The Counterforce No. 70
Pynchon, Pynchon, Pynchon
It’s been 20 years now since Thomas Pynchon’s work first came into my life. I don’t recall exactly why my interest was piqued back in the summer of 2005. I knew people who had read Gravity’s Rainbow but they had never really sold it to me. But I think it had something to do with repeatedly seeing this cool cover at that awesome used bookshop on Westbourne Grove in West London run by the sweetest Muslim woman. Long gone now, sadly. I’d stop in there most days on my walk back from classes at The Recording Workshop and loved browsing its oh so alluring shelves
I started asking for recommendations on Livejournal on where to start with Pynchon and got quite a few for Mason & Dixon. But my old friend Joe who knows me very well pointed out that with my love of Europe, it was only right to begin with GR. By the time I got back to the shop, that edition was gone, so I picked up one with a plainer red cover that nonetheless became a talisman ushering in a major life change
I LOVED Gravity’s Rainbow from the get-go. Was astounded by the beauty of the prose, the width of its scope, its sheer ambition, the fact that Pynchon seemed to know everything about everything, and his powers of invention were beyond anything I had experienced before. That’s not to say I understood it at all. The first 180 pages were the most difficult I had ever encountered, but I found that like most things worth having, you really had to want it. I’ve read it four times now as well as a bunch of criticism so I understand what’s going on a lot more - oh, that’s why Pointsman is given an octopus there etc. - but it’s still not an easy read. And the feel of the book! The paranoia! GR would haunt my dreams, and remains the only book that has ever made me feel so physically ill that I had to put it down (the Brigadier Pudding scene, you know…). Early on in my Livejournal I described the experience of reading it as ‘less like a book that I’m holding than a GIANT BLACK SWARM OF ULTRA-PARANOID BEES’. And my review on LJ once I’d finished was titled ‘On Depravity’s Pained Brow’. I so fondly recall reading those final chapters as the summer days turned to autumn, much on my lonesome - I didn’t know many people in London back then - going to Hampstead Heath and sitting in the grass, grabbing lunch of potato pancakes at a Polish restaurant down the hill, almost as good as my grandmother would make
My LJ details my difficulties and ecstasies with it all, and how after page 500 the struggles seemed to dissipate and everything just soared. And having finished this epic, the world of Pynchon now felt very much like a club where if you get it you get it and it is wonderful to find other people around who also do and can share that joy with. I know a girl who had a rule that she wouldn’t talk to anyone for six months after they’d read Gravity’s Rainbow because that’s all they would want to talk about. Fair enough
Fast-forward a little over a year later to November 2006 and I’m back in the States and at Border’s and see the just-released hardcover edition of Against The Day. I think to myself ‘how many more times will I have the chance to buy a Thomas Pynchon novel the week it comes out?’ and promptly snatch it up. Thankfully the answer to that question will be ‘three, and hopefully still counting’, though as it will turn out I’ll only have to buy one, getting review copies of the later two. But we’ll get to that…
I didn’t get the chance to dive into Against The Day’s 1085 pages right away but the following year right before I was moving back to London, my friend Alex posted on his LJ about having finished The Crying Of Lot 49 whilst sitting on a park bench at lunch and being terrified someone was going to come up and hand him a letter. More Pynchon paranoia was exactly what I was looking for and I bought the novella to read on my flight over. Loved it of course. Back then I had a thing of reading a big book over the xmas holidays so that year I went with V, ushering in a quite intense couple of years with the great author. I still think it’s so cool that his first novel was called V and his second was focused on the V2 rocket
Straight after that it was Vineland, by far the easiest to read of the novels (up until Inherent Vice) and I was really drawn to this. The constant mix of highbrow and lowbrow - talking in-depth knowledge of acupuncture meridians and Eastern philosophy but also Godzilla references. The People’s Republic Of Rock N Roll, the counterculture 60s brought into the Reagan 80s, and him starting to work in more human connections and doing it in such a moving way. Plus that great Star Wars reference at the end. I’ve always been of the opinion that there is no such thing as a bad pun, only laboured ones, and the whole ‘the check is in the mayo’ bit is wonderful for just how laboured it is. The successor to GR’s ‘For DeMille, young fur henchmen can’t be rowing’
