Pynchon Watch Y2K6: We'll get to the niece thing later; but first, let's get to the thing about my curious reaction to V.

1.0. - Something Curious

And then something curious happened: I read V. and I liked it. I didn't get it. But I mostly enjoyed reading it.


2.0. - On Reading Lists

My reading habits are erratic. I don't structure my trek down the main streets and back roads of writing. True, there's various book discussion group deadlines, but I'm not married to those schedules. (Sorry, Austin--I, uh, got distracted.) Sometimes I read brand new-ish books just so I can feel like I at least have a tenth of a hundredth of a clue about what's going on "today" in literature. (Which pretty much comes down to "Lots of people are writing lots of books and some of them are awesome" but that doesn't make for good conversational copy.) (Also, synchronicity: Dan Green posted this while I was writing part of this post. I may come back to that some other time, because it really is a fascinating topic.) About as structured as I've gotten this year has been my Summer of Dostoevsky project, and with only two books of the planned five read, you can see how well that's gone. (I did recently pick up my next Dostoevsky book--Demons (or The Possessed)--and was blown away by the opening chapter, which was funny and weird, and then I set the book down and walked away because it wasn't time for it yet. No idea why.)

But for these token stabs at order, I'm most often bouncing merrily through the world's back catalogue from one book to the next, neither rhyme nor reason dictating what book gets picked up after the current one gets put down. If anything, I've got a ready awareness of the multiple (and potentially conflicting) directions I could be taking my reading list in at any one moment in time. I should be reading more literature in translation; I should be reading more books by women; I should be reading more classics; I should be reading certain books that I've been meaning to read for a very long time but haven't gotten to yet because of whatever reason comes up every time it comes time to grab a book off the shelf. I figure there's always at least eight books that I should be simultaneously reading at any particular moment. How constant that list is from any one moment to any other moment, well...

What I'm saying is nothing the typical avid reader doesn't know, whether he or she chooses to think about it or not; there are more worthwhile words than can possibly be read in a lifetime, there's more worlds than those in any gunslinger's philosophy, yadda yadda etcetera and so forth; I generally choose not to think about it too much because otherwise I'd go insane with grief over lost opportunities and all those sweet reading lists lost on impact. I at least like to think this justifies and encourages my haphazard reading list. Wherever it is I go, it will be worth the going. And the going, like breathing, will happen one moment after another.

What it doesn't (and, yet, I guess, does) explain, is why I found myself this last week reading, not one of those eight immediate-priority books of the mysteriously ever-shifting moment, but rather a book by an author who I'd thought I'd already written off as someone whose work I had no honest intellectual interest in.


3.0. - If You Must Read Only One Book, Read Two Books Instead

I feel bad for V.; the book gets comparatively short shrift these days. V. seems stuck in a sort of book-sized shadow of Pynchon's own making, darkened by both Gravity's Rainbow--the younger brother who won all the awards and honors in school and who was totally huge enough to beat up other teams single-handedly on the football field--and The Crying of Lot 49--the younger brother who actually got laid a lot because sitting through an entire conversation with him wasn't impossible.

I forget when I picked up my copy of V., though I know it came from a used book store, based on the price sticker I rubbed off the cover this week. I don't know why I bought it when I did, though I can imagine the phrase "Pynchon, hey, he wrote Gravity's Rainbow" probably sounded through my brain. I know I can safely say that since whenever I bought it, I've heard next to no talk about it, this book that won awards when it was published. (Which of course begs the question, if it wasn't for the other brothers, would we know this one today?)

One reference came this year somewhere on the Internet when someone suggested using it as a warm-up book (following Crying, of course, because Crying's the short one, the one you can read and then you can pat yourself on the back and introduce yourself at ritzy business networking functions as being someone who has read an entire Pynchon novel) for the ultimate goal of reading Gravity's Rainbow.

What a fantastic tag line, right? "V.: A warm-up book." Hey, all you professional published authors in this joint: raise your hands, those of you who have written a book with the intention of it being classified a "warm-up" book.

Vollmann, you smart ass. Put your hand down.


