The 200 Greatest Adventure Novels of All Time

[Dave Monroe]

154. 1963. Thomas Pynchon’s apophenic adventure V. — published on the
cusp of the Sixties. I am fascinated by fiction from ’63 — including
YA lit — in so much of which we find a volatile admixture of
seriousness (not earnestness) and irony. In Pynchon’s début novel,
which details the picaresque exploits of schlemiel Benny Profane and
the Whole Sick Crew, in and underneath New York, characters in search
of a plot (in the paranoid sense of the term), jazzman McClintic
Sphere articulates Pynchon’s cynical-yet-innocent worldview: “Keep
cool but care.”

[...]

165. 1966. Thomas Pynchon’s apophenic adventure The Crying of Lot 49.
California housewife Oedipa Maas uncovers a centuries-old conflict
between two mail distribution companies; or perhaps she’s detecting
signals where there is only noise. “The ordered swirl of houses and
streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same
unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she
knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there
were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed
meaning, of an intent to communicate.”

166. 1966. Richard Fariña’s comical picaresque Been Down So Long It
Looks Like Up to Me. The adventures of undergrad Gnossos
Pappadoupoulis in the American West, in Cuba during the revolution,
and at an upstate New York university. The author was a folksinger who
died in a motorcycle accident two days after this first novel was
published.

[...]

175.  1972. Ishmael Reed’s metafictional crime adventure Mumbo Jumbo,
which is set in 1920s New York — locus of a virus known as “Jes Grew,”
which influences people to listen to ragtime and jazz, dance, and be
happy. (It also infects the book — whose format is disrupted by radio
dispatches, photographs, drawings, footnotes — itself. Agents of the
white, western, Christian hegemony attempt to suppress the virus.
Other agents — including the Mu’tafika, who steal historical artifacts
from Western museums and return them to their places of origin — work
against the hegemony. PaPa LaBas, a Voodoo practitioner, is drawn into
the conflict.

[...]

178. 1973. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Set during the waning
days of WWII, Pynchon’s infamous masterpiece is an espionage adventure
revolving around the quest to uncover the secret of a mysterious
device (the “Schwarzgerät) that is to be installed in a German V-2
rocket with the serial number “00000.” (The book’s title refers to the
parabolic trajectory of a V-2, as well as to the introduction of
randomness into physics via quantum mechanics.) But the book is also a
picaresque adventure following naive Tyrone Slothrop, a naive Allied
Intelligence operative, as he wanders — under surveillance — around
London and Europe.

[...]

http://hilobrow.com/adventure/

Thanks, Doug Millison!
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l