Thomas PynchonReviews

Decent read, but to be honest also a bit disappointing. I expected more of Pynchon.

Thomas Pynchon does Neal Stephenson.

A strange and gruesome tale of two men in pursuit of an unidentified object. The story of this difficult book is equally evasive. I delved into the story with reckless abandon, fearing that I might never come out.

I will write a longer review later, but as a very general overview: some of Pynchon's novels may be 'better' or 'richer' in some measure of the word, but V is the most beautiful. It has the most heart.

An interesting read: the first time I've ready Pynchon writing in an era that I lived in. That makes his wacky characters and odd setups feel harder to swallow, because I'm matching them against a reality. (An older reader of Pynchon would probably feel this as normal.)

At the same time, beautifully crystalline moments come up out of the prose, a Pynchon trademark, and they need the wacky around them to make them shine.

This was a re-read for me; this book is consistently amazing. This time around I noticed a greater melancholy in the story, as though the conspiracy inside was both something desired (to make the world make sense) and something feared (because of a loss of control).

Pop goes the weasel! Pynchon's 1960s California-paranoia story of odd names, fractured plot and multiple conspiracy theories is soaked in clever allusion and hieroglyphic metaphor, but never really leads to anything. Indeed, frustration is obviously the point, as this clown-car drama full of interconnected but ultimately unresolved inquiries never arrives at a meaningful pattern but simply cuts to black.

Pynchon artfully distances us from character, plot and emotion - one assumes as an act of dislocating our own deluded efforts to make sense of this complex and chaotic world, and allowing us to feel instead the disorientation and anxiety inherent in a 'post-modern' society, where communication of all kinds is unreliable, uncertain or unfinished despite our efforts to systematise it.

Pynchon packs a lot of sophisticated and tantalising signposting into a short novella, and you can see why armies of smart fans enjoy parsing the under-determined semiotics of Pynchon. But in the end, all the highways in his Golden State lead to the same unrequited longing for answers.

One of the half-dozen-or-so novels I will be rereading for the rest of my life

...and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn't find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness... how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.

Pynchon's funniest and I think most accessible book. But it's driven by the same themes as his others — the animus of the Elect toward the Preterite, the entrenchment and corrupting essence of power, and the everyday instances of grace and humor that constitute a disorganized resistance. Pynchon's lens in IV is the "long, sad history of L.A. land use... Mexican families bounced out of Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium, American Indians swept out of Bunker Hill for the Music Center, Tariq's neighborhood bulldozed aside for Channel View Estates": colonizations and usurpations and repossession and redevelopment. Doc navigates these disputed spaces in a haze of marijuanasmoke, the ultimate stoner P.I., trusting to intuition and happenstance to make some kind of sense out of the chaos.

Maybe it's because I've seen the movie four or five times since I first read this, but it actually mostly made sense this time around. Having some idea at least what was going on, I was able to chill and absorb the warmth of the writing, the radiant affection the novel has for its setting, mingled with longing for what might be and might have been. Lemuria symbolizes this lost Pacific Eden, dormant under the water like the lagan, the contraband submerged for later retrieval by the schooner Golden Fang and other dubious vessels. Sortilège is Lemuria's chief channeler:

"I dream about it, Doc. I wake up so sure sometimes. Spike feels that way, too. Maybe it's all this rain, but we're starting to have the same dreams. We can't find a way to return to Lemuria, so it's returning to us. Rising up out of the ocean — 'hi Leej, hi Spike, long time ain't it..."
"It talked to you guys?"
"I don't know. It isn't just a place."

But, thinks Doc to himself later,

What good would Lemuria do them? Especially when it turned out to be a place they'd been exiled from too long ago to remember.

Sprinkled in, too, are ironically and characteristically Pynchonian foreshadowings, as Aunt Reet the realtor prophecies realtor.com in an early scene, and Fritz futzes with the nascent ARPAnet in aid of Doc's investigations ("...any excuse to feel like I'm surfin the wave of the future here..."). But Doc can see what's up: "so when they gonna make it illegal, Fritz? [...] Remember how they outlawed acid soon as they found out it was a channel to somethin they didn't want us to see? Why should information be any different?" Wolfmann's Channel View Estates are well named, honoring the "toobfreex" Doc meets in a Vegas motel and presaging, too, YouTube's ubiquity.

Like all great L.A. stories, IV is full of weather too, the Santa Anas messing with the dope-addled denizens of Gordita Beach like so:

Jets were taking off the wrong way from the airport, the engine sounds were not passing across the sky where they should have, so everybody's dreams got disarranged, when people could get to sleep at all. In the little apartment complexes the wind entered narrowing to whistle through the stairwells and ramps and catwalks, and the leaves of the palm trees outside rattled together with a liquid sound, so that from inside, in the darkened rooms, in louvered light, it sounded like a rainstorm, the wind raging in the concrete geometry, the palms beating together like the rush of a tropical downpour, enough to get you to open the door and look outside, and of course there'd only be the same hot cloudless depth of day, no rain in sight...