3.2.0.

I'd like to suggest that the time is ripe for a re-evaluation of V., Thomas Pynchon's first novel. Rather than being considered one of Pynchon's "other works," rather than being that book he wrote "before Gravity's Rainbow," one can easily argue that V. in fact stands today as a formidable, unique, compelling, fascinating, and self-sufficient piece of modern literature, worthy of detailed (re-)analysis, consideration, contemplation, and conversation.

One could definitely argue all that.

Though, I'm not going to.

But one definitely could, were one to set one's mind to it.


3.1.0.

But before we move forward, some additional anecdotal evidence regarding V.'s lack of self-status in contemporary conversational culture. Friend Chris (a sort of recurring character here on this blog, who is in fact a real live human being, one who often reads books I recommend, who in fact recently read The Exquisite by Laird Hunt because I told him he had to immediately and who also admitted to enjoying the book (which said factoid is casually dropped here to reinforce the fact that many people should read the book because it's a very good book, insofar as the second-hand account of the opinion of a friend of a blogger should amount to a bit of real-world concern or care by anyone anywhere)) has for some time been gearing himself up for his own first attempt at Gravity's Rainbow. Because, let's not fool ourselves: Gravity's Rainbow, whatever worth one finds in it, is sort of the dead body in the car crash of difficult modern literature. Sooner or later, every kid worth an ounce of curiosity is going to slow down and look for his or her own self.

Friend Chris recently noted in conversation that for all the talk he's heard about Rainbow and Crying, he's never once heard talk of V., that first novel which is so problematic for a blogger who keeps landing the title of it at what would normally be the end of his sentences, where the period in the title would make it look weird and, to this blogger, slightly unsettling. Nobody ever references V., Friend Chris said.

And then a few curious things happened:

1. I mentioned in an e-mail to Friend Chris that I was, quite randomly and unexpectedly, reading V., myself.


2. Friend Chris saw a quite random, humorous reference to the novel V. in a day-to-day calendar (a tie-in to the Daily Show's America: The Book book).


3. V. was unexpectedly mentioned in casual conversation by a third party, which reference spurred Friend Chris to mention the fact that V. never gets mentioned in conversation, along with a relating (like this list) of the curious, nearly concurrent references to that book.

Curiouser and curiouser.


3.1.1.0.

It should, of course, be at least passingly noted that anecdotal evidence is certainly not intended as a definitive statement or proof of the aforementioned hypothesis about V. and its status and the shadows and car crashes and all that. I am perfectly willing to entertain the idea that I might be plain wrong about the frequency with which the book is mentioned, or its status among other, like me, contemporary casual literary elite.

So while objections may be fairly lodged, it should be noted that your own anecdotal evidence may be used in the court of public opinion to point out that you, in fact, either a) hang out with more interesting but far stranger people than I do, which will cause the public to raise its collective eyebrow at you, or b) are ultra-highly-active on the Pynchon-L e-mail discussion list, which--and please, take no offense when I say this--means your viewpoint, as far as the rest of us are concerned, doesn't at all count.


3.2.0.

And this is where this would go if I wasn't feeling like rushing to get that point across, back up there a ways.

Moving on then.


4.0. - Yeah, Darby, Way to Have Your Cake and Analyze the Fun Out Of It Too, You Big Jerk

So while I'm not going to three-point-two V. right now, I am going to try to say at least some stuff about it.


4.1.0.

First, yes, my overall reaction to the book was strangely positive. You can take that as a sort of average of all my responses during all the moments I read the book. My specific reactions ranged anywhere from stark raving joy to feeling utterly bored witless.

Perhaps my biggest take-away from reading this book was a sense of finally getting it, a little. By it, here, I mean the buzz, the hype, the hoopla, not the same sort of "it" I meant way back at the beginning of this faux-essay. Reading V., really diving into it this time, it felt like I was finally being let in on why the joke's funny, or what the glossy expense reports have to do with me personally down here in the cube farm murk. While I'm not inspired to flat-out Pynchonoid fanboy levels of ecstasy, here's what's crazy and new for me: I can see how someone could go there. There's enough detail in this book to warrant weeks, months, if not years of avid discussion and debate. (Everything 3.2 might imply. And now maybe it makes sense why I'm not going there, not even really attempting to go there, here. Because I wouldn't know where to start and I'm not sure I'd know how to get out once I got into it. Plus I feel a need to move on.)

Maybe even more important is that I can see some of the DNA that got passed down to who knows how many inspired-by-that writers. Of whom David Foster Wallace is the most personally interesting example. A full explanation of that is way, way beyond the level of effort I'm willing to take up here, but suffice it to say again that I can see where the discussion might lead, because I now have a somewhat deeper feel for where it starts, beyond just accepting what's said about some things.

All of which is very nice and all but what's it got to do with the price of love in Malta? Probably not much. Probably just makes me feel a little more confident about my ability to understand what's going on in letters today. Probably just gives me more to think about while sitting in cars in parking lots staring through windshields at electric lights wondering and waiting for whatever comes next. Plus I had fun reading the book. Which brings us to


5.0. - Aw, Now You're Just Teasing

the pleasure of Pynchon. But not yet. I'm just reminding myself where I go after


4.2.0.

the difficulty of Pynchon. (Honestly I'm not sure which is worth talking about first. Honestly I may have switched these back and forth once or twice. Honestly, things sort of worked out for the best this way, so I let it ride, because why not? Let it be said, in any case, while I've already got my aside-mode blinker on, that I'm intentionally keeping things macroscopic here, because I'm in no way ready to get too critical-analytical, certainly not yet at least. Also note that I'm glossing over the fact that some people might not find this book difficult in the least. One person's hole is another person's hypothesis.)

What makes V. difficult? What kind of difficulty are we dealing with? It's not linguistic. (Contrast this with, for example, the occasional difficulty of William T. Vollmann, who seems, at times, more interesting in making a mockery of language than an art of it. I can say that without worrying that he's about to pull a gun on me because I saw him slip out the back door a while back with a bad sniffle in his nose.) On a sentence by sentence level, the language itself isn't particularly difficult. Pick sentences at random, and there's not much you can't quickly understand, especially with a decent dictionary nearby. (This book got the word "scungille" stuck in my brain.)


4.2.a.side:

Pynchon's prose, for some reason, reminds me of Steve Erickson's prose. Neither writes necessarily beautiful prose, in terms of surface-level poetry, and yet it's fully functional in seeking its ends, while being quite capable of making its own occasional leaps to loftier heights. DaVinci dropping tabs of Monet? Something worth considering, perhaps.


4.2.c.ontinued:

So logically enough, then, the difficulty must rest a plane or two higher. It's still in and of the word-by-word details, though; though it's in the way we, the reader, have to process, arrange, and connect those details, as we read this book. Let's semi-arbitrarily tackle first structure, then characters. Though the two are interdependent (as I found out that we shall see).


4.2.1.0.

Structurally, the book happens along two timelines. The first (as presented in the book) "present day" timeline is set from 1955 to 1956. The second, related in what I'll call flashbacks though I use the word somewhat hesitantly, stretches from the end of the 1800s through the 1940s. The present day timeline takes place in and around New York City, with some travel. The flashback timeline is set in a variety of locales, including Italy, Africa, and, yes, Malta. The timelines are essentially divided by chapter, so the "cuts" between the two are (perhaps blessedly) not of the "jump-cut" nature. Though present-day events may be used as introductions to or preludes to flashback chapters, and one can certainly argue that the flashbacks are hardly more than present-day re-constructions of unwitnessed, untrue events.

So far I'm not talking rocket science levels of complexity here. We'll jump back to notions of structure in a moment, but first, let's talk about:


4.2.2.0.

Characters. Sweet holy lord, this book's got a lot of characters. And oh boy, do those characters connect in a whole lot of ways.


4.2.2.a.side:

Here's where I can most see myself falling toward the Pynchonoid trap. The more I read, the more characters I met and the more connections I saw, the more I needed to help myself keep some semblance of a track of them. The resulting (incomplete) character map I began drawing on the inside back cover of my copy of the book now looks like a pair of twisted spiderwebs, loosely (yet, crucially! maybe?) linked.


4.2.2.c.ontinued:

What makes the number of characters difficult is, in part, their varying levels of importance, which does not necessarily depend on the amount of face time they get. Seemingly minor characters can slip in, color the entire proceedings with their perceptions, then hop out the back way, never to be heard from again. Other seemingly minor characters can actually be somewhat more important characters in disguise--with the nature of their importance being a topic of discussion in itself. Major characters can seem to not have much of anything to do with anything going on elsewhere in the book. (And, maybe they don't.) Other major characters, through whom we see major portions of the story, we never actually get to know too well. (How can we, when they seem to have distanced themselves from themselves?)

Now, with some of this information in hand, we can go back to


4.2.1.0.

the structure question, and mention that the order in which and the span of the book over which we meet these multitudinous characters is what ultimately (for me) ramped up the book's difficulty. Because it's not that we're introduced to a whole bunch of characters all up front who we then follow through the text. Characters are doled out and stretched out and chopped up from the beginning of the book to the end of it. (We meet new characters in the Epilogue! We see old only alluded-to characters fresh and new in the Epilogue! If this book had an index, it would certainly list characters who only appear on pages after the last page of the book!)

We can also mention that the connections (and the importance of those connections) between the characters are often never made immediately clear. Main characters from the present-day plot line don't actually meet and interact until near the end of the book. Meanwhile in reaching those points, we wade through a thick sea of casual, random encounters. (Which, are they truly casual? Or even of the slightest importance?)

But it's the presence of connections that prevents one from writing off the book as a bunch of random stories with no particular collective importance. What happens in the flashback stories, is that we are given some sense of a main story (or stories) that threads its way throughout these various historical settings. (That, of course, is the story of V., the woman--or, woman?--of the title of the book.) It's a story we're never directly given, per se, but is one we glimpse out of the corner of our eye as we pass through other exotic tales, which seem (and might be) completely disconnected from each other, if not incomplete in and of themselves.

But in more human terms, what this kind of structure creates is a tower of fatigue-generating, patience-rewarding details. Reading this book is tiring, when you've got to keep so much of it in your mind at once, without knowing whether what you're holding is necessary or not, nor whether what you've dropped is worth the effort of stooping down to pick back up. It's not unlike the effect of reading a long collection of short stories in one go: picking up characters and events and settings and ideas almost as quickly as you drop them often can mean the stories near the end of a book aren't as easily or readily enjoyed as those near the beginning. Now sandwich those stories into an already existing plotline and change the name of a minor character in each story to a single name, so those various characters all become one character. Things get exponentially more fascinating, and frustrating.


4.2.3.0.

To spin a new simile: the difficulty of V. is like the difficulty of a well-paced videogame. What starts seemingly simple becomes increasingly difficult with each new stage; ability to reign victorious over successive stages depends on one's mastery of the obstacles thrown at the player earlier in the game, until defeat of the final boss (the book itself, on the literary side of the "like") requires a synthesis and expansion of every technique the game has taught the player.

V., however, does not offer green warp pipes.


4.2.4.0.

All of which is to say, in short: the book offers the diligent reader a surprising amount of complexity. Or, difficulty. Depends on your views, I reckon.


4.2.4.a.side:

None of which is actually as scary as I might make it sound; for the human mind is a wondrous thing, and does a lot of the work for the reader, without having to spell it all out as it's doing it. (You needn't recite bunny-ear rhymes to tie your shoes.)


4.2.4.b.ut:

That's definitely not to say that one can sleep through the book; blink in the wrong spots, and you'll lose who knows what ground. (You do still need fingers to tie your shoes; the brain's not that amazing, not yet.)


4.2.4.c.ontinued:

And while the structure and character questions aren't the end-all, be-all of the book's difficulty, I think the points I've raised here give the curious reader (or, at least, they've given me myself and I) some semi-spelled-out sense or idea of what it actually is going on here that's so challenging about Pynchon's work. (Not that I'm saying these things are universal to his writing--but, they do give me some idea of what I might consider looking for, in his other books, should I choose to tackle them.)

