Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is a prominent post-World War II American novelist known for his complex narratives and metafictional style, which draws attention to the constructed nature of fiction. Born into a well-off family in New York, Pynchon studied engineering physics at Cornell University before graduating with an English degree. His literary career began with his first novel, *V.*, which explores themes of entropy and paranoia through the journeys of disparate characters linked by a mysterious woman named V. This novel was followed by *The Crying of Lot 49*, where the protagonist grapples with uncertainty and societal dislocation.
Pynchon's magnum opus, *Gravity's Rainbow*, combines humor with a grim portrayal of war-torn Europe, delving into themes of control, technology, and existential dread. Despite a long hiatus from public life, he continued to publish notable works like *Vineland*, *Mason and Dixon*, and *Against the Day*, each marked by intricate plots and a blend of historical and cultural references. His later novels, such as *Inherent Vice* and *Bleeding Edge*, embrace detective narratives while maintaining his signature themes. Pynchon is regarded as a significant figure in modern American literature, celebrated for his unique style and profound explorations of contemporary society.
Thomas Pynchon
American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist.
- Born: May 8, 1937
- Place of Birth: Glen Cove, New York
Biography
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr., is the most controversial, the most discussed, and the most mysterious of the post-World War II writers who pioneered what is called metafiction (roughly, any fiction that calls attention to its fictive nature). Descended from eminent Massachusetts Puritans and raised in a conventional upper-middle-class Long Island family, Pynchon attended Cornell University as a student in engineering physics, left to serve a hitch in the Navy, and returned to graduate with a degree in English in 1959. He wrote his first stories while at Cornell. He worked as a writer for Boeing Aircraft from 1960 to 1962. As a result of Pynchon’s reclusiveness, little else is known of Pynchon’s life after 1962, other than that he has lived, variously, in Mexico, California, and New York, and that he and Melanie Jackson, his literary agent and mate, have a child. The chief public photo of Pynchon is from his high school yearbook.
Pynchon’s early fictions weave their complex interactions around the twin themes of entropy and paranoia. In his decaying world, characters are always afraid that they have been singled out for some dreadful fate; in many cases, the fear is justified. Pynchon’s first novel, V., was greeted with puzzlement by many of its readers and with the fanfare accorded an important new talent by many critics. The book won the Faulkner Award as the best first novel published in 1963. Its characters, either Navy men who spend their shore leaves being drunk and disorderly or a group of raffish New Yorkers who speak of themselves as "the Whole Sick Crew," are linked by the character of Benny Profane. Benny thinks of himself, accurately, as a "schlemiel." He has left the Navy, but he returns to Norfolk to drink and fight with his old buddies when he cannot think of anything better to do. In New York, he is part of an equally pointless life.
V. is not, however, simply a depressing novel about sad and useless characters. Pynchon’s style and the way in which events are presented often make the grimmest scenes comic. In one sequence, Profane joins a motley group of men who are issued rifles and shotguns and sent into the sewers beneath the streets of New York to kill the alligators that, grown too big to be pets, have been flushed down the city’s toilets. The action is murky but hilarious, and its links to other actions in the novel are tenuous. The novel is held together by its characters’ search for a mysterious woman named V., who has appeared in various guises at crucial points in the history of the Western world ever since 1898. The search itself is ludicrous and tragic by turns. The only hope for the searching characters is provided by a tenor saxophone player: "Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care."
The same combination of the wildly comic and the mysteriously threatening marks Pynchon’s second novel, The Crying of Lot 49. Much briefer and more coherent than V., this story centers on a California woman named Oedipa Maas who is named executor of the estate of a wealthy industrialist who was at one time her lover. The paranoia that was an underlying element in V. is the major focus of The Crying of Lot 49. In her travels in California, notably to San Francisco, trying to fulfill her obligations as executor, Oedipa can never be sure of anything except that the world in which she lives is mysterious and menacing. She is not even certain that her former lover is dead or that her job as executor is not a colossal practical joke being played on her. She uncovers a secret right-wing organization which seems to be linked to a centuries-old subversive group. She comes in contact with various people who have been cast out by society, discovering that her own ties to the world are not firm. The novel ends before she finds answers to any of her questions.
