Thomas Pynchon

Of course, to the fanboy contingent that makes up some hefty percentage of his readership, Pynchon has no weaknesses, but those of us who have occasionally glimpsed the emperor in his skivvies must proceed with greater caution. There’s nothing quite so dispiriting as slogging your way through 1,085 pages of increasingly repetitive and tedious folderol (i.e., “Against the Day”) only to find that its significance ultimately boils down to not much more than sheepish nostalgia for the heyday of the counterculture. Not that “Inherent Vice,” which clocks in at a far more surmountable 372 pages, doesn’t have essentially the same theme as “Against the Day,” but here it’s presented straightforwardly, rather than disguised as a misplaced sympathy for anarchist bombers tricked out in mathematical paraphernalia and hot air balloons. Also, unlike the utopian romances and adventure stories Pynchon pastiched in “Against the Day,” the hard-boiled genre has its cynicism baked in, furnishing “Inherent Vice” with a downbeat counterpoint to what even the author himself seems to realize is a callow idealization of the hippie scene.

Our hero, Larry “Doc” Sportello, plies his unlikely trade behind a door labeled “LSD Investigations” (for “Location, Surveillance, Detection”) and decorated with the image of “a giant bloodshot eyeball,” painted by speed freaks, the highly detailed capillaries of which have been known to hypnotize potential clients into forgetting what they came for. The office is situated in Gordita Beach (the fictional counterpart of Manhattan Beach, where Pynchon lived during the same period), south of Los Angeles proper and home to the usual Pynchonian assortment of marginal types: stoners, musicians, surfers, small-time crooks, psychics, buxom “bikini babes,” nubile “stewardii” and so on.

Doc gets a visit from an ex-girlfriend, Shasta, “laying some heavy combination of face ingredients on him that he couldn’t read at all” and worried that her new boyfriend, a real estate developer, may be the target of a kidnap plot by his wife and her lover. Doc investigates, then gets knocked out cold in a massage parlor, implicated in a murder and clued into a web of connections involving the Black Panthers, the Aryan Brotherhood, loan sharks, L.A.’s genteel oligarchy, the LAPD, a dodgy sanitarium, a consortium of dentists, a surf band supposedly staffed by zombies and something called “the Golden Fang” — which could be a schooner, a drug cartel, an archvillain, or maybe just those dentists, or then again, maybe it’s all four. Most of the other jobs Doc takes on during the course of the novel — hard-luck cases to a one — turn out to be connected to the Golden Fang or the developer, who has gone missing, apparently taking Shasta with him.

Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of “Inherent Vice” is that, while a few key elements of this baroque construction go unaccounted for, a surprising number of plot strands are more or less neatly tied up by the novel’s end. The story isn’t easy to follow, but it can be followed — and without the aid of the sort of secret-decoder-ring-style analysis that often passes for literary discernment among Pynchon devotees. Besides, the reader always retains the option of writing off any stray fancies to pot-induced fantasizing; one of the novel’s most amiable qualities is its mellow willingness to blur the line between the author’s pet conspiracy theories and the random mental bebop of the merely stoned.

Paranoia is also a purview of noir, a genre that shares Pynchon’s propensity for regarding arrested development as a form of valiant, but doomed nobility. Everyone in hard-boiled fiction has already fallen from grace before the story even begins, and in its blasted landscape only one or two true men remain, lone knights, clinging to the fading rags of their personal conception of chivalry. In the case of “Inherent Vice,” the holdout is both Doc and the community of Gordita Beach, which is being dragged by Greater Los Angeles down the long slide from the crest of a perfect wave.

Pynchon conceives of the almost-lost paradise of hippieland, embodied by Gordita Beach, as an enormous postgraduate crash pad, where everyone lounges around all day getting wasted and having sex until evil is introduced in the form of a landlord demanding the rent. Such bummers are caused by nothing more than sheer “greed,” the term Pynchon’s protagonists use for capitalism, that heartless machine bent on grinding the humanity out of us all. The machine is run by shadowy puppet masters who say things like, “Look around. Real estate, water rights, oil, cheap labor — all of that’s ours, it’s always been ours. And you, at the end of the day what are you? One more unit in this swarm of transients … We will never run out of you people. The supply is inexhaustible.”