After seven months of not having anywhere to live in London, constantly hopping between friends’ couches, cheap hotels, and short-term lets, when I finally settled into my place on Eden Grove, I began Mason & Dixon in earnest. What an amazing idea, retelling the life stories of those two and working in everything their line would come to represent, far beyond their original orders. The whole Jesuit imposition of lines upon the Earth versus the whole Feng Shui idea of working with nature, where of course no such thing as straight lines are found. Captain Zhang being perhaps my favourite character in the book. And I do love the dark red pearl that was once “a Cyst, growing within the Brain of a Cobra”. There were rumors of Pynchon working on such a book since at least the 70s, a good twenty years before M&D’s release in 1998. And one would guess he was writing Against The Day during that time too, given how enormous everything about that book is. And which it was finally time for me to read
So come the summer of 2008, I’m back home for my sister’s wedding and AtD is very much on the agenda. The only problem being its bulk. Obsessed as I was - it remains to this day my favourite novel - I was going to be carrying it with me everywhere I went. Someone recommended to my friend Rick that he chop the hardcover in half, making it much less unwieldy. A sensible solution, actually. I opted to just buy the paperback, whose cover I like better. Though I do love that that seal on the hardcover is that of the Tibetan Chamber Of Commerce. Represents so much about the book, especially one of my favourite lines from it: “Those whose enduring object is power in this world are only too happy to use without remorse the others, whose aim is of course to transcend all question of power. Each regards the other as a pack of deluded fools.”
There’s so much about Against The Day that I love, more than I can go into here, but the scope of it, traversing pretty much the entire world, as well as flying above it and entering into it to play on the whole Hollow Earth theory. And let’s not forget the Tetris references of the Russian hot air balloon! Its captain being named Padzhitnoff after the inventor of that game, the balloon’s name even translating to ‘The Great Game’ (which of course has other real life political resonances), and we even see Padzhitnoff having a revelation about ‘four-brick groupings’ when they’re in Italy. The occultism of the book is so much fun, especially the play on the English side of things with the T.W.I.T. - True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys. The wonderful Yashmeen Halfcourt. How the family tree extends to Vineland with Jess Traverse being Prairie Wheeler’s great-grandfather. And while it’s 300 pages longer than Gravity’s Rainbow, it is infinitely easier to read
Upon finishing AtD, that September I was headed to Paris to see The Divine Comedy do a night of chanson. And for something to read on the Eurostar over, I went to my school’s library and took out Steven Weisenburger’s excellent A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion. It is reading this that I credit as my getting into occultism. Inspired by its talk of Tarot, astrology, and other arts of the unseen, I would spend years studying these things further. Still am
Just around the corner the following year, there’d be the surprise of a new Pynchon novel, Inherent Vice. I can’t go too much into it here, but we used to do this thing called 47 PINTS DAY, and to celebrate IV’s release, the day it came out I invited a few friends to the Big Red bar on Holloway Road and we had a 23.5 PINTS DAY (the total number drank, not each person’s individual consumption). Of course at chucking out time, I very much wanted to carry on, as drink would often do to me, and with Inherent Vice in tow, instead of heading home I hopped on a night bus into the city center to catch the end of Scarlet’s DJ set and then spend the rest of the evening hitting various casinos with her until around 7AM
But Inherent Vice, man, That’s the one. Everybody thought it was Pynchon-lite when it came out, probably because it was just so readable. But, as
and I have discussed on multiple occasions, there is so much going on in that book, revealing itself more and more each time. There’s that whole Pynchon adding an extra day to the otherwise accurate historical timeline, which is very cool. Inserting another 24 hours between May 4th and 5th, 1970. Even flagging it up with the line “Next day was as they say another day”. In May 2023, I was heading down to Georgia to do some readings for The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass. On the 15 hour drive down there, I put on the audiobook of Inherent Vice and loved it so much that, after a break for a Wodehouse book while I was in Athens, I simply started Inherent Vice again on the way back up. I love the film too. Especially this film poster highlighting the classic Pynchonian V for Villain
