The New Nixon: Pynchon in Nixonland

[Dave Monroe]

Pynchon In Nixonland

July 31, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Book Review, Culture,
Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon

Thomas Pynchon, the mystery man of modern American letters (though not
exactly all that mysterious – his voice is, after all, a familiar one
to regular viewers of reruns of The Simpsons), has a new novel out in
about a week. Its title is Inherent Vice, and it’s his venture into
detective fiction, in which, according to the early reviews, he brings
his customary blend of hazy paranoia, eccentric characters, and
goofiness alternating with high seriousness to the hard-boiled
tradition of Hammett, Chandler and Ross Macdonald (who, of course, had
some of their qualities in their own work).

Pynchon often writes in an historical setting. Much of V., his first
book, takes place in pre-WWI Europe. Gravity’s Rainbow, his most
acclaimed novel, sets its action in a hallucinatory Europe of WWII.
Mason & Dixon features the adventures of the two famed Englishmen in
the 1760s as they the line bearing their name, and Against The Day,
his thousand-page 2006 opus, describes a plot occuring between the
1880s and 1919.  Inherent Vice is set in a past now much more distant
than the Second World War was in 1973 when Gravity’s Rainbow appeared
– the Los Angeles of 1970.  Yes, Pynchon, who reportedly lived in the
LA suburb of Manhattan Beach in that time, is now giving his diverse
readership a tale of the days of bell-bottoms and waterbeds. As
Christopher Taylor reports in his review in tomorrow’s Guardian:

    Although Doc [Sportello, the private-eye protagonist of Inherent
Vice] himself is vague about what year it is, the novel is also
located quite firmly during the run-up to Charles Manson’s trial,
which started in June 1970. The murders committed by Manson’s
followers are a well-worn symbol for the end of the 60s, and we’re
encouraged to see Doc as a kind of anti-Manson, Manson’s non-evil
double. Nixon and Reagan are much discussed too, making the book serve
as a loose prequel to Vineland [Pynchon's 1990 novel set in Northern
California] in which burned-out hippies and fascist cops get to grips
with Reagan’s America. Yet the book’s most effective
crushing-of-the-60s-dream scenes are more equivocal about who or what
did the crushing than the plot’s top-down conspiracy suggests.
Watching people in a record shop listening to rock’n'roll on
headphones "in solitude, confinement and mutual silence", or passing
through a town where old TV shows are endlessly reviewable, Doc gets
glimpses of "how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of
light, might close after all", with technology dispersing communality
as much as aiding it.

This is not the first time the 37th President has shown up in
Pynchon’s fiction. In 1972, the writer selected a quote from Joni
Mitchell’s song "The Circle Game" to use as the epigraph to the final
section of Gravity’s Rainbow (at that stage still titled Mindless
Pleasures). Reportedly, his publisher could not secure permission to
use the quote (which appeared in the advance galleys of the book), so
at the last minute Pynchon inserted instead the single word "What?"
and attributed it to RN (who also appears in the last pages of that
book under the name Richard M. Zhlubb).

No word yet on whether Spiro Agnew shows up in the new novel.

Correction: The Joni Mitchell song Pynchon quoted in the original text
of Gravity’s Rainbow  was "Cactus Tree" from her first album rather
than "The Circle Game," and the lines he used for an epigraph were:

She has brought them to her senses,
They have laughed inside her laughter;
Now, she rallies her defenses
For she fears that no one will ask her
For eternity
And she’s so busy being free

http://thenewnixon.org/2009/07/31/pynchon-in-nixonland/