While both V. and The Crying of Lot 49 attracted admirers and detractors, Gravity’s Rainbow created a literary sensation and made Pynchon the object of more critical books and articles than any of his contemporaries. Centering on Europe at the end of World War II but encompassing elements of the history of the Western world over the last three centuries, Gravity’s Rainbow goes beyond the earlier novels in its evocation of paranoia and entropy (a concept that Pynchon, following philosopher Henry Adams, adapts from physics: The loss of energy in any action within a closed system will lead ultimately to the death of the universe).
Gravity’s Rainbow describes a war-ravaged Europe where characters with any spark of decency are threatened with destruction. A mysterious and hidden "They," acting through agents, seek to control and direct all life, removing emotion, chance, and love. "They" control gigantic business and political organizations that use technology to manipulate the war for their own ends. Resistance to "Them" is possible but temporary. In the end, technology and its products may succeed in abolishing life on Earth. Indeed it is arguable that the novel’s real protagonist is not Tyrone Slothrop, who disappears or "fragments" before the action closes, but the German V-2 rocket, which in many ways assumes a "life of its own." The novel ends with an atomic missile about to strike the theater in which the book’s audience sits.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, as in the earlier novels, wild humor leavens Pynchon’s grim message. Characters with humorously unusual names (Bloody Chiclitz, Roger Mexico, Jessica Swanlake, Miss Muller-Hochleben) engage in fantastic antics: Two men try unsuccessfully to trap a wandering dog in a bombed-out house, the dog at one point speaking in the voice of radio comedian Fred Allen; the central figure, Tyrone Slothrop, is installed in a pig costume to act in a pageant staged in a small German town and lives for weeks in the costume. The grisly, the obscene, the tragic, and the burlesque combine in Pynchon’s imagination.
For seventeen years after Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon stayed out of sight, known only through a few published book blurbs, letters-to-the-editor, and essays, including a telling piece of self-criticism introducing Slow Learner, a volume of his early stories released in order to halt their publication in unauthorized printings.
Vineland appeared to widely mixed reviews in 1989. Detractors seem mainly to have missed the entropy and bleak landscapes defining his prior fictions, and they thought Pynchon had lost his edge as a critic of modern times. Yet the novel tells a subtle and wildly comical story about the slow death of 1960s radicalism during the Reagan era, understood in reference to 1930s leftism and nineteenth century progressivism. The story’s focus on a still-unassimilated hippie, Zoyd Wheeler, his daughter Prairie, and the girl’s mother, long missing after selling out to FBI agents, brings into play Pynchon’s old theme of an omniscient bureaucratic "They" controlling daily life. The new element is television as an insidiously banal yet effective mode of social regulation. Unlike his earlier fictions, Vineland concludes somewhat hopefully, on a scene of family reunion in nature.
Mason and Dixon once again aroused discussion as to whether Pynchon had lost his direction or simply moved on to slightly different pastures. His title characters are Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the eighteenth century surveyors responsible for drawing the Mason-Dixon Line that divides the North from the South. Pynchon takes this enterprise as symbolic of the delineation, both physical and metaphorical, of the modern United States, indeed, of the modern world.
Pynchon again spent several reclusive years before the publication of his next novel, Against the Day, in 2006. It followed his characteristic style of a complex, twisting plot filled with literary and cultural references. A historical novel with the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and World War I as the main bookends, it employs various writing styles drawn from the popular fiction of the early twentieth century. It received a mainly positive critical response, with much analysis and interpretation of its layered themes. Pynchon followed this relatively quickly with the novel Inherent Vice (2009), which also took a historical focus as 1970s detective story. Viewed as one of his most accessible works, though filled with countercultural references and drug themes, it was another critical and popular success and was adapted into a film in 2014. The general concept of a detective story also provided the frame for Pynchon's next novel, Bleeding Edge (2013). Set in the early twenty-first century, it focuses prominently on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the immense impact of the Internet on society. Pynchon's trademark themes of paranoia and entropy are also present, and mainly strong reviews led it to be considered as a finalist for the National Book Award.
