Somnopolis

Thomas Pynchon’s latest comes quick on the heels of Against the Day and clocking in under five hundred pages is doubly surprising for this is an author who has vanished for years at a time, only for a large opus to suddenly appear every odd decade.  Like Salinger, or Terrence Malick he is seen as an eccentric recluse, whose output can divide readers between those who find him incomprehensible, or a revelation.

I confess I find his books to be a struggle sometimes. Characters and locations sidle up to the reader without warning, as Pynchon’s sentences are long flowing threads that need to be concentrated on. Nothing can be taken for granted as the goal is not so much ease of comprehension, but taking the literary form to strange new places.

So Gravity’s Rainbow ends in a Cabalist fugue, while Inherent Vice introduces us to the stoned thought patterns of Doc Sportello, whose every utterance is a minefield of question marks. Pynchon may give readers the impression of resorting to automatic writing on occasion, but there is a disciplined confusion of form and style here.

As I have said here before, this book reminds me of The Big Lebowski and The Long Goodbye. Both films took the model of a Raymond Chandler story and then aerated the claustrophobic noir form with the breezy indolence of post-loved up LA. Doc has a lot in common with the Dude, his stoned amicability allowing him to cruise into danger and blithely ignore the threats of powerful men. His way of life is a thorn in the side of ‘straight’ culture, as he appears to have found a neat middle-ground between the compromises of selling out and the naive hedonism of hippies.

While the Coens parodied Marlowe with the Dude, an unemployed bowler discussing the case of the Big Lebowski as if he has become convinced he is an actual PI – Doc Sportello has a detective’s licence and a reputation as a man who can be trusted to get the job done. Often pro bono. He even has a contact in the LAPD – Bigfoot Bjornsen – although the Swedish giant is just as likely to be Doc’s torturer as ally. The grudging respect between the two thankfully never devolves into the stereotypical ‘buddy up’, model of Hollywood. Doc is under no illusions. LA is haunted by the dual phantoms of the Watts riots and Charles Manson. He and his ‘kind’, are hated by the police and the feeling is more than mutual. Mention is made of the Mod Squad, the show that argued it was cool to be a narc. Doc is wise enough to bite the hand that feeds him.

The cover jacket blurb to Inherent Vice mentions that this is a departure for Pynchon, his own take on the detective novel. The plot does contain the usual tropes. Doc is hired to investigate two cases that are related. He finds himself caught in the middle of a massive conspiracy involving sex, drugs and real estate. Even the old standard of the femme fatale enters the proceedings, his ex Shasta who hires him to look into what soon becomes a missing person’s case.

In the end though I believe Inherent Vice fits neatly into the Pynchon canon. Like Against The Day, Vineland and Gravity’s Rainbow it is a story that revolves around the disillusionment with an era. The sixties are cosily remembered as a time of free love and the peace movement. Pynchon reminds us that Helter Skelter forever damned the hippies in the public eye as potential cults plotting murderous rampages and justified widespread police aggression. When so much politically was at stake, the idealism of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy’s Camelot enshrined by martyrdom, characters seem more interested in discussing episodes of Gilligan’s Island, The Mod Squad, or Dark Shadows. Sinking into nostalgia and witless trivia the sixties was transformed into a fiction of itself before it had ended. As Doc shambles from one adventure to another, he seems to represent a curious wisdom. Everyone is compromised, so why not trust the bad guys to do something right for a change?

“What, I should only trust good people? man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense. I mean I wouldn’t give odds either way.”

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. Loving it so far, a strange noir-ish gumbo that takes in The Big Lebowski, The Long Goodbye and even Chinatown.

The jacket seems to almost self-consciously announce itself as a ‘novel’, an admission perhaps that Pynchon is wandering into what might be considered genre fiction. Still I feel Inherent Vice may even be related to Vineland, that other contemporary Pynchon novel with a befuddled hero caught up in the affairs of The Man.

Enjoying it very much so far.

