authors influenced by Pynchon

[Ya Sam]

By John Dolan

Diss Nietzsche and Die

The Clay Machine-Gun
by Victor Pelevin
translated by Andrew Bromfield
London: Faber & Faber
1999


Victor Pelevin is not so much a writer as a symptom. His popularity--Clay 
Machine-Gun has already sold 200,000 copies--cannot be explained as the 
result of his talent, for he has no great gifts. His success has to do 
rather with the literary equivalent about real estate: Location, location, 
location. What Pelevin has done, in a very far-seeing way, is to stake out 
precisely the territory in which world literature is growing fastest. That 
territory can be defined, usefully though roughly, as science fiction with 
enough high-culture flourish to make it respectable reading for English 
majors.

This territory is imagined by its English-language audience as stretching 
from Pynchon to Philip K. Dick to Gibson. Its components are: "soft" 
(non-science-oriented) science fiction; hardboiled noir detective prose; 
animistic theology; computer imaging; and drugs. Lots of drugs. Pelevin has 
certainly learned, somewhere or other, to mimic the sound that speed gave 
the Beats, and his characters in Clay Machine-Gun use massive amounts of 
cocaine, mushrooms, opiates and whatever else they can find. This is 
typical, as is his association of drug use with the experience of an 
immanent god--a feature of American science fiction, and particularly the SF 
produced on the west coast of the US during the sixties and seventies. Dune, 
of course, is the best-known example, with "the spice" constituting at once 
a mystical revelation, a necessary part of civilized life, and a catalyst 
for self-improvement via extended life and "expanded consciousness"--a 
familiar program for anyone who went to an American high school.

The key to this emergent genre is that it is as indiscriminate and 
all-engulfing as an amoeba. It continually agglomerates to itself any 
culturally-exciting field. It is divided in many ways, but the most 
important for Pelevin is the matter of prose style.

The best way to illustrate this is to ask the reader this question: Whom do 
you prefer, Thomas Pynchon or Philip K. Dick? The answer determines a lot 
about one's placement within this huge genre. Pynchon is very much a 
"literary" writer, working very carefully over his writing at sentence 
level, willing to let his plot sit still for a while as he improvises on a 
theme. Dick is the opposite: the story and the dialogue alone interest him, 
and he's willing to let the prose simply do the job. Sometimes, indeed, he 
writes so roughly that the literary reader is offended. I remember loaning 
Mark Ames a PKD book and having him bring it back the next day, shaking his 
head and pointing to this sentence on page one of the novel: "'Hi!" she said 
friendlily." It was that "friendlily" that Mark couldn't handle.

I side with PKD over Pynchon. In fact, I consider Dick to be the one genius, 
the one absolute genius in US literature since 1945. I find Pynchon to be 
kind of an Uncle Tom, as a representative of science fiction, making 
pointless and protracted Faulknerian noises in his prose to suck up to a 
New-Yorker-sensibility. This is in part why I don't much like Pelevin's 
versions of science fiction. He does it Pynchon's way, with much less 
narrative invention and much more prose stylin' than I would like.

http://www.exile.ru/books/review66.html

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