vintage

I assure you, you are not hallucinating.

Well, ladies and gentlefolk, it’s certainly been a while. I could make up tales of all of the fabulous things I’ve been doing while away from here, but you’ll surely have noticed that the period of my absence roughly coincides with that period of time commonly known as a “Semester”. I’ll let you dream up your own yarns of bloodshed and last-minute papers as you like.

I also haven’t really done any end-of-year lists, which is Total Blasphemy in the world of blogging (especially music-related) but them’s the breaks, I guess. I’ll have the lite versions around in the next little while in case any of you still feel like reading them after the barrage of lists that was this past December.

While we’re here, I might as well tell you what I’ve been up to.

What I’ve Been Up To

I’ll be honest: most of this category, at least most of what isn’t directly school-related, consists of reading Thomas Pynchon. For those unacquainted with his work, he’s fairly notorious for his dense and difficult-to-read prose, and for being a serious recluse (the first time anybody who wasn’t in his inner circle heard his voice was, bizarrely, on an episode of The Simpsons; in marvelous Simpsons fashion, he is depicted wearing a bag over his head. Check out that Long Island accent!). And particularly for frustrating English majors everywhere with postmodernist yarns like V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, the latter usually prompting people to throw the book across the room. Many of my friends have done that very thing.

Anyway, I naively started reading Against the Day as my introduction to Pynchon, which was a severely misinformed decision. It’s over 1000 pages (the Vintage UK edition, which I have, is just over 1200) and is just chock-full of things. Characters. Plotlines. Time periods. References to older novels (which I didn’t, at the time, get). I read the first 200 pages, read them again, and then read them a third time. I nearly pitched it out of the window.

The problem with Pynchon, for a first-time reader — and later, the glory of him — is that he systematically destroys any kind of expectation you might have for reading a novel. Nothing is linear. Characters don’t get fleshed out the conventional way. Endings are not endings. Narratives don’t move the way you want them to. Novel readers are conservative in that we expect conflict, resolution, characters, conclusion; Pynchon reminds us that we’re not going to get that.

1000 pages of in-your-face post-structuralism is not, however, the way to start learning that lesson. So I stopped.

Instead, I picked up the shortest of his novels — The Crying of Lot 49. Most hardcore Pynchon fans look down their noses at this one, because it’s not as involved as his other works; it does, however, contain all the things that characterize it as Pynchon, and it’s one hell of a novel. It moves a bit more conventionally than I had expected, which makes it a much better introduction (and, I’ll admit, the last chapter — particularly the final sentence — made me yell, out loud, and almost throw the book at the wall anyway in a mixture of frustration and glee). We are given tantalizing hints as to what Lot 49 might be, exactly, and they are all typically Pynchonian red herrings; we’re not told until the final three or four pages. And then, of course, the names. The names! Oedipa Maas, Pierce Inverarity, Mike Fallopian (really). The crowning glory is probably Genghis Cohen. It only gets better from here on out.

I can’t say I’m great at literary criticism, but I know enough to say this: Pynchon is brilliant. I still don’t really understand him, but that’s part of the appeal: everything isn’t immediately obvious, which means you actually feel compelled to re-read. And get the companion readers (J. Kerry Grant, thank you for helping me navigate V.). And read all the essays. And and and.

One thing’s for sure: if you decide to embark on a quest to read one of these novels, don’t rush it. Buy a copy — you’ll be renewing it at the library an infuriating number of times — and read as slowly as possible. I’ve finally learned that lesson and I’ll probably be reading V. for another month, but it’ll be a glorious one. His prose is sometimes dense enough to chew on, and it’s all worth it.

I think, though, that it will soon be time for some lighter reading. At least a novel that doesn’t require a book of annotations and a character notebook alongside it. I’m longing for simpler times.