Not Feeling the Pynch

I’m in between books right now. This condition never lasts long, but it’s strange that it’s happening just now. See, there’s a new book out by an author who used to be my fave, but I’m not interested in reading it, and I’m not sure why that is.

Last week, I stopped by a nearby bookstore and took a look at the new novel by Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day. I used to consider myself a devotee of his books, but I was surprised to find that I had little interest in buying this one. This is a marked change from the winter of 1990, when I got out of a (barely) moving car to run into a B.Dalton’s after seeing the newly published Vineland in the window. There was even some bating of my breath in 1997 when Mason & Dixon was released. Now? Bupkes.

It’s not because of an aversion to long / involved books (AtD is nearly 1100 pages); I just finished a 600-page exploration of the history and meaning of the mourner’s kaddish, worked my way through a 1200-page biography of Robert Moses last summer, and read Proust’s opus in the spring of 2005.

The problem (I think) stems from a short work by Pynchon: his introduction to a recent edition of George Orwell’s 1984. I read the intro a few weeks ago, and was amazed by how much Pynchon came off as an aging hippie who was trading off his old licks. Pynchon’s attempted hijacking of 1984 to tacitly denounce the Bush administration read as something far less nuanced than I’d come to expect from the writer. This, of course, led me to suspect that I was too kind in my past readings of Pynchon’s work, but I haven’t gone back to check.

(A gentleman named Mark Ciocco summed up pretty nicely some of his problems with Pynchon’s 1984 intro in a post and a followup) on his blog a few years ago.)

So, by the time this new book saw print, and the first review (from a right-wing newspaper) mentioned the cardboard-ness of The Bad Guys in the novel, it struck me that maybe I’m just too old for Pynchon’s whole Merry Prankster / anarchist counterforce approach, in which the doomed valiant create chaos just about for its own sake, with the corollary belief that order is inherently evil. Or maybe he’s too old to see the present era with the vivacity of his earlier work. Or maybe he’s still writing allegories of the struggle against Nixon.
I’m rambling, which you’re used to by now. I’m trying to convey this suspicion I have that, despite all the gorgeous, Rilkean prose and labyrinths of symbolism he broke out in Gravity’s Rainbow, and all the intricate, encapsulated plotting of The Crying of Lot 49, and even the wondrous camaraderie he evoked between Mason and Dixon, this guy may be a burned-out wreck who complains about The Government, Big Business, Dehumanizing Technology, and other embarrasingly obvious targets.

Driving home tonight, I heard a song by the Who on my Sirius radio. I hadn’t heard Cry if You Want in a bazillion years, and my first thought was, “Man, Kenny Jones was a boring drummer.” But then there were the lyrics, which feel apropos:

Don’t you want to hide your face
When going through your teenage books
And read the kind of crap you wrote
About “Ban the Bomb” and city crooks

So I’m back where I started: between books. I’d start Ron Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare book, but I’m flying soon (Toronto to visit a couple of clients) and I don’t want to carry a big hardcover with me. I could always follow Ron’s recent suggestion and start reading the Philip Kerr Berlin Noir omnibus. Choices, choices. . .