And then, unbelievably, we got more! In 2013, I was incredibly honoured to review Bleeding Edge for The Quietus. A review I’m very proud of, although subsequent readings of the book didn’t delight me in the way they usually do. But getting the book a month or so ahead of time was just a wonderful feeling, knowing I was one of a small group of people experiencing this before the release date. Which brings us now to Shadow Ticket, and let me tell you that pre-release feeling did not diminish one bit
I didn’t have quite as much lead-up time with this as I did with Bleeding Edge, but I did manage to read it twice, and watch The Black Cat (1934), from which comes the book’s epigraph. I strongly encourage a second reading as, the first time through, its opening half seemed too long before getting to the main action, and then once there, the confusion within felt like it could be greatly expanded upon if not clarified, more weight given to its individual tales. But second time around, all seems exactly as it should be, even those many loose ends. Here’s the review. I’d love it if you shared it
I of course had many thoughts about the book that I wasn’t able to fit into just one review. So here’s a couple additional points. I love how the acronyms came back strong - BAGEL, SMEGMA, UTOPIAN... And his continued use of bringing modernity into the past but in non-anachronistic ways - here with ‘FaceTube’, and also mentioning it in a way that reminds us YouTube was originally meant to be a dating site. Of course he’s always showing us early technologies that we might not have thought existed at the time, such as here with the early fax of the Belinograph, or the x-ray machine in the shoe shop. And the autogiro! Making for a literal deus ex machina. And what do you make of Zdeněk, the golem? Referencing the famous one created by Rabbi Löwe of Prague since we’re in Eastern Europe, but also the use of early robots, the term itself having just come into usage from Karel Čapek’s 1920 play, R.U.R. I can’t figure out Zdeněk’s dimensions. It says he’s ‘pocket-sized’ but still manages to drive a car and have an armoury at his disposal???
Besides the links to Vineland via the last name of Wheeler, and by extension to Against The Day, there’s also the evil doctor Swampscott Vobe whose name can’t not put us in mind of Scarsdale Vibe. The whole ‘V for Villain’ thing, but also Swampscott and Scarsdale are both US towns, in Massachusetts and New York respectively. The ‘V for Villain’ thing seems to have faded out, though interestingly Bruno Airmont, who would be considered the villain of the book, has a wife named Vivacia. And there’s the casually mentioned ‘Valdivia Expedition of 1898-99’ which recalls AtD’s Vormance Expedition. Speaking of names, Hicks’ Uncle Lefty doesn’t show any real leftist politics, ‘Lefty’ simply being a nickname of ‘Detlaf’
The timeline too. Details put the story pretty straightforwardly starting before xmas 1932, and at least one other xmas passes judging from descriptions once we’re in Europe. But towards the end I can’t figure out why, when again discussing the Chicago Cubs, Hicks claims to have “never heard the details of” Babe Ruth famously calling his shot during Game Three of the 1932 World Series at Wrigley Field in Chicago on October 1, 1932. This happened right around the novel’s beginning when Hicks would’ve still been in Milwaukee and regularly traveling down to The Windy City. How could he not have heard? Thoughts anyone?
And that scene with the records on the train is really lovely, and so Pynchon. I love too the colour scheme of the American edition’s cover, those oranges and purples mentioned a few times throughout the text
And then we get the double whammy of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Which I LOVED LOVED LOVED. I wasn’t sure going in, as when I first saw the trailer it looked and felt nothing like I envision Vineland to be. And it wasn’t. Of course it’s updated for our times, but even with the different tone it really did justice to the book, remaining faithful to Vineland’s spirit. Except for the bit at the end with Sean Penn, which I felt was extraneous, I thought everything about this film was amazing. The performances were so great. The shots - those face to face ones, the scene between Lockjaw and Willa at the church, those rolling roads through the hills in that unique chase scene that eventually made my stomach lurch. Chase Infiniti showing an excellent range of intense emotions. I was in tears three or four times and had an extended bout of sobbing at the end. It was so moving, and also really freaking funny at points. Benicio del Toro zen af. “No fear. Like Tom fucking Cruise.” is one of the all-time great movie lines. Regina Hall holds it all together as a bridge between past and present
And how strange/cool is it that Sean Penn is actually mentioned in Vineland, as playing Larry Bird in that fictional Lakers v Celtics film?
It is very much a Pynchon autumn and I am very happy about that
Thanks for the shout out! That’s the version of Crying of Lot 49 I read. And the audio book version of Inherent Vice is magnificent.