Palms beating together, louvered light, a downpour — ingredients sufficient on their own for me to love a book.

At a time when we are assessing how short lived the ‘victories’ in our history books were, while seeing progressivism undone by the steady drumbeat of the anti-government movement, and civil rights and voting rights undone by a steady drumbeat projecting citizens as enemies – it’s a good time to dive back into Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland where the true believers of 60s counter culture find themselves scattered in rural enclaves of Northern California – coming to terms with betrayal, guilt and distrust.

American History is always the unnamed character in a Pynchon story and its antagonist always seems to be the mythology of American History. The mythology is a story of progress and hope, standing up to authority – while the situation the characters find themselves – the protests against the war, Nixon, COINTELPRO – have their roots in the Red Scare, attempts to root communist sympathizers out of Hollywood and colleges, the Cold War and rise of the military industrial complex, Anslinger’s racist early version of the War on Drugs – all seeming to have stacked the deck against idealism. And a repression that seemed to be defeated with the resignation of Nixon, merely going underground.

And while society seems to fail against infringements against the 1st and 2nd Amendments the powers that be seem to be taking liberties with the 4th Amendment.

This is where the central characters – Zoyd Wheeler a washed-up hippy having his home seized by the DOJ, his wife (for a brief time) Frenesi having her body and existence seized by an obsessive Fed and their child, friends and family seemingly caught in the crossfire – find themselves. And where the central villain, Brock Vond – whose motivations seem to change from a twisted view of love for Frenesi, to a love of power, to a sheer Iago-level evil desire to win at all costs – attacks, seizing even those things that romantics would think can’t be taken.

There are the fantastic details that lead the reader down every conspiracy-laden rabbit hole – a commune of female ninja warriors, a Godzilla size foot stomp that takes out a factory to serve as an inciting incident, a psychological and theological impact of television, and a for-profit college designed to indoctrinate (ok the last two – not so unreal) that are great Pynchon hallmarks that stretch not only the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief but also the citizen’s.

The book ends with perhaps one of Pynchon’s most sentimental endings, the daughter of the revolutionaries – Prairie waking up in nature, the lost family dog with her – the two who may actually be innocent with their future’s threatened the most by repressive regimes finding themselves in an Edenic place. Then the reader realizes the book is set in 1984, the time shared by Orwell – and perhaps Pynchon has not gone soft.

Vineland is one of the more underrated novels of its time and one that’s turned out to be uncomfortably prophetic.

I always enjoy Pynchon's writing style, but this book featured far too much sex of various violent and disturbing sorts. The plot itself wandered a lot, but wasn't too hard to follow. I'm sure I missed all sorts of clever allusions, but I caught enough of them to make me feel smart. I liked the book as a whole, but I'd have a hard time recommending it to my parents, for instance.

Despite its short length, this was a very complex and clever book. It really stretched my reading capacity.

found this really indulgent. whatever man big concept or something

Leggere un libro e non capirci un bel niente di tutte le oltre seicento pagine, ma, dentro di voi, sapete che qualcosa vi è rimasto… ma cosa? Perché?...

Un pò Flann O’Brien, ma meno chiaro...

Demain le noir matin,
Je fermerai la porte
Au nez des années mortes;
J’irai par les chemins.
Je mendierai ma vie
Sur la terre et sur l’onde,
Du vieux au nouveau monde…

Domani, il nero mattino,
Chiuderò la porta
In faccia agli anni morti.
Andrò per le strade,
Vivrò per mare e per terra,
Come un vagabondo,
Dal vecchio al nuovo mondo… (pagina 16)

La mia traduzione (peccando di saccenza):
Domani, un oscuro mattino,
Chiuderò la porta
In faccia agli anni morti.
Mendicherò dal mio futuro
Sulle strade e sulle onde del mio destino
Dal vecchio al nuovo mondo.
Sarebbe stato davvero il colmo se alla fine di questa sua caccia Stencil si fosse ritrovato faccia a faccia con se stesso, davanti al proprio io afflitto da una specie di travestitismo dell’anima. (pagina 290)

Scorrendo il suo menù di preoccupazioni, vide una portata rimasta fino ad allora inosservata, la quale assunse la forma di una domanda dalla logica tipicamente tedesca: “Se non mi ha visto nessuno, io sono davvero qui?” (pagina 332)

La festa era vicino al confine con il Maryland; tra i partecipanti, Profane trovò un evaso da Devil’s Island, il quale era in viaggio, sotto il falso nome di Maynard Basilisk, diretto a Vassar, dove contava di insegnare apicoltura; un inventore che festeggiava la settantaduesima invenzione respintagli dall’ufficio brevetti: questa volta si trattava di un bordello che funzionava a gettone, da installare nelle stazioni degli autobus e dei treni, e lui ne stava spiegando il progetto avvalendosi di cianografie e di gesti a un piccolo gruppo di Tirosemiofili (collezionisti di etichette di formaggio francese), …; una dolce patologa originaria dell’isola di Man, la quale si distingueva per essere l’unica persona al mondo a parlare la lingua di quell’isola, e di conseguenza non parlava con nessuno; un musicologo disoccupato che si chiamava Petard, il quale aveva dedicato la vita alla ricerca del Concerto per kazoo di Vivaldi; il concerto, andato perduto, era stato segnalato alla sua attenzione da un certo Squasimodeo, il quale un tempo faceva l’impiegato statale sotto Mussolini e ora giaceva ubriaco sotto il piano; … (pagina 540)