The title of the novel refers to a legal term used by insurance underwriters describing a defect integral to a property that will cause it to deteriorate over time. So it is with the shriveling Eden of Gordita Beach, where the potheads are all turning to heroin, the formerly cool have sold their services as narcs and government agents, and whatever slack the straight world (or “flatlanders,” as Doc calls them) once cut the hippies has been rescinded in the wake of the Tate-LaBianca killings. The specter of Charles Manson hovers over the novel, partly because the public really did come to view hippies with greater apprehension after the notorious murders, but mostly because the Manson Family represents the perversion of hippiedom’s communal vision. They were evidence of the inherent vice in humanity itself, the seeds of violence, idolatry and the abuse of power that no utopian plan can hope to eradicate.

The novel’s other iconic touchstone is John Garfield, Doc’s favorite actor, a movie star who specialized in unpolished working-class heroes, rebelled against the studio system and died young after being blacklisted for his leftist politics. If Manson stands for the corruption of the counterculture, Garfield (who rejected communist authoritarianism as well as conservatism) represents the futility of confronting the world’s vast systems of command and control. Doc’s policy of remaining detached, helping the odd friend here and there and slipping around the corner whenever the shit hits the fan proves the better part of valor.

These are the “arguments” of the novel, in the archaic sense that they summarize the author’s message and beliefs and in the contemporary sense that they are social themes for critics and other readers to ferret out, thus demonstrating their analytic chops and allowing everyone involved to feel very smart. But a novel is an aesthetic artifact as well as an intellectual one, and of late Pynchon’s fiction has mostly failed as art.

“Inherent Vice” almost succumbs to the flaws that scuttled “Against the Day;” in the middle, it certainly founders. The narrative, as is all too typical of Pynchon’s recent fiction, lumbers through a monotonous parade of indistinguishable characters, each with a silly name and one or perhaps two outlandish traits, as if selfhood were something to be ladled out in stingy portions like the gruel in “Oliver Twist.” Opportunities to portray interactions of import go to waste; in particular, Pynchon depicts women and sexuality with all the depth and nuance of a 14-year-old who has acquired his entire knowledge of these subjects from the dirty jokes printed on vintage novelty cocktail napkins.

Some have contended that the cartoonishness of Pynchon’s characters is deliberate, a postmodern spit in the eye of the bourgeoisie ideal of “rounded” fictional psychology. Perhaps, but this argument isn’t very convincing, given that Pynchon otherwise evinces conventionally sentimental views of humanity (for example, describing a chain of freeway drivers in a thick fog as “a temporary commune to help each other home”). Let’s face it, there’s something profoundly futile about mounting a protest against vast, complex systems that use ordinary people like interchangeable cogs by writing novels that are vast complex systems in which the characters amount to interchangeable cogs.

What ultimately delivers “Inherent Vice” from this futility are the stubbornly individualistic imperatives of its borrowed genre. The detective story must resolve around a central character — in this case, Doc — and Pynchon has no choice but to make something of him. Because his creator is fundamentally sweet (unlike, say, Philip Marlowe’s), Doc turns out all right, and in negotiating his fatally compromised moral environment, even attains a paradoxical sort of wisdom. “What, I should only trust good people?” he says to a friend who questions the deal he cuts at the novel’s end, a rash yet generous act of faith. “Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense. I mean, I wouldn’t give odds either way.” When driving in the fog, you sometimes have to take whichever exit presents itself, and hope against hope for the best.

The action, much of it fairly pointless, takes place over a 30-or-so-year span between the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and just after the First World War. It centers around the three sons of Webb Traverse, a Colorado union “organizer” (his political activities seem to consist entirely of blowing things — and presumably people — up) who is brutally killed by a couple of thugs hired by an industrialist named Scarsdale Vibe. The Traverse boys — Frank, Reef and Kit — spend most of the book drifting in and out of a purposeful determination to avenge their father’s murder. Dropping in (literally) every now and then are a troupe of pubescent boy balloonists called the Chums of Chance, whose exploits fighting “the Yellow Fang” and other antagonists are also recorded in a series of “boys’ own” pulp novels that the other characters occasionally read.

