More Alive and Less Lonely Page 22
Someone once claimed that the New York subways were a great secret neighborhood, running underneath all the others and uniting them—and that person wasn’t wrong—but the pizzerias, all so identical and each so snowflake- or fingerprint-unique, those are the upper stations of this Pynchonian secret system, the not-at-all innocuous fuel outposts, the crow’s nests for scoping out the upper realm—hence the famous synchronicity between the price of a slice and the cost of a single fare on the trains. Someday I’d like to pop out once at every station in the system and gobble a slice from the pizzeria a stone’s-throw from the stairwell (you know it’s there), and someday I will, I swear. To remember pizza is to remember your life, sure, but it’s also to dream of days, of slices to come, because the pizzerias of New York City are like that: stretching out implacably through your past to your untold future. Slow down, smell the dough—maybe grab a slice or two, or even a calzone, hey, you went to the gym yesterday, you deserve it—or hustle past, you type-A freak, they don’t care, it’s not personal to them. They’re not going anywhere, and there’s always a next slice.
—Introduction to The New York Pizza Project, 2015
Pynchonopolis
Are you ready for Thomas “Screaming Comes Across the Sky” Pynchon on the subject of September 11, 2001? On the one hand, his poetry of paranoia and his grasp of history’s surrealist passages, make a perfect fit. Yet his slippery insouciance, his relentless japery, risk being tonally at odds with the subject. Either way, and despite his sensibility’s entrenchment in 1960’s Californian hippiedom, Pynchon is a New Yorker, with an intimate license to depict the sulfurous gray plumes and tragic tableaus of that irreconcilable moment:
On the way home she passes the neighborhood fire-house. They’re in working on one of the trucks…She threads among the daily bunches of flowers on the sidewalk, which will be cleared in a while. The list of firefighters here who were lost on 11 September is kept back someplace more intimate, out of the public face, anybody wants to see it they can ask, but sometimes it shows more respect not to put such things out on a billboard…What makes these guys choose to go in, work 24-hour shifts and then keep working, keep throwing themselves into those shaky ruins, torching through steel, bringing people to safety, recovering parts of others, ending up sick, beat up by nightmares, disrespected, dead?
Thomas Pynchon, meet Pete Hammill? Not so fast. For it is the audacity or recklessness of Bleeding Edge also to sound like this:
Maxine notices this one party out on a remote curve of the bar, drinking you’d say relentlessly what will prove to be Jägermeister and 151, through a Day-Glo straw out of a twenty-ounce convenience-store cup…sure enough it’s him, Eric Jeffrey Outfield, übergeek, looking, except for the bare upper lip and a newly acquired soul patch, just like his ID photo. He is wearing cargo pants in a camo print whose color scheme is intended for some combat zone very remote, if not off-planet, and a T-shirt announcing, in Helvetica,
REAL GEEKS USE COMMAND PROMPTS
, accessorized with a Batbelt clanking like a charm bracelet with remotes for TV, stereo, and air condition, plus laser pointer, pager, bottle opener, wire stripper, voltmeter, magnifier, all so tiny that one legitimately wonders how functional they can be.In fact, the awful day is delayed for three hundred pages, by which time the two airliners crash not only into the twin towers but into an exemplary Pynchon shaggy-dog-novel in full effect. This one, featuring earth notes of Bret Easton Ellis and William Gibson, concerns the diversion of funds, by the shambolic white-collar outlaw Lester Traipse, from a hot Internet start-up called hashslingerz.com to a fiber brokerage called Darklinear Solutions, under the knowing eye of the corrupt dot-com entrepreneur Gabriel Ice. These figures move among dozens, in a conspiracy typically dazzling and ludicrous, as well as impossible (and maybe unimportant) to confidently trace.
