James Wood On Pynchon's Characters

[Rob Jackson]

Here is Wood's full letter to the LRB:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n21/letters

Compliments of Sorts

Thomas Jones, in his review of Inherent Vice (LRB, 10 September),  
asserts that those who haven’t liked the last Pynchon books ‘often  
complain’ that his characters are not proper characters, ‘in the sense  
that developed over the course of the 19th century: basically, there’s  
never anyone to sympathise with.’ When? I haven’t seen this complaint  
in two recent negative reviews by Louis Menand (in the New Yorker) and  
by Sam Anderson (in New York magazine). Speaking for myself, as a  
hostile reviewer of Against the Day, the question has nothing to do  
with whether you consider Pynchon’s characters fully rounded in a 19th- 
century sense (19th-century characters not being all that rounded,  
anyway, in the end); or whether you ‘sympathise’ with them: does one  
‘sympathise’ with, say, Peter Verkhovensky, or Stavrogin, or Verloc,  
or any of the people in a Michel Houellebecq novel? Surely the issue  
is not what a novel’s characters are (round, flat, major, minor,  
caricature, sketch etc) but what a novelist does (or doesn’t do) with  
them: what is seriously at stake in the entire novel of which they  
form the fabric. And what Pynchon does with his characters,  
increasingly, is juvenile vaudeville. If you like that, fine. But in  
his review, Jones unwittingly gives two reasons why one might not:  
reading Pynchon’s new novel, he writes, ‘is probably as close to  
getting stoned as reading a novel can be’ (which he takes as high  
praise); and – apropos of Pynchon’s relentlessly jokey treatment of  
1970s California – ‘But there’s something profoundly bleak about the  
inability to take anything seriously’ (which he also envisages as a  
compliment, of sorts).

James Wood
Cambridge, Massachusetts

*******

Wood's criticisms (of both P and the review) are spot on.

In IV, Pynchon seems to write alot about the processes of getting  
stoned, describing it as an outsider or wannabe would, and it feels  
and sounds pretty stale and humdrum as a result, whereas some of the  
most beautiful passages and sequences in GR and M&D for example are so  
obviously trip-inspired. And there is a true and authentic sense of  
immediacy to the experiences described (the getting, having, not  
having, needing, wanting, not wanting, etc., of the illicit product of  
choice) in the earlier novels which is absent from IV.

The other big problem is that P has become more and more of a pastiche- 
merchant rather than a parodist or satirist. What worked reasonably  
well in V. and almost seamlessly in GR (the splicing together of a  
whole bunch of short stories, novellas, fragments, often appropriating  
different literary genres and styles in the process) fails miserably  
in AtD.

But IV is simply bad noir-pastiche. The novel's postmodernist joke,  
transplanting a 40s and 50s literary/film genre onto the late 60s  
early 70s California hippie locale, isn't funny or even particularly  
interesting, and the novel certainly doesn't work as straight noir.  
The femmes fatales, the crime, the coup de grace - they're all weak as  
water. Like its protagonist, the novel is stunted and self-involved.

all the best