After months of it squatting ominously on my bookshelf, I finally cracked the spine of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. Needless to say I’m loving it. A cardinal rule of writing, according to my English teacher Dinny Craven following on from George Orwell – is short, sharp sentences. Ideas in writing should be conveyed as simply as possible, avoiding over-decorative language that is both wasteful and pretentious. The reader should be able to understand what the writer is saying at all times. This is writing as an instructive experience.

Pynchon’s goes the other way entirely, but as he was a student of Nabokov (whose wife claimed she could recall the young American’s distinctive hand-writing) I detect a clarity and form in the verbosity. The Chums of Chance – a band of pulp novel adventurers – leap onto the page, sailing into the upper atmosphere, buoyed up by hot-air tales of subterranean jousting with dwarves and the evil machinations of the many varied forces in the world whom they are bound to fight…

…We also are treated to the struggle of ordinary Americans in a time when unions are viewed with suspicion and slandered as communistic anarchists, when the ideas of Tesla are buried to prevent a loss of earnings for the corporate classes. It is exhilirating, genius material and delivered with wide ranging, concussive bursts of ideas. Pynchon creates a chemical marriage of fantasy and historical fiction, that is more profound and full condensed insight into the period than any leaden academic study.

Every moment I open a page I feel love.

Anthony Lane’s chosen title for his collection of essays and reviews manages to be a neat little quote from Some Like It Hot (one of the finest closing shots in cinema), not to mention that the jacket design bears a marked resemblance to the title sequence also.

Lane is witty, literate and almost quintessentially English. Issuing his film notices and author profiles from the pages of the New Yorker, he ensures that almost every sentence carries a degree of British hauteur to ram the point home. Furthermore though, particularly in his articles on literature, his enthusiasm for the material at hand is infectious. I’ve come away from the book with a list of authors I must read up on. His film reviews range from bemused affection to bewildered awe. His article on The Phantom Menace is dismissive. He simply cannot be bothered. As a film reviewer he must review what is at hand (which is why his notice on Dazed and Confused is such a suprise. The man loves it and explains exactly why – unlike that picture’s mostly stoner audience “the 70’s were kewl man….far out”). His piece on Speed casts the film in a whole new light, evincing any pompous criticism of action movies, revelling in the sheer spectacle offered by Jan de Bont and Keanu Reeves’ haircut. Though his review this week of Bryan Singer’s Superman pic is less than impressed:
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/

Henry James is on the list. Reading Portrait of a Lady felt like wading through a sea of molasses – perfectly pleasant, but thick and heavy in some intangible way. I must give it another try. He nails the appeal of Pynchon, whose characters meander about in a meaningless world that remains rich with black humour and absurdity. His chapter on Buster Keaton is beautifully written, justifying the degree of affection for a silent movie actor who within a decade after the onslaught of sound was assumed to be a player in ‘one of those pie pictures’. His omnivourous appetite for literature throws up many secondary source quotes on his subjects. A critic known as Stanley Cavell is cited as saying: “I see the speculation of Heidegger exemplified in the countenance of Buster Keaton.” Ok then. I don’t remember ol Martin surviving the collapse of a house unscathed or running atop trains, but hey. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

One chapter on W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo inspired me to head out and buy a copy. As I approached the guy behind the till noticed the book in my hand and suddenly started excitedly asking me if I’d read anything by him before. I hadn’t, I replied, having only just read Lane’s assessment of him. That seemed to excite him even more (I appeared to have fallen into some Masonic underworld of bibliophiles. Mention Lane and you’re in) so he ran off to find me more Sebald novels on sale. Have to say, he’s worth the attention.

So I’m going to tuck myself in tonight with the final few chapters of Nobody’s Perfect, Georges Bataille’s Visions of Excess and Vertigo. It’s rare enough to find a writer who inspires one with such a desire to read – to encounter one whose sole goal is to promote a rich variety of writers, poets, artists and film-makers successfully is almost unheard of.