1. It has to have started as a joke about a novel so complex it turns into rocket science. Actual
rocket science.
2. True, it's a Bakhtinian orgy of a thousand
discourses, many of them remarkably specialized. But it's narrated in just
two main voices, really: the grandiose, God-sized one that gives us the
famous opening line, "A screaming comes across the sky," and the deliberately
facile (o-or glib!) one that's in charge for roughly
a million Roadrunner & Coyote-type scenes, including the one that gives us the equally famous "fickt nicht mit dem raketemensch!" After a few hundred pages they're both pretty
hard to take—the second especially, as it gets to sounding a little too much like this guy:
3. It's like a brilliant, ambitious, thoroughly researched novel about the last days of World War II dropped acid. Rather a whole lot of acid.
4. World War II is to Pynchon what the JFK assassination is to Don DeLillo in Libra: postmodernity's founding moment, o-or the moment at which the modern world's complexity outstripped the human mind's capacity to conceptualize, theorize, narratize, chart, map, or otherwise grasp it (behold GR's several hundred characters and dozens of fragmented, often only semi-followable plot lines, some of them of ambiguous ontological status). This post isn't about Libra, so I won't quote DeLillo. But here's Pynchon on the War—and, by extension, on his own book:
The War, the Empire, will expedite . . . barriers between our lives. The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Führer—it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity . . . . Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it.
"There's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less . . . sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle."5. It's thrilling, sure, watching a planet-sized brain hit all the afterburners, shake off all the shackles, give itself license to say or depict absolutely anything that occurs to it, propriety and concern for whether the reader's keeping up be damned. (Really: no novel was ever more toweringly indifferent to its audience.) But it gradually becomes clear this avalanche of language, to steal a phrase a friend uses to describe Moby Dick, is concerned mainly (if words like "concerned" and "mainly" even make sense here) with denouncing a nebulous, death-obsessed, hyper-bureaucratized "Them" bent on dragging the modern world, through such insane enterprises as World War II, into its grave. And you almost have to wonder, after a certain amount of the old ultraviolence (there's stuff in this book, to note it, Bret Easton Ellis wouldn't touch with a ten-foot whatever), whether GR is really an indictment of Them or their unwitting agent.
6. I am a Pynchon fan, believe it or not: The Crying of Lot 49 has to be one of my ten all-time favorite novels. If you're looking to get into Pynchon, start with that way more controlled, way more coherent book. It's a maximalist novella.
Now that's funny.