I read this book slowly, often just for twenty minutes at a stretch on the subway. Like so many people, I'd tried a couple of times before to read it but lost steam. He does that on purpose -- the first hundred pages includes lots of wild fun to lure you in, but also some intensely dense stuff. It loosens up immensely in the second part. And the book is worth the read! Very funny, both smart and crass at the same time. So many side stories that push you on into a mysterious direction. It's a hard book to try to explain. I loved it, though, and look forward to reading it again.

The original mystery novel for hipsters.

Throughout the years I've heard so much about the genius of Pynchon so I was excited about finally reading one of his books. After 100 pages of this book, with almost a 1,000 more to go, I was really starting to wonder what all this talk of genius was all about. I was finding the novel to be incomprehensible gibberish. Part of the problem was that the characters weren't introduced. They were merely tossed into the plot as if the reader already knew all about them. Another problem was the long drawn out sentences and paragraphs. I made a conscious effort to slow down my reading pace and let the words sink in . This helped quite a bit and soon after this I started to get a feel for the characters and at about page 200 I finally started to feel myself getting engrossed in the novel.After spending a month in the world of the Traverse brothers and company I'm definitely going to miss them, but overall I'd say reading the book was more work than a piece of fiction should be.

Shaggy dog noir, magical realist and postmodern, along with a healthy dose of SoCal 70s burnout culture. Charles Manson is referenced quite a bit, along with a panoply of musical allusions, both real and made-up. Later Pynchon is fun to read, mainly because he has dropped a lot of his po-faced experimentalism and just lets his overactive brain take over. It all can be a bit confusing (or trippy) as the Inherent Vice has an extensive cast list, and the plot structure reads as a lot of stoned digressions. The reader learns, however, not to underestimate the druggy losers on the fringes of society, and not overestimate the straight men who are supposedly in charge.

Against the Day is a completely unique novel - both in its ambition and its ability to frustrate the reader. If you don't like Pynchon's tics (jokey character names, bantering inauthentic dialogue, narrative dead ends), then abandon hope all ye who enter. If you are willing to devote a slice of your remaining life to 1085 pages of this, you need to just buckle up and enjoy the ride.

I haven't read any other criticism of this novel yet. Personally, I don't have a clear sense of what Pynchon is on about here. At first I thought he was playing with genre - ATD includes steampunk, historical fiction, Western, adventure, noir, detective, etc. The large swath of the story that takes place in Europe during the lead up to World War 1 seems too baggy and incoherent, with whole sections (in Venice and Bulgaria, for example) that read like travelogue more than narrative fiction. My peak frustration came in the Bulgarian section, wherein Cyprian Latewood joins a nunnery. What is the relevance of Cyprian to the story? He is a secondary character that becomes central and then reverts to the background. There are many many characters like this, who pop out of the woodwork. I was tempted at some points to create a spreadsheet of characters, just to keep them straight.

ATD exemplifies the problem I have with a lot of postmodern fiction. In the end, the idea of a fragmented narrative that reflects the way life really unfolds, seems to make sense. In practice, it feels self indulgent. Pynchon's attitude seems to be that "life is long and confusing, so I will therefore write a long and confusing novel." It doesn't work as satire, because its narrative threads are so diffuse and meandering that any insight on human nature or society is lost.

Like Chandler on LSD. Groovy.

I recognized a lot of elements that I should have enjoyed, but I just didn't enjoy them. I do appreciate how the story unfolded and ended. There just wasn't a connection, I guess.

This was the first Pynchon I've ever read, and it leaves me wanting to read more. Occasionally hilarious, frequently wacky. At several odd points in the book it seemed as if the fabric of reality was giving way to the main character's hallucinations (and perhaps it did?) which added an undertone of the absurd and uncanny to the book.

Bizarre and fanciful, starting in a more realistic vein and then shifts to the bizarre.

agatha christie with longer sentences

Inherent Vice is Pynchon at his most accessible. It's about a private detective living in the L.A. of 1970. It's just a fun read, an indulgence of imagination and reading pleasure. It's the novelistic equivalent of a Tarantino film, except that Tarantino pays more attention to female characters.

I plucked it off the shelf when I saw that Paul Thomas Anderson has made a movie adaptation. I'm glad I picked it up. The recent Pynchon novels (Against the Day, Bleeding Edge, and this one) have been stacking up on the shelf, and it was delightful to get back into his paranoid world. His vision resonates with the privacy concerns of the 2010s.

Read it if you liked The Crying of Lot 49. It's also a sort of novelistic cousin of Vineland.

Now I just can't wait for the movie!