Pirates of Pynchon

I finally nabbed a copy of the new Pynchon novel. The man is pretty high up on my list of favorite writers ever (mostly due to the luminous Gravity's Rainbow), so I've been looking forward to plowing through the new one ever since reading Pynchon's very own penned blurb from Amazon. The Gilded Age, anarchists, World's Columbian Exposition, Nikola Tesla, Groucho Marx - all gathered in one Herculean tome. What's not to like?

I've noticed that nearly all the book reviews refer to the supposed "difficulty" of Pynchon's prose and the need to "decode" the text. Am I missing something here? Granted, Mason & Dixon was difficult to pick up, mostly due to the antiquated syntax (and physical weight). But Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland were not what I would term difficult reading. Even Gravity's Rainbow, which is pretty thematically challenging, is nowhere near on a par with, say, Finnegans Wake. So far in Against the Day I've encountered a boy's adventure yarn, a pulp detective story, a western, and a bit of Jules Verne-esque flight of fancy. Pynchon is a pretty smart fellow and his references are far and wide, but it's not all that different from when Family Guy references a scene from, say, mid-seventies Electric Company. Pynchon brings in events like the Michelson-Morley experiment with aether, which I vaguely remembered from a history class long ago. Things like that should not be so obscure as to stump book reviewers. Maybe the problem lies more in our standards of education. [Or more likely book reviewers don't want to spend the time on a 1,100 page novel when there's more cash involved in chugging through four 400 pagers.] Sure, there are plenty of mysteries to unravel for the unraveling-inclined, but it's also just a ripping good yarn. Reading Pynchon, to me, is reminiscent of teaching Einstein through Road Runner cartoons. A highly educational slapstick chase sequence. And how anyone could not relish a romp through Pynchon's universe is beyond me.

Then you have those who blame him for being large in scope. The canvas of his novels is a sprawling widescreen epic - that's what he does. It's a bit like blaming Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights for not being Van Gogh's Sunflower. Many reviewers complain that they wish Against the Day had been smaller and the storyline more concise. Again, like griping that Bosch's canvas is too busy and he should have concentrated on only a few of the figures. Finding fault with Pynchon for not being Agatha Christie is just irrelevant. And faulting ambition is just bad all round.

I tried reading Vineland and couldn't get into it for a number of reasons. But at least I took the book on its own terms instead of accusing it of not being a cookbook.

Anyhow, there's an Against the Day group read going on over at The Chumps of Choice, spearheaded by the esteemed Neddie Jingo. Worth investigating.