Thomas Pynchon

[greekrefugee]

This guy is beyond amazing. I've sat in on grad lit classes that fail to encompass the scope and magnitude of his talent. Most schools flat out skip him because professors are afraid to tackle him, not to mention the students. He is without a doubt my favorite of the contemporary American titans of postmodernism (along with Cormack McCarthy, Don DeLillo and Philip Roth. Even if you don't buy into everything Harold Bloom has to say about modern literature, he is right about those four.)

Most people probably won't have the time or inclination to read Pynchon, and do all the extra work necessary to really digest his stuff. If you feel like it though, it is certainly worth the effort. Taking (or auditing) a class or hitting up your local library will add serious depth and dimension to his works.

The Crying of Lot 49 is probably the best place to start with Pynchon. His other books are so massive that they scare off many readers. J. Kerry Grant's A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49 is a great place to start for extra reading on the novel. The following is taken from the introduction to this book: "Even after a number of readings, the novel resists interpretation to an extraordinary degree, especially if "interpretation" is taken to mean the effort to tease out a unitary and more or less comprehensive account of the novel's message from the tangled network of metaphor and allusion that is Pynchon's trademark. Notwithstanding the strictures of post-structuralist theory, such an effort remains the first inclination of most readers, and it is often only after repeated failures that the novel's tendency to frustrate and redirect the impulse beings to seem innate, rather than simply the result of incomplete or defective reading strategies."

The book is a mere 152 pages long and still manages to pack an astounding amount of depth and complexity into it. Pynchon studied engineering physics at Cornell, left at the end of his second year to serve in the U.S. Navy, and then returned to Cornell to pursue a degree in English. He was subsequently employed as a technical writer at Boeing, and his interest in science is a pervasive force throughout all his works. For instance, a classic essay question asks the student to distinguish between thermodynamic and informational entropy and explain their roles in the novel. One of the wonders of his writing is that you are never forced to be aware of his intelligence. Some people write so you can see how smart they are. Pynchon crafts his work so that we are carried by his thematic structure and are constantly surprised by it. You'll read shit and be like, god damn, that's fucking awesome. His work makes the reader use their intelligence, rather than flaunt his own. It's a subtle and powerful force. A general knowledge or love of science will help a great deal with Pynchon.

His other works are all equally stunning in their own right. After Lot 49 he went on to craft monolithic novels while maintaining the same dense, cryptic style. Gravity's Rainbow is considered by many to be his greatest work, though Mason & Dixon is also fantastic. Against The Day is his latest effort and is at somewhat of a different level. I'm honestly still absorbing it after two reads, so who knows what the fuck is going on with that one. It will probably take some time for the dust to settle and some stable criticism to arise out of it.

Without a doubt one of the greatest living authors, and the only one I've ever read that flat out knocks me on my ass. You read Dickens or whatever classic author of choice, and say, ok, that was a great book. This person can write a novel. Pynchon rapes your brain. Though of course it's too early to tell, he is probably on the level of the last generation of titans, namely Ezra Pound, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot.