Well, here's some news, on a couple of fronts.
I'm not one-third of the way through Against the Day. If I was reading it in hard copy, around 350 pages. So far, I have no idea where it's going and, frankly, no idea if it's going anywhere at all. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening (and some not so interesting stuff) but I feel like the person who criticized the first part of U-town for being "too much like life." And I remember that the biggest factor in which Pynchon novels are first class (and which are not quite there) is whether or not there's a real ending. Which I talked about here. But I'm certainly not about to stop, so I'll report more later.
I've got a lot of very helpful comments on the mystery stories from some excellent beta readers, and I think I have some idea what I need to do next. But then I remind myself that I'm not working on that project this year, so it may be time to start a new story instead.
I need to buy a new notebook. And maybe a new pen...
Oh, and Jo Eberhardt wrote an excellent post called, "Writing about Sex, Religion and Politics."
July 23rd, 2012
This was good news:
“After Long Resistance, Pynchon Allows Novels to Be Sold as E-Books“
I think Inherent Vice and Against the Day first, then Mason & Dixon after that.
What a bunch of treats to look forward to, and it was certainly not a given that this would ever happen.
Thanks, Mr. P.
(And the Times is still wrong about Inherent Vice. 🙂 )
June 15th, 2012
I saw this story, and so far I'm not excited.
Of course, Inherent Vice could make a good movie. But I'm not excited about Paul Thomas Anderson directing that movie (which could easily be just a rumor, of course, and even if it is true it may still not happen).
First off, of course, it is true that Robert Altman would have been a good choice. On one hand, of course, he didn't go in for doing adaptations of famous novels (perhaps because his attempt to direct Ragtime didn't work out so well), but on the other hand he spent the later part of his career deciding to do things at least partly because he had never done them before.
But I'm not convinced that Paul Thomas Anderson is his appropriate replacement, even though they were friends. I watched Boogie Nights once and it barely held my attention. It's very long, and very predictable.
Magnolia, however, is another type of beast. Even longer than Boogie Nights, but weirdly watchable (and certainly not predictable). Not a "good movie," but almost painfully heartfelt and sincere, and that's a rare quality in Hollywood these days. It's clearly Anderson's attempt at Nashville (it even has two of the same actors, which I can't imagine is a coincidence), but it's very earnest and didactic, not qualities usually associated with Altman.
(I knew somebody who saw Magnolia once and became obsessed with it, saying, "It's like a Zen koan!" Which made me want to point out that I thought koans were supposed to be short. But I didn't, because I think that was a pretty perceptive observation about what the movie was intended to be and the effect it was intended to have.)
Anyway, I don't think any of this makes Anderson the right director for Inherent Vice (of course, I'm not sure what would make somebody the right person for the job, other than being a resurrected Robert Altman).
(By the way, I guess I should turn in my cineaste card, since I have to admit that I have received much more enjoyment from the movies of Paul W. S. Anderson than I have from those of Paul Thomas Anderson.)
The trickiest part of the adaptation is probably that the movie has have a somewhat Lebowski-ish vibe throughout, and then sneak in and break your heart at the end, as the book does. Which is why the Coens couldn't do it (not that there's been any idea that they would, but it's been mentioned just because of the Lebowski connection).
Well, here is one thing I do know: Robert Downey Jr. is too old for the part of Doc Sportello. Doc is nearing 30, and Downey is 45. It wouldn't work for Doc to be 45 any more than it would work for him to be 15. If he was 45, then he would be the Dude, and then it's a whole different movie (I talked about this here).
December 3rd, 2010
I just re-read The Crying of Lot 49, which I hadn't picked up in a decade or two, and it was interesting (and quite enjoyable).
It was interesting to see Pynchon writing about the 1960s before "the Sixties" really happened (or at least before the specific time period that's the foundation for Vineland and Inherent Vice). And this was not a conscious decision on his part, since TCoL49 was the last Pynchon novel to be set in the era when he was writing it. He had no idea what was about to happen.
It was interesting to remember Pynchon's early emphasis on paranoia. His two later California novels are really "post-paranoid," the stage where you know for a fact that you have large and powerful enemies, you just don't quite know all of the details yet. After all, the Tristero may exist or not; if it does exist, Oedipa may have been meant to encounter it, or she could have stumbled into it by accident; or the whole thing could have just been a single line of text created by a printer named Inigo Barfstable in 1687; but the existence of the LAPD and the FBI (and organizations like Vigilant California) isn't really in doubt.
