Salon.com > Thomas Pynchon

Pynchon lights up

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:31:00 +0000

Hard-boiled detective fiction may not seem like the ideal vehicle for the often cryptic style and subject matter of Thomas Pynchon, but his newest novel proves otherwise. An account of the adventures of a hippie private eye pursuing assorted nonlucrative commissions in a Southern California beach town around 1970, "Inherent Vice" is a sun-struck, pot-addled shaggy dog story that fuses the sulky skepticism of Raymond Chandler with the good-natured scrappiness of "The Big Lebowski." It's an inspired formula; the mystery plot supplies the novel with a minimum of structure (as well as confidence that there's some point to the enterprise) and the genre provides ample cover for Pynchon's literary weaknesses.

The fall of the house of Pynchon

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 13:30:00 +0000

One of the seldom-mentioned dangers of having a long, storied and influential career as a novelist is the increasing likelihood that a master will live to see his pupils surpass him. Sure enough, slogging through the underbrush of the vast and quintessentially Pynchonian new Thomas Pynchon novel, "Against the Day," it's hard not to think, almost with the turning of every page, of all the other writers who now do this better. The book is titanic, crammed with characters and events both historical and fantastic, a blend of both fuck-you braininess (yes, there are equations) and puerile humor, diverted by both exegeses on science or politics and passages of swashbuckling adventure. It's that kind of novel; you know the type.

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.

How to get a blurb from Thomas Pynchon

Fri, 15 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Reclusive literary giant Thomas Pynchon may not push out novels very frequently, but when it comes to book blurbs, he's on a roll. In 1998 he offered bon mots in support of Magnus Mills' Booker-nominated novel, "The Restraint of Beasts"; earlier this year his praise decorated the back cover of Jim Knipfel's memoir, "Slackjaw" (Tarcher/Putnam). The author of "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Mason & Dixon" has now given the nod to "The Testament of Yves Gundron," a first novel by Emily Barton. The book is set on a primitive island; Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish it this January.

How did Barton, a yoga instructor and graduate of the University of Iowa's MFA program, accomplish the feat that most fledgling novelists would kill to pull off? "It was actually pretty easy. I think my editor wrote Pynchon and told him the truth," the 30-year-old Brooklynite said, referring to FS&G's Ethan Nosowsky, who sent the letter, along with Barton's novel, to Pynchon's agent and wife, Melanie Jackson. "Ethan just said, Look, she thinks you're the greatest thing ever and she said that she would really like it if you read her book. It was really straightforward." The blurb, which the publisher has extracted from Pynchon's reply, reads, "I found it blessedly post-ironic, engaging and heartfelt, a story that moves with ease and certainty, deeply respecting the given world even as it shines with the integrity of dream."

Sharps & flats

Wed, 13 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Mimi and Richard Fariqa's "Pack Up Your Sorrows: Best of the Vanguard Years" contains some of the strongest music of the 1960s, songs as adventurous and one-of-a-kind as the man who wrote them. Back then, Richard was a songwriter as well as both a novelist and former gunrunner/revolutionary. Mimi was his child bride, kid sister of the Queen Jane of American folk music, Joan Baez.

Richard was born in 1936 to an Irish mother and Cuban father. As a teen, he smuggled rifles for the IRA, then moved to Cuba and fought alongside Fidel Castro. By 1959, he was part of the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene. He also went to Cornell University upstate in Ithaca, where he befriended misfit student Thomas Pynchon. Fariqa then married Carolyn Hester, a folk singer. In Eric Von Schmidt's memoir of his folkie days, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down," Hester recalls an idyll with Fariqa on Martha's Vineyard during the summer of '61: "He was afraid the English were going to avenge themselves [on him] because he'd blown up a torpedo boat in Ireland. He was always carrying a .38 around. He thought the Protestants were going to bump him off. I couldn't believe it."