Like Pynchon’s previous novel, “Mason & Dixon,” “Against the Day” doesn’t really start to cohere until a point so far into the book that all but the most fanatical acolyte (and there are plenty of those, of course) will have given up and wandered off. “Mason & Dixon” doesn’t become an actual novel until about page 250; with “Against the Day,” it takes more like 400 pages. Unlike “Mason & Dixon,” which does finally deepen and solidify into a consideration of the original sins of both America and the Enlightenment, “Against the Day” eventually wobbles out of focus again, leaving the diligent reader with a grab bag of themes to consider. The novel is partly, like “Mason & Dixon,” about the corruption, by the conniving of the powerful, of the pure human impulse toward adventure and discovery. “Say, I’m in the wrong business!” a theoretical mathematician remarks when a sleek arms dealer describes how much money he makes. “No you’re not,” the arms dealer replies.

That’s one of the funnier jokes, and there aren’t a lot of those. Much of the humor in “Against the Day” is considerably flabbier. The Chums of Chance (as if that name weren’t bad enough) provide the occasion for some of the most lumbering bids for laffs. You see, the Chums are supposed to observe a code of Boy Scout-style purity of mind and body — but some of them are horny! At one point, the banter between the straightest-arrow Chum and the sassy-lecherous Chum became so painful that I began to wonder if this all wasn’t just a parody of a lame parody of a form of pop culture so dated that hardly anyone remembers it well enough to parody it. But then I realized that even Pynchon isn’t that convolutedly ironic and it was just bad.

Which is not to say that there isn’t some fine writing in “Against the Day” — a hallucinatory bit depicting a method of traveling through sand, under the surface of the desert as if it were the ocean, and the flight of two fugitives through the Balkan Mountains in winter are two standouts — but for most readers not enough of it is good enough to make up for all the parts that aren’t especially vivid. To get to either of those tours de force, you will first have to read about 68 monotonous descriptions of one or another of the Traverse boys (it hardly matters which) walking into a bar, saloon, cantina, casino, etc., filled with “desperados,” “disreputables,” “notoriously unprincipled gents,” “adventuresses,” “pigeons,” “sharpers,” etc. — all of it related with what the narrator apparently, but mistakenly, believes to be a jaunty, rakish charm.

Admittedly, “Mason & Dixon,” with its faux-18th-century diction, could also be trying, but at the heart of that novel were two characters who approximated actual human beings. What the uniformly young, attractive and randy characters of “Against the Day” approximate is more like the cast of “The OC.” When we talk about “Against the Day,” we must talk about themes and prose set-pieces and the handfuls of intellectual and historical spangles (The Riemann Hypothesis! The Great Game! Theosophy!) tossed into the mix because the novel doesn’t really have characters — and strange to say about a book with so much happening in it — or much of a plot, either. But then, the two elements are related, since when you don’t care about (or, for that matter, can barely distinguish) the characters, it’s also hard to care what happens to them.

Naturally, there are all sorts of superpersonal issues in play. There’s a great deal of portentousness about the coming of World War I, and a lot of pre-quantum woo-woo physics about alternate universes, refracted light, the elasticity of time and bilocation (being in two places at once), but that doesn’t effectively play out in the characters’ lives. They head out on preposterous missions, get embroiled in assorted unfathomable conspiracies and engage in frequent, energetic but trivial sex without the nature of time-space or the coming geopolitical catastrophe figuring into it in any meaningful way.

Part of the problem lies in a conflict between Pynchon’s would-be populism and the gnomic, smarty-pants style of fiction he practically invented. In his ethos, the brave, heroic, decent individual is pitted against merciless institutions, systems and elites (he’s got a thing about Ivy Leaguers) that openly or covertly run the world. (He’s also prone to personifying those systems, hence the mustache-twirling villainy of Scarsdale Vibe.) That’s the essence of Pynchonian paranoia, but the rub is that Pynchon’s heroes (in this novel, at least) aren’t paranoid. True understanding is reserved for the author — or dedicated reader — who’s capable of grasping the “secret” knowledge of how the world really works. It’s no coincidence that the character in “Against the Day” who most resembles an actual reflective human being (and presumably the one the author most identifies with) winds up as an initiate in a quasi-gnostic religious order. Most Pynchon protagonists, however, would never read Pynchon novels, let alone worship the man who writes them. They are men of action, not men of sitting around thinking up crackpot theories about the Tunguska event.