It was interesting to remember how often physics is invoked in the early novels. Entropy and Maxwell's Demon loom large in TCoL49, for example. There's not much of this in the later novels.
It was also interesting to read Pynchon before he had such a firm grasp on his tools. There's some wonderful writing here (the first sentence and the last few paragraphs are two examples of many), but some of the sentences jump up and yell, "Hey! Look at this sentence I'm writing here! Pretty cool, huh?"
Also, despite the fact that it is a very short novel (152 pages, compared to 385 and 369 for Vineland and IV, let alone the 600–1,000+ of the others), it would have benefited from some trimming. There are several pages near the end, for example, where Pynchon recaps various things that we already know (especially unnecessary in such a short book) and then makes explicit all of the questions he is about to avoid answering. The book would have been much improved by deleting everything between "Pierce Inverarity was really dead" (page 147) and "Next day, with the courage you have..." (page 151).
Oh, and as Stormville pointed out many years ago, Oedipa's car does somehow manage to get itself from San Francisco (where she parks it before wandering around all night by foot and bus) to her hotel in Berkeley (where it is waiting for her the following morning). When I read the book the first time, I thought this was just plain carelessness (supporting the idea that TCoL49 was written quickly and mostly to make money – a theory which I still find convincing), but now that I've read Inherent Vice, where is an an extra day inserted between May 4 and May 5 (which is clearly deliberate), I wonder if Oedipa's helpful car is a simple continuity error after all. No way to be sure, thank goodness.
To go back to my previous entry ("the magpie deserves your respect"), I did see an article in the New York Times which cleared up some questions. The book in question (Reality Hunger: A Manifesto) is a non-fiction book ("deeply nihilistic," apparently), written by a "onetime novelist."
I have skimmed the article, which I will probably read at some point, though I confess that some of the pop culture comments near the end led me to doubt the author's perceptiveness. Referring to Lady Gaga as "third-generation Madonna" is pretty obvious (though perhaps not to the NYT audience, many of whom may have no idea who she is), drawing general cultural lessons from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (an independent comic that spawned one unsuccessful movie) is unconvincing, and I question the judgment of anybody who considers the recent Star Trek movie an inspired reinvention of a classic (I would disagree with both "inspired" and "classic," actually, and even "reinvention" may be pushing it).
Also, of course, I enjoy the Resident Evil movies and can't wait for the new one.
March 29th, 2010
One thing got left out of my last post ("Inherent Vineland") because I couldn't figure out exactly how to express it. I was trying to explain the objective reason that things like the Godzilla footprint in Vineland are less valid and more annoying than, for example, the amorous mechanical duck in Mason & Dixon.
This difficulty is not going to be solved by changing the sentence structure, I discovered, because the real problem is that the basic premise is not true.
There is, on the other hand, a basic difference between the Godzilla footprint, which serves no purpose other than to amuse the author, and the various mentions of Lemuria in Inherent Vice, which actually tie into and support the basic themes of the book. But the Godzilla footprint and the amorous mechanical duck are pretty much of a piece, and the only difference is that by the time I got to the former I was already finding the whole book somewhat annoying (though also enjoyable in parts), and by the time I got to the latter (quite far into M&D), I was already completely hooked.
That's the only difference. As Johnny Carson used to say, "Buy the premise, buy the bit."
This all applies, of course, to what I do, since there are a few magical realist elements in my writing (mostly in the novels, not so much in the mystery stories). So, there's Vicki, and Randi, and a couple of others. And I think that in most cases how readers react to them is going to be determined by how they're reacting to the whole thing. And, secondarily, on whether I'm maintaining consistent rules of how things work and who can do what and so on. Superman is very powerful, for example, but if he can suddenly become invisible, or raise the dead, or read minds, most people would either get annoyed or start to lose interest. Same thing if Wolverine could suddenly fly, or write PHP code, or play the harpsichord.
March 15th, 2010
I just finished re-reading Vineland, and it is true (as I reported before) that I remembered its flaws much more clearly than its positive aspects.
In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani said that Inherent Vice was "a workmanlike improvisation on Vineland." For my taste, it's more like another try, much more successful, at the same general idea. Inherent Vice is Vineland done right.
Many people have referred to the similarities and connections between the two books, but the echoes are more than just themes and ideas. There are a lot of shared details.