We join a good companion in failing to trace it: Maxine Tarnow, fraud investigator and mother of two, who among Pynchon’s protagonists is rivaled for tangibility and homely charm only by doper private eye Doc Sportello, from 2009’s Inherent Vice. Though this book’s as long as V., categorists will mark it as Comparatively Stable, with The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland, as opposed to the Utterly Centrifugal: Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day. Maxine pinballs between workplace and family, and among the men in her life: her ex-husband, the commodities-trader Horst Loeffler, her infuriating fake-Zen shrink, Shawn; and the neoliberal death-squad spook Nicholas Windust, Pynchon’s latest update of his prototypical cop-heavy. Like Philip Marlowe, Maxine plunges into dive bars armed with nothing but her wits—except Marlowe never stripped for a pole-dance to surveil strip-joint customers from the vantage of the stage. She also visits DeepArcher, a realm of the “deep Web” providing sanctuary for the avatars of fugitive gamers, cyber-anarchists and possibly the 9/11 dead. Pynchon has consistently invoked these sorts of quasi-mystical vales of yearning: spaces outside space, and times outside time. DeepArcher is his latest bardo.
But wait. I’m acting as if we all know what it is to read Pynchon. In fact none of us do, for figuring out what it is like to read Pynchon is what it is like to read Pynchon. You’re never done with it. He’ll employ a string of citations to real and imaginary Bette Davis movies, say, or riffs on basketball, much as Pollock uses a color on a panoramic canvas or Coltrane a note in a solo: incessantly, arrestingly, yet seemingly without cumulative purpose. Instead, they’re threads for teasing at, or being teased by. Try Bette Davis, who often played good/bad twins or sisters: she resonates—uh, maybe?—with Pynchon’s Poe-like attraction to characters split into sinister mirrored doubles. Or try basketball, which in Pynchon’s scheme appears to connect disparate persecuted tribes like Mayans, Jews and African-Americans—yet, why, then, does Horst—(“a fourth-generation product of the U.S. Midwest, emotional as a grain elevator”)—twice hold his head in both hands “as if about to attempt a foul shot with it”?
Well, basketball’s Midwestern too. As Hitchcock said, admiring his own Strangers on a Train, “Isn’t it a fascinating design? One could study it forever.” This down-the-rabbit-hole invitation, accepted by generations of fans and scholars, confronts those wishing to join the party with a lost sensation: at which secret mailbox to send away for a decoder ring?
Motifs bleed off the edge of one Pynchon canvas onto the next. Partisans of Pig Bodine, from 1963’s V.—he of the “remarkably acute nose,” who is “never known…to guess wrong” about a brand of beer—will thrill at meeting, fifty years later, Conkling Speedwell, “a freelance professional Nose…born with a sense of smell far more sensitive than the rest of us normals enjoy.” New readers may groan, not least at that reference to “normals”—are Pynchonites merely flashing hipster credentials?
What this misses, though, is the sheer vitality and fascination, the plummets into beauty and horror, the unique flashes of galactic epiphany, in Pynchon’s method. Our reward for surrendering expectations that a novel should gather in clarity, rather than disperse into molecules, isn’t anomie but delight. Pynchon himself’s a good companion, full of real affection for his people and places, even as he lampoons them for suffering the postmodern condition of being only partly real. He spoils us with descriptive flights. Here’s uptown in the rain:
What might only be a simple point on the workday cycle…becomes a million pedestrian dramas, each one charged with mystery, more intense than high-barometer daylight can ever allow. Everything changes. There’s that clean, rained-on smell. The traffic noise gets liquefied. Reflections from the street into the windows of city buses fill the bus interiors with unreadable 3-D images, as surface unaccountably transforms to volume. Average pushy Manhattan schmucks crowding the sidewalks also pick up some depth, some purpose—they smile, they slow down, even with a cellular phone stuck in their ear they are more apt to be singing to somebody than yakking. Some are observed taking houseplants for walks in the rain. Even the lightest umbrella-to-umbrella contact can be erotic.
This time out, Pynchon may be pursu
ing a small clarification in his historical pageant of conspiracy. Bleeding Edge unnervingly plays footsie with 9/11 trutherism, but I think the discomfort this arouses is intentional. Like DeLillo in Libra, Pynchon is interested in the mystery of wide and abiding complicity, not some abruptly punctured innocence: “Somewhere, down at some shameful dark recess of the national soul, we need to feel betrayed, even guilty. As if it was us who created Bush and his gang, Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Feith.” Horst, who possesses an idiot-savant gift for profitable investment predictions—Tyrone Slothrop on Wall Street!—observes a dip in certain airline shares the week before 9/11, and wonders: “How could predicting market behavior be the same as predicting a terrible disaster?” Maxine supplies the answer: “If the two were different forms of the same thing.”
While paranoia in everyday life believes the worst questions have monstrously simple answers, paranoid art knows the more terrifying (and inevitable) discoveries are further questions. Paranoid art traffics in interpretation, and beckons interpretation from its audience; it distrusts even itself, and so becomes the urgent opposite of complacent art. In Pynchon’s view, modernity’s systems of liberation and enlightenment—railway and post, the Internet, et al.—perpetually collapse into capitalism’s Black Iron Prison of enclosure, monopoly and surveillance; the rolling frontier (or bleeding edge) of this collapse is where we persistently and helplessly live. His characters take sustenance on what scraps of freedom fall from the conveyor belt of this ruthless conversion machine, like the housecat at home in the butcher’s shop. In Joyce’s formulation, history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. For Pynchon, history is a nightmare within which we must become lucid dreamers.
Thomas Pynchon is seventy-six, and this refusal to develop a late style is practically infuriating. The man’s wildly consistent: the only reason Bleeding Edge couldn’t have been published in 1973 is that the internet, Guiliani/Disney Times Square and the war on terror hadn’t come along yet. This book, and Inherent Vice, make jubilant pendants on his mammoth enterprise, neon signposts to themes he took no trouble to hide in the first place.
Pynchon depicts the world as he sees it, riddled by the depredations of greed, conspiracy and intolerance, of entropies both human-engineered and cosmically imposed. But his novels take the form of the world as he wishes it, hence their mighty powers of consolation. The freedoms and duties Pynchon assigns himself are those he desires on our behalf—lasciviousness, punning inanity, attention to the routinely sublime but also to the inevitability of suffering, love for the underdog and a home in our hearts for the dead. Also, license to attempt disappearance into some radical space adjacent to history, and to daily life—what anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey has called “Temporary Autonomous Zones”—even if the costs of such jaunts are, in the end, punishingly high. There’s much talk of time travel in Bleeding Edge, but getting unmoored is hardly a free ride: “You don’t just climb into a machine, you have to do it from inside out, with your mind and body, and navigating Time is an unforgiving discipline. It requires years of pain, hard labor and loss, and there is no redemption—of, or from, anything.”
In summary: Despite the lack of personal information supplied about the author, it’s plain, from the sweep and chortle of his sentences, from the irascible outbreaks of horniness, from the pinpoint rage at popular hypocrisy and cant, that young Pynchon is a writer of boundless promise, sure to give us a long shelf of entrancing and charismatic novels. I believe he has a masterpiece or three in him. I look forward to seeing what he’ll do next.
—The New York Times, 2013
To Cosmicomics
Now listen, Cosmicomics: How’d you get so folksy,
So elegant, so insouciant, when by any paraphrase
You’re some sort of staggering cosmic acid journey?
I guess the Grateful Dead pulled off the same trick
But they’re nothing like you. Though then again,
If Deadheads ran the public education system
You’d be the high school science class textbook.
(How I’d love to impose you on Texas.)
I’d better explain. In your tales
This unpronounceable character Qfwfq
Appears and reappears in many forms and guises,
And like Marvel’s “The Watcher” (another Calvino title, hey!)
