
are nearly always beautiful. He began his review this
way: “Love, as Mickey and Sylvia, in their 1956 hit
single, remind us, love is strange.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/books/review/10tbr.html


 
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