bleeding edge (pynchon)

Travelling in Poland earlier this year I frequently found myself thinking; Pynchon was the only one who really understood what the second world war was about, above and beyond these concepts of victory and defeat. Gravity’s Rainbow soared above all that, like the parabola it describes. Of course, you then expect all his novels to be equally revelatory, especially if the issue underpinning this one is that great known unknown, which goes by the name of 911. For a while it feels as though the novel might take you closer to the heart of the mystery, that Pynchon’s New York will be a palimpsest, the script within which another truth will be revealed. It bubbles with signifiers and characters. The novel ties in the dotcom crash with property development with PROMIS with false flags and mercenaries on roofs with Stinger missiles and the brew is so heady it’s hard not to get high on it. Pynchon employs the kind of semiotic shorthand which he excels at to throw everything into the mix, including the great bouffant clown himself. There are so many possible readings of what happened on the that day, and he does his level best to cover as many of them as possible. But if the point of a mystery is that it conceals a secret (and maybe it isn’t?), then the novel ultimately disappoints. Although that disappointment is determined more by expectations, expectations that have haunted Pynchon for fifty years now, than by any kind of literary failure. Where Gravity’s Rainbow felt as though it not only soared above, it also plumbed the depths, it seems significant that when Maxine, Bleeding Edge’s Oedipa Maas, sees something underground, in Montauk, something so terrifying that it might just be the thing that unlocks the mystery, she flees and the novel never goes there again. As though the revelation is too much for the author to bear, so he leads his protagonist and readers on a wild goose chase instead. Maybe they got to him? (Triple question mark) Or maybe as a character in the novel says “paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much."

inherent vice [thomas pynchon]

OK, so this isn’t vintage Pynchon. In amongst the laurels there were quite a few brickbats for the novel when it came out. It’s not hard to understand why. There’s a relentless frothiness to the narrative and prose, something akin to the holy surfer who is one of the dozens of barely-fleshed-out characters who pops up. Like the surfer, Pynchon seems to ride the waves of his prose, waiting for the one that will propel him onto a higher plain. This doesn’t occur all that often in what is a typically lengthy, if not meaty, tome. However, in the decision to riff off Chandler and Hammett, (with even an occasional nod to his contemporary, Elroy), Pynchon doesn’t seem too fussed with the transcendental or the parabola. This is a nostalgic, amiable text, where the hero, Doc Sportello, will not end up propelled into space, where the hero is, in fact, a hero, who tends to the meek and skirmishes with the forces of evil. It’s more Tolkien than Dostoyevsky. The novel doesn’t even have the metaphysical aspect of a similarly secondary text, Vineland. However, who’s to say that every writer should always emulate his or her peaks? If twere all peaks, the land would be flat. Inherent Vice has enough to keep the reader on their toes, trying to keep pace with the manic process of the detective novel, something Pynchon embraces with delight. This is a Maltese Falcon of a novel, ridiculous and charming at the same time. If anything, it would seem to suggest a paean to a youth the author may or may not have known, the beguiling simplicities of a pre-connected world, when personal space still existed; before we were all plugged into the mainframe. For those that remember that time, Inherent Vice is a treat; for those who, increasingly, will not, it is a pseudo-archeological record, as befuddling and vital as a Mayan codex.