free fall

I’ve returned to Gravity’s Rainbow after a bit of a pause and am now immersed, infuriated, confused and completely SOLD. It’s a strange and masochistic satisfaction, being halfway through a very difficult book and knowing that you’ll have to return to the beginning and read it through again a couple of times before the pieces start to fall into place. It’s hilarious, perverse, paranoid, encyclopediac, schizoid and dazzlingly labyrinthine in terms of plot. I have no idea what the hell is going on. I desperately want to have a long ranty boozy conversation about this book with someone so I’ve been sitting in public places reading with the cover on full public view. Thus far, no one has walked up to me and started to enthuse. Now if I see people who are reading books that are particularly excellent and they don’t look like they will bite, I usually go and earbash them. Why will no-one come and talk Pynchon to me? Pynchon readers are freakazoid cultists, for crying out loud! I have questions… If I had full-time net access, I’d probably be plugged into Spermatikos Logikos or whatever it is called (actually quite good Pynchon fansite accessible through the really quite good The Modern Word) trawling through all the allusions that space cadets mourning the passage of modernism have gathered in their spare time. Doesn’t anybody study Postmodernism anymore? It can’t have gone out of fashion that quickly. I mean, I was teaching a course on Postmodernism last year and Pynchon was on the syllabus.

The closest I have come to a Pynchon chat was with a nice young feller sitting next to me on the bus who read the back cover when I went off for a wander. ‘Your book sounds a bit interesting,’ he said on my return. I think the blurb about the coincidence of Slothrop’s sexual conquests and the flight of the V-2 bombers is what got his attention because when I started rabbiting on about Pynchon, his eyes glazed over reasonably quickly and he started fidgeting in a purposeful manner with the controls of his iPod. Honestly. If some big dumb square-jawed American college jock walked up and said, ‘Pynchon, dude, aaaawesome,’ I’d be happy.

Anyway, if I could have a conversation about GR, I’d first of all get really excited about the sequence ‘You never did the Kenosha kid’ and Slothrop’s confectionary torture at Darlene’s… And what about the journey into the Central Nervous System? And what the hell is the relationship between Leni and Peter Sascha and Pointsman? And I want more Pirate Prentice! Brigadier Ernest Pudding – Ha! Entropy, entropy, is it the nature of the beast that I feel overloaded every time I try to consolidate my thoughts about entropy? Paranoid? Moi? What’s with maximum disorder within a poised, highly ordered formal structure? I know there’s zillions of Joyce-Pynchon trainspotters, what’s the official D&G line on Pynchon? What? You never read that book? Wow, I can’t believe you never did. The Kenosha kid sure did her research.

Hopefully by this stage, I’d be at the whiