Pynchon Watch Y2K6: The stunning conclusion!

Are you sure you're ready for this? It's a doozy that will blow your mind. Go get a glass of water and get ready to throw it at your face. Put the kids to bed, let the dog outside, lock the cat in the litter box, log yourself out of World of Warcraft, give your wife the credit card and tell her to go buy herself something pretty, go find the nearest baseball bat and beat your husband over the head for being a sexist prig, find a chair and throw it through the nearest window, take back all the holiday gifts you've bought for your loved ones, alert the President, buy a car at low, low, low prices, and start smacking your grandma in the face with an empty paper towel tube, because after nearly six months of consideration-qua-obsession and a whole butt-ton of blog posting, I have arrived, at last, at a stunning conclusion:

Thomas Pynchon cares what you think.

...

What? Yeah. I know. It's crazy. But here's the thing: it's not obvious.

Before I got onto my oh-six Pynchon track, had someone told me what I just told you, I'd have laughed, because, no. I think it was Stephen King who said there's writers who write for readers and writers who write for themselves. I wouldn't have known if Pynchon was the latter but he certainly wasn't the former, I'd have said. Pynchon is hard, Pynchon is an artist, Pynchon is a postmodernist, Pynchon is reclusive, Pynchon is a jokester, a trickster, an elitist punk, Pynchon is a whole lot of things exactly other than someone who cares what I think. If he cared what I thought, he wouldn't have written all these big huge hard novels that only total-nerd self-important smug-bastard other-exclusive literary hipsters read--he would have called me on the phone and asked me what I thought, right?

Well...no.

...

I'd rather not belabor this point. Or maybe even explain it at all.[1] But still, I'm glad to make this point, because it's one nobody ever made to me, before I started reading Pynchon's books. Maybe it's been so obvious to everyone that nobody's felt the need to voice it, and maybe voicing it makes me look like a naive jackass. Wouldn't be the first time.

Or maybe not. I keep thinking about a paragraph from Gerald Howard's essay on Pynchon, printed in the Summer 2005 Bookforum ("I do worry, though, that Gravity's Rainbow may be turning into an undervisited monument"). The gist of his point in that paragraph seems to be that, among us under-30s, there's a concurrence that Pynchon is "slow going stylistically" (read as: hard/difficult) and that today Pynchon's "concerns were in general alien and irrelevant" (read as: distant).

I'm not going to argue the book isn't hard. It is hard. There's a lot of characters and a lot of stylistic shifts and a lot of rapid-fire changes in the point of view. It's not slow per se in terms of action--lots of things happen on every single page, and Pynchon writes some of the best physical action sequences I've ever read. The book does demand slow reading, though, yes. Of course, that shouldn't be an impediment. Really good books, however easily they may be read, should, or could, demand and reward slow reading.[2]

But, here's the thing: the book isn't that hard. Once you become attuned to the music of it (and other yadda yadda critic-speak-y things) the book offers delights, however silly and stupid, or perilous and harrowing. These are often--shockingly!--easily grasped, given the reader's investment of time and effort in the book.[3] This is something I learned this year. This is something I had never been told to expect. This thrilled me.

The second suspicion--that Gravity's Rainbow is outdated--seems laughable to me on the literal level. I won't go into it here.[4] But if you look at that on the figurative level--that Pynchon himself is remote from us as readers of his writing--you see the very questions that got me interested in Pynchon in the first place this year. And you've got me standing here in front of you saying, gods no, no, he's not. Even nearly thirty-five to forty-five years later, V. and Gravity's Rainbow brim with humor and--wait for it!--heart. And that's terrifying from an "I want to speak critically about art" standpoint because you can't prove heart.

All I can do is point to my own new experience with his work: Pynchon does things in Gravity's Rainbow that affected me, intellectually as well as emotionally. He shocked me and confused me and made me think and work for it, but what I found was that he wasn't the faceless watchmaker God I was expecting to find, the one who created mountains so that mankind could climb them only because they were there, only to reach the top with the exact same questions as they had at the bottom, seen not anew but only from a new perspective. No: the words on Pynchon's pages breathe today, because Pynchon put life, his life, into them. He created, but he stuck around for the rest of the show. Reclusive? He's right there right now! He would like your attention. He has things he wants to say to you. He wants to show you things.

He wants to change your mind.[5]

...

Oh, and you can stop beating your grandma. You're only pissing her off now.

--

Endnotes:

[1] All I know is my gut told me I needed to arrive some place[*] after all my musings about Pynchon this year, some place where I could "retire" the subject tag, because if I don't, I'll just feel weird about it for a long time, because I'm only OCD in the weirdest ways.

[2] This is all to say nothing of re-reading, which I certainly will do with Gravity's Rainbow and V. someday. Once I recover enough from my initial readings to make it through Vineland and Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. And I guess I ought to give The Crying of Lot 49 another shot now, being all converted-like as I am. Not to even mention the stack of books by other authors that's been building up next to be first-time TBR pile, books I'd like to re-tackle once I get the first-time TBR pile under control (ha ha fat chance I know), books including Dhalgren and Invisible Man and The Corrections, and like The Trick is to Keep Breathing because you know I never know when I might feel a sudden and incontrovertible need to be a little bit more depressed than I am at any given right now, right?

[3] Certainly more easily than I can say for some writers who I'm pretty sure don't give a rat's ass's flying fig what I think about anything, cough cough Ben Marcus.

[4] Hello, motherfucking Cold War, people!? Jeez. Don't make me evangelize.

[5] To which, finally, let me close off here with a piece of advice to you who are considering reading the book (or, in the case of friend Chris, who have recently begun reading the book), if such advice may be deemed useful. If you make it to the middle of the book, and you're not having any fun with it, put it down. If the longer section right about in the middle of the book doesn't devastate you down to your floor? Put it down: you're not having enough fun (as weird as that might sound) and you will only grow more, and too, bitter. This is sort of a long-way-around respond to something my friend the Duck & Penguin once said, about Gravity's Rainbow being a love it or hate it book. Yes, it can be that, and likely is that, but if my experience is anything to go off of--it is possible to switch oneself from one category to the other. There's certainly no shame in admitting defeat; I think now it was somehow necessary for me to do so before swinging back around on Pynchon for the better.

[*] However temporary, by the way, that arrived-at place might be--because, it's not like I'm done thinking about Pynchon's work, god knows. And also however antithetical--or, precisely thetical--to the spirit of Pynchon the idea of "arrival" might be.