Ogles the big bang, evolution, and a whole menu
Of zoological and cosmological happenings.
Each time, he’s stuck inside the story, hapless voyager
And yet also an eternal galactic bystander,
One aware he’ll jaunt from this exploit to another.
Goofy Qfwfq: he’s nobody and everybody,
He has no body, yet he’s all of us.
Cosmicomics, you’re silly, and sexy, too; my paperback
Edition boasts “ ‘All at One Point’ and ‘Games Without End’
Originally appeared in Playboy magazine”—yowza!
I guess you could be some kind of angelic stroke book
With pin-ups of the cosmos, which, when unfolded,
Filled all time and space. But then easily folded back, too.
Cosmicomics, you’re like that: bigger on the inside
Than the outside; as when, while tripping, you
Stare at the housecat and see a sabertooth, or pick
Your nose and find a whole fractal world up in there.
—Black Clock, 2015
Anthony Burgess Answers Two Questions
This was 1985—not the Anthony Burgess novel, the year (Anthony Burgess wrote so many books you might have to make that specification about a number of words or phrases—“On going to bed, I read ninety-nine novels—no, I mean I really did go to bed and read ninety-nine novels!”). I was dropping out of college and had begun a novel and returned to New York. A bookstore in Manhattan announced a rare reading and signing by Anthony Burgess, a primary hero of mine at the time, for his autodidact’s erudition and braggadocio, and for how he’d gentrified a number of outre genres just by picking them up and mingling them with his erudition and braggadocio. I grabbed a couple of first editions—an unseemly three first editions, actually—and stuffed them in a sack and took the subway uptown. I was hours early, completely certain the event would be standing-room-only. Well, it was eventually, but I was still early. I camped out on a folding chair, front row center. The room filled and eventually the great man was introduced. I don’t think he read anything. He pontificated, chain-smoked and wheezed, retailed anecdotes, was charming and spellbinding and ghastly. Soon the chance came for questions from the audience. There I was, front row center, my hand in the air, and as if claiming the privilege of my having arrived three hours early, I was called on first. With great posturing of my own I set up my question, a painfully obvious one: “You recently published a list of the ninety-nine best novels in English in the last century; which of your own would you select to round out the hundred?” It was painfully obvious he’d been asked before and painfully obvious how he’d rehearsed the mock-casual, mock-surprised response. “Well, to be quite honest I hadn’t thought I was leaving room for one of my own, humph humph, that wasn’t my intention, but I suppose it is reasonable to expect an author to have a favorite among one’s own works, hack hack, I’m sure many people will expect me to say Earthly Powers, which has been received as a sort of ‘chef-d’oeuvre’ in many quarters, hem hem, but in truth the book of which I’m fondest, hurr hurr, very likely for private reasons of my own yet it is my vanity to think that among my novels it is the likeliest to endure, heh heh, and certainly no one here will have heard of it, it was given a very negligible treatment either here or in Great Britain, a novel with the odd title ‘MF’…”
Burgess may have been about to continue, or not, but in any event he was halted in his progress by the rustling at my feet—at his feet, nearly. For I was seated, just as I’ve said, front row center, and the riser on which his chair was placed put him only a foot or so abov
e me. Out of my knapsack came the American first edition of MF, which I’d brought for him to sign, and now brandished happily for anyone who wished to see it, and to see how I’d punctured his anecdote.
“Ah, yes, hah hah, well, there it is, what are the odds of that?”
He was pissed.
At the signing line, after his talk, I presented the book to him again, along with copies of The Wanting Seed and A Tremor of Intent, for his signatures. “You’re the hic hic young man with the book, very good, very good…”
I requested that he sign A Tremor of Intent to my friend Eliot, and then asked my second question. The Wanting Seed, my favorite of his novels—could it, possibly, by any chance, have been influenced by the writing of Philip K. Dick? (I now know that Burgess’s novel was written well before any of Dick’s major novels had appeared; the question was foolish.)