At the heart of all this is a romantic delusion, namely a keen nostalgia for the heyday of 1960s counterculture, which as we know from “Vineland” was single-handedly destroyed by Richard Nixon. The good guys in “Against the Day” are anarchists, just about the only revolutionary persuasion compatible with Pynchon’s notion of virtuous political behavior — that is, hanging out in dives, doing drugs, screwing, and bickering about which head of state ought to be assassinated first. Although, to his credit, Pynchon is intelligent enough to know that this dream is jejune, he cannot give it up, and so he makes the Earth of “Against the Day” haunted by the apparition of a lost paradise, the fabled Shambhala, “a convergence of gardens, silks, music — fertile, tolerant and compassionate. No one went hungry, all shared in the blessing of an oasis that would never run dry.” Eventually, he relocates this magical utopia to the sky, where the Chums of Chance, those embodiments of callow idealism, carry on with what can never actually be achieved on this planet.

Maybe this would be sufficient, if by now we didn’t have, say, a writer like David Foster Wallace, who can give us a novel every bit as antic and intellectually demanding as “Against the Day,” and can also populate it with believable people whose fates not only interest but break our hearts. It’s already the tenth anniversary of “Infinite Jest,” the novel that applied the encyclopedic, cerebral approach of “Gravity’s Rainbow” to the territory where most of us experience the knock-down, drag-out struggles of modern life: the interior of the human psyche. Or, take a writer like Neal Stephenson, whose grasp of the systems that fascinate Pynchon — science, capitalism, religion, politics, technology — is surer, more nuanced, more adult and inevitably yields more insight into how those systems work than Pynchon offers here.

The bar is higher now, and it’s not quite enough to sketch a dozen or so characters without trying to make them breathe in a novel that raises Big Questions and then just leaves them dangling. Time doesn’t exist, but it crushes us anyway; everyone could see World War I coming, but no one could stop it — those are two weighty paradoxes that hover over the action in “Against the Day” without truly engaging with it. This is the stuff of tragedy, but since the people it sort of happens to are flimsy constructions, we don’t experience it as tragic. We just watch Pynchon point to it like bystanders watching the Chums of Chance’s airship float by overhead.

“The Intuitionist” is a stylish, highly original mix of detective story, Borgesian metaphysical puzzle and portrait of pre-Civil Rights race relations, set in a place almost, but not quite, like New York City. Its soft-spoken author — still nervous enough about publishing his first book that he glanced away after spotting a stack of fresh copies at a local bookstore — recently stopped by to talk with Salon.

When did you decide that you wanted to be a novelist?

When I was a kid. I read Stephen King and I thought he was really cool. I wanted to write novels with monsters in them. It was kind of funny, this year, to see the rediscovery of Stephen King.

Did you learn things from being a TV critic that helped?

I think I got a lot of stuff out of my system. I learned some good habits from having to produce every other week and trying to make it fresh. Village Voice style back then encouraged the first-person — that sort of me-me-me stuff — and I worked through various preoccupations with pop culture. Some of the pieces were very satirical and over-the-top, and I would go overboard sometimes and think, “Oh, that didn’t work very well,” so I’d come back with something better. You can’t just make ’70s references all the time. After the 10th “Good Times” joke, it’s not fresh.

There’s a lot of people who need to learn that. I don’t know if I’d want to give them all TV columns to get them over it. Where did the idea for the elevator inspector in the “The Intuitionist” come from?

My whole life I’ve seen those elevator inspection certificates. I’d go to school, when I was a kid, and come back and the person had been there, the exact same guy for 10 years. The elevator seemed perfectly fine, so what’d he do? I was thinking about what would make a funny detective story. Well, why not put this person in a situation where he actually has to apply his esoteric skills to a straightforward mystery? But then I had to actually make up what kinds of skills he had, and it became all about elevators and not so much this chase-the-McGuffin sort of story.