Deep code

Wed, 19 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

To make a sweeping, possibly unfair generalization about an entire swath of humanity, computer geeks come in at least two distinct subspecies. One is familiar from popular culture -- the unkempt, hairy, paunchy recluse lacking in social graces. An ugly stereotype, to be sure, but these people do exist. Less well-known is the second kind of geek, the kind of guy Julius Caesar feared -- the lean and hungry geek. These geeks come in compact packages, thin and wiry. They sport close-shaved goatees rather than long hair and rabbinical beards. They regard the world with blazingly intense eyes, taking in everything, evaluating it, wondering how to fix it. These are the visionaries, the geeks who don't like to waste their time doing unimportant, boring stuff. Their impatience is reflected physically: Their bodies shiver with a nervous, tightly contained energy, just waiting to explode into the "flow" of all-night coding sessions, or, in the case of Neal Stephenson, 900-page novels.

Going Up

Tue, 12 Jan 1999 19:38:00 +0000

Colson Whitehead's bewitching first novel, "The Intuitionist," is certainly not autobiographical. A Manhattan native and Harvard graduate who went to work as an editorial assistant at the Village Voice and eventually became that paper's TV critic, Whitehead has never inspected an elevator or belonged to an old-time union, like Lila Mae Watson, the beleaguered heroine of his book. Perhaps it was his early penchant for Stephen King novels that gave Whitehead's fiction a decidedly imaginative bent. In that case, readers have more to thank King for than several million sleepless nights.

"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?

Terrible swift sword

Thu, 03 Dec 1998 20:00:00 +0000

A couple years ago, Russell Banks was one of three judges who selected "Snow Falling in Cedars" as the winner of the Barnes & Noble Discovery Award. In a ceremony at a Manhattan B&N store, Banks gave a righteous speech in which he declared that the realism in that novel had redeemed American fiction. Banks never defined "realism," assuming the crowd knew what he meant. Banks implied realism was holy. More than that, realism was American. This is an impressionistic description of that night, but Banks spoke with such fully vented spleen about fiction that didn't toe his line that it was as if he wished the Ayatollah Khomeini had proclaimed a fatwa on Thomas Pynchon and his whole crew of American postmodernists.

Now, it's several years later, and HarperFlamingo, HarperCollins' new designer line of literary fiction, has published Banks' opus of realism, "Cloudsplitter." The novel is this author's sincere attempt at the Great American Novel. Remember that term? These are the days when novels are micromanaged into genre -- first novels, coming of age novels, sexual preference novels ... and the most expansive genre, the category known simply as "literary fiction." The idea that any novel could be so expansive as to be classified as the Great American Novel is a fairy tale. (Besides, we all know that term really meant the Great American White Male novel.)

The year in books

Wed, 24 Dec 1997 20:00:00 +0000

James Dickey died this year. So did Allen Ginsberg, who got off the best line about "Deliverance," Dickey's lone bestseller ("What James Dickey doesn't realize," Ginsberg mused, "is that being fucked in the ass isn't the worst thing that can happen to you in American life"). Isaiah Berlin died. So did Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Michael Dorris, J. Anthony Lukas, James Michener, V.S. Pritchett and Murray Kempton.

Media Circus

Fri, 23 May 1997 19:00:00 +0000

when Alex485 -- his e-mail moniker, not his real name -- decided to set up a Web site devoted to his all-time favorite novel, Donna Tartt's "The Secret History," he found that he had one potential bummer on his hands: He couldn't find any photographs of the diminutive Mississippi-born writer. Alex didn't let this problem ruin his day. "Since I'm having trouble finding Donna-images," he confesses on his The Secret History Fansite, "I'm using jpegs of (actress) Moira Kelly instead. I look at it this way: if there's ever a biopic or something of the sort, I think Moira Kelly should play the part."

Weird morning in America

Fri, 25 Apr 1997 19:00:00 +0000

the all-American lost poet Delmore Schwartz -- best remembered for the proverb "even paranoids have real enemies" -- also deserves credit for the Caffeine Theory of the Enlightenment. By this account, the Age of Reason owed its brilliance, energy and encyclopedic ambition to the arrival, in Europe, of the java bean. Schwartz meant it as a joke. Yet cultural historians have spent many happy years researching the economic, social, literary and political (if not gastrointestinal) consequences of the coffeehouse for the rising bourgeoisie. And the example of Voltaire -- who sucked down a few dozen cups a day whenever possible -- has long seemed to me to clinch the case.