Despite his relative lack of productivity and his long silences between publications, Pynchon is assured a place among the most significant novelists of the mid-to late twentieth century. His amazing range of knowledge, his mastery of a bewildering variety of styles, and his ability to combine serious materials with surrealistic comedy mark his work as unique.
Author Works
Long Fiction:
V., 1963
The Crying of Lot 49, 1966
Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973
Vineland, 1989
Mason and Dixon, 1997
Against the Day, 2006
Inherent Vice, 2009
Bleeding Edge, 2013
Short Fiction:
"Mortality and Mercy in Vienna," 1959
"The Small Rain," 1959
"Entropy," 1960
"Low-Lands," 1960
"Under the Rose," 1961
"The Secret Integration," 1964
Slow Learner: Early Stories, 1984
Nonfiction:
Deadly Sins, 1993 (contributor)
Bibliography
Berressem, Hanjo. Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Birkerts, Sven. "Mapping the New Reality." The Wilson Quarterly 16 (Spring, 1992): 102-110.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. A useful collection of essays on all aspects of Pynchon’s literary works. Contains essays of an introductory nature for first-time readers of Pynchon’s prose.
Chambers, Judith. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Twayne, 1992.
Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980.
Diamond, Jamie. "The Mystery of Thomas Pynchon Leads Fans and Scholars on a Quest as Bizarre as His Plots." People Weekly 33 (January 29, 1990): 64–66.
Dickson, David. The Utterance of America: Emersonian Newness in Dos Passos’ "U.S.A." and Pynchon’s "Vineland." Göteborg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1998.
Dugdale, John. Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.
Grant, J. Kerry. A Companion to "The Crying of Lot 49." Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.
Grant, J. Kerry. A Companion to "V." Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.
Green, Geoffrey, Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery, eds. The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon’s Novel. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994.
Gussow, Mel. "Pynchon’s Letters Nudge His Mask." The New York Times, March 4, 1998, p. E1.
Hawthorne, Mark D. "Pynchon’s Early Labyrinths." College Literature 25 (Spring, 1998): 78-93. D
Horvath, Barbara, and Irving Malin, eds. Pynchon and "Mason and Dixon.". Delaware, 2000.
Hume, Kathryn. Pynchon’s Mythography: An Approach to "Gravity’s Rainbow." Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
Levine, George, and David Leverenz, eds. Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. A useful selection of essays on Pynchon’s prose.
McHoul, Alec, and David Wills. Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Mattessich, Stefan. Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003.
"Paul Murray on Thomas Pynchon: 'His Vision of the Future Feels More Prescient Every Day.'" The Booker Prizes, 2023, thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/paul-murray-on-thomas-pynchon. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.
Rothkopf, Joshua. "Sex, Drugs, and the Postal Service: Thomas Pynchon, a Beginner's Guide." Rolling Stone, 16 Dec. 2014, www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/pynchon-for-beginners-20141216. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.
Sales, Nancy Jo. "Meet Your Neighbor, Thomas Pynchon." New York 29 (November 11, 1996): 60-64.
Schaub, Thomas. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.
Slade, Joseph. Thomas Pynchon. New York: P. Lang, 1990.
Weisenburger, S. C. A "Gravity’s Rainbow" Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988.
Whelan, David. "Thomas Pynchon and the Myth of the Reclusive Author." Vice, 9 Oct. 2014, www.vice.com/en‗us/article/who-is-thomas-pynchon-and-why-did-he-take-off-with-my-life-198. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.