Did you do a lot of research into elevators?

Yeah, I just went to the library. Sadly for me, a lot of it was reference, so I had to troop around. But, yeah, there’s engineering manuals, there’s state guidebooks, actual code books of elevator inspection. They tell you what violation 3.04a(d) is, whatever.

And where did the idea of Empiricism vs. Intuitionism come from?

I had a book called “The Evolution of Useful Things.” I looked through the index, didn’t see “Elevator.” [Author Henry Petroski] did have a chapter on how inventors come to create improvements on various objects. Like, why does a fork have four tines instead of five? It was so over-the-top — it was well-written, but impractical. He wrote, “Our objects are weak, they drink like fishes, they cuss like sailors, you have to keep control of them.”

He was personifying them.

Yeah. And so, from that, it became this absurd doctrine of how we can treat elevators, how we can tend to them and nurse them.

I’m assuming that you always meant your main character to be black. Did you always mean her to be a woman, too?

No. I had the bare bones of the plot, and I was starting to get the voice of the book down, and it was just coming out the same, like my stock ironic black man character I’ve always used.

What are the characteristics of your stock ironic black character?

He’s hard to describe, but I guess he can be kind of tedious at times.

Is he wisecracking?

Yeah, sort of wisecracking — he knows what’s going on. I guess the book would have been perfectly fine with him in it, but I was doing the same old thing, so I thought, “Let’s just switch it up.” Of course, that changed the entire book. I had to throw out a lot of the plot I had before, and it became a lot more … it was harder but it became more interesting. I was struggling through the first chapter, and when she takes that bribe in the beginning, I was “OK, this is who she is.”

The building super puts the money in her pocket, and she just ignores the fact that he’s done it. She still gives him the citation, but she doesn’t say, “No, take that back!” or “How dare you?” How did that form your sense of who she was?

She is incorruptible, but she has her own set of rules. She’s not giving back the bribe, and she’s not doing what she’s supposed to do in that situation. She’s in this middle ground. For me that fed into her responses later on, with the intrigues with the Empiricists and the Intuitionists.

Another unusual thing about your book is that often, when black writers are writing about race, they feel it needs to be very realistic. Do you feel you have more freedom than previous generations?

Yeah. Definitely, decades ago, there was the protest novel, and then there was “tell the untold story, find our unerased history.” Then there’s the militant novel of insurrection from the ’60s. There were two rigid camps in the ’60s: the Black Arts movement, denouncing James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison for being too white, and Ralph Ellison calling the Black Arts writers too militant and narrow, not universal enough. Now I think there are a lot more of us writing and a lot more different areas we’re exploring. It’s not as polemicized. I’m dealing with serious race issues, but I’m not handling them in a way that people expect.

You’re using elements of a style that people associate with white men — the Thomas Pynchons and Don DeLillos of this world. People who don’t like that kind of book tend to dismiss them for being white men. By writing these big novels that make big statements about society they’re supposedly showing a bogus sense of entitlement.

I love all those guys. And I certainly don’t feel that way. I think they’re great writers and I think they’re attacking, grappling with, the culture in a way that interests me. I think if it’s a good book, it’s a good book.

You are in this literary territory that isn’t usually associated with black writers, though.

I think Ishmael Reed has done it — “Mumbo Jumbo” and “Flight to Canada” are in the same sort of vein, I think he’s overlooked as a groundbreaking voice in black fiction. And Jean Toomer’s “Cane,” a ’20s novel. He’s a Harlem Renaissance guy. I think it’s always been there, it’s just that mainstream critics, maybe even readers, don’t see the linkages.

They don’t see that there’s a tradition of the black intellectual novel?

Yeah. This guy Charles Wright, not the poet, had some very crazy books that came out in the ’60s, and Clarence Majors, his book “All Night Visitors,” which came out in the early ’70s. You could say it’s been ghettoized. No one’s really picking up on experiments that were going on in the late ’60s.

And what’s your new book about?

It’s about John Henry, the steel driving man. It takes place in 1996.

But how does John Henry, who died a long time ago, come into it then? I take it this is not the literal 1996 that we all lived through?

No.

It’s the special Colson Whitehead version.

Right.