And, I think this is enough to point forward toward one more point I'd like to make about the difficulty of Pynchon, which deals with the question of importance.


4.2.5.0.

Importance. I think I've alluded to it, but let's make it clear: I'm curious not just about the metascopic Importance of Pynchon (i.e., in a literary or cultural sense), but in the microscopic importance of the things inside his books. One, I suspect, can learn about the one by examining the other and vice-versa. Neither of which I'm really going to do right now, of course. I'm just going to point a little and go Hmm and Huh and nod and smile and get a headache and then I'll try to move forward with my life.


4.2.5.1.0.

When I say I question the microscopic importance of things inside Pynchon's books, what I mean specifically is that sometimes, I don't know what the hell he's talking about and why I should care. Lots of things happen in V., and often, their significance eludes me. Why the alligators? Why the connections? Why a waterspout? Why V. herself (her?self) at all? Why Benny Profane? Why self-referential third-person language?

Many questions are raised. Some are more profound than others. How many are answered? That's another question entirely.


4.2.5.2.0.

When I say I question the metascopic importance of Pynchon in the literary, cultural landscape, well...now, unlike a few more weeks ago, I've got a lot more ways of asking and approaching that question. Like, why the alligators? Why the connections? Why the structural hijinks and character onslaughts? Why V. her(?)self?

And then, why do people care about these things? These words? This man?

What's up with all that?

And, hence:


5.0. - Whatever, You Know We All Totally Skipped All That, Right?

The curious pleasure of Pynchon.

That's sort of it, isn't it? My fascination with the guy, wrapped up in a nutshell. Here's this guy who writes big challenging books. What of them brings pleasure? What of them is important or worth pursuing? What have I found there in returning to him, past my own imagined sell-by date for the guy?

The word challenging is sort of telling, already, for some people, some cases, I suppose. Some challenges will always be pursued, whether the rewards were worth the pursuit or not. Climbing mountains, landing remote controlled cars on other planets, building empires out of green? Cool beans. You go, indeed. Stacking golf balls to get into Guinness? Winning the hot dog eating championship? Getting Lulu's ultimate weapon by dodging 200 bolts of lightning on the thunder plains in Final Fantasy X? Get a job, you stinky hippie.

When it comes to literature, it's true that I do ultimately (and, on average) find reward in challenging literature. From the pomo hootenanny of Infinite Jest to the sparse realms of Stephen Dixon, the never-easily categorized Jennifer Egan to the adult content of Mary Gaitskill, there is, for me, reward in the thing and the hunt of the thing.

Certainly, V. is full of challenges, and, to my surprise, I've found them oftentimes pleasurable, or at least, intriguing. This book, copyright 1963, well before the rise of "interactivity" as a cultural buzzword commodity, demands more, on a purely technical level, of the reader than many other books I've come across. Once I realized what was going on, I did see it as an interesting, oftentimes exciting endeavor. The activity of assembling a story from the scraps and folds of other stories while always questioning where what one's left with came from and what its ongoing and ultimate value is, is, well...fun.

What I think is sort of more curious about what I found in reading V., is how much--as this lengthy post in part proves--I've found myself interested in simply trying to define the challenge itself. It's like doing the challenging thing and then turning around to find out whether you climbed the wall or took the bungee jump. (Or both at once.) I'm not sure how interesting that--or any of this--sounds to anyone other than me. Maybe this says more about me and where I am right now as a reader and what it is I'm currently--today, this month, this year--asking for from the books I read. Maybe, after reading The Exquisite, it was inevitable that I'd circle back around to Pynchon, for another desperate stab at the godfather of modern post-modern experimental rootin' tootin'.

Maybe, finally, a lot of things.

Maybe that's the only conclusion I can logically draw.

Know something? That's damned exciting.


6.0. - Sobering Thought, That

Or maybe, like's so for Mondaugen, it's all after all merely code for chaos.