- a girl named Trillium (possibly the same person Doc meets)
- a 1964 Dodge Dart (possibly the same car as Doc drives)
- Moe of the Three Stooges going "Spread Out!"
- Mod Squad
And that's within only a few pages in Vineland. I just opened it to a page at random and saw Tex Wiener's École de Pilotage (which is also mentioned in Inherent Vice, of course).
As I read, I did feel like Pynchon must have been referring back to Vineland every page or two when writing Inherent Vice. Maybe he was using the wiki.
Both books are about the loss of freedom, the global clampdown (in every area of life, including and most importantly our brains) after the 1960s, but Inherent Vice gives a much clearer idea of what was lost. In Vineland we mostly see the People's Republic of Rock and Roll, but the PR3 is doomed to fail from the beginning. So, too bad about the infusion of paranoia, kids, but the whole experiment didn't have a chance anyway.
However, the most annoying thing about Vineland is how arbitrary a lot of it is. Maybe Pynchon isn't the author to go to for deep psychological analysis, but there are things here, things which are vital to the plot, which are completely without motivation. Everybody loves Frenesi. Why? I have no idea. Even the characters themselves don't know why:
"...I can see why you guys married her."
"Why?" asked Zoyd and Flash, quickly and together.
"You're adults, you're supposed to know."
"Give us a hint?" Zoyd pleaded.
And Frenesi, the object of all this arbitrary attraction, lusts after Brock Vond, to the extent that she betrays everybody around her and everything that she believes in. Why? Still no idea.
Well, yes, I do know why. Because otherwise the plot doesn't work. To quote from the wiki:
"You know what happens when my pussy's runnin' the show."
If this is Frenesi's only motivation for the series of betrayals (including her betrayal of herself) that lie at the heart of Vineland, it's a thin reed on which to build a book.
On the other hand, the things that happen in Inherent Vice are quite believable. Why does Doc not sell out to Bigfoot, though he knows many of his contemporaries have? Why does Adrian Prussia get into his particular line of work? Why does Mickey decide to create Arrepentimiento?
And Trillium's unfortunate devotion to Puck is certainly more believable than Frenesi and Brock Vond.
With Pynchon's earlier novels there was some griping (at least I heard some) that the female characters were, even by his standards, pretty thinly drawn and mostly seen in terms of men and sex. (Quick, name a female character more pathetic than Jessica Swanlake.) In V. there is Mafia Winsome, who is certainly not submissive to her husband, but her goal is to rescue the world from certain decay through "Heroic Love," which in practice means "screwing five or six times a night, every night, with a great many athletic, half-sadistic wrestling holds thrown in." So, still defined by men and sex.
Vineland is apparently Pynchon's big breakthrough in this area, but his solution seems to be that all the men are whiny losers and all the women are above average. It's like watching a movie where all the men are played by Paul Giamatti and all the women are played by Angelina Jolie. Which might be interesting as a sketch on Saturday Night Live, but it pales over the course of a whole novel.
This is something I encountered myself when I was working on my third novel. At a certain point, I realized that there was not enough testosterone. It was out of balance. That's why Neil ended up playing a much bigger part than I'd anticipated.
(However, I will admit that I really like DL Chastain and Takeshi Fumimota in Vineland. They're a great couple, and he is definitely not a whiny loser once they get together.)
Which leads to another question. It's pretty obvious that DL and Frenesi were lovers, but Pynchon suddenly gets vague whenever this subject comes up. And Prairie is obviously in love with her cohort Che, but he's even less specific about exactly what their relationship consists of. Why so coy? It's like watching a movie from the 1930s or 1940s and having to deduce where the sex takes place. Which is rather odd from the author of Gravity's Rainbow. But he certainly got over this peculiar reticence by the time he wrote IV, as I talked about here.
Anyway, as I said here (point #9), a lot of how I ultimately feel about Pynchon's novels depends on the endings, and this one sucks (especially as compared to IV). Prairie says "Get the fuck out of here!" to Brock Vond as he hovers above her on a cable (loved the part about "Death From Slightly Above," by the way), but then later (after he is safely gone) she hopes he does come back and take her away? Why? Nothing in her character has prepared for this.
Doc would have a few things to say about the whole thing. At least the "pro-cop fuckin mind control" in IV was realistic.
Oh, and sorry, but the "I am your father" shtick (true or not) is invalidated by the Star Wars rule.
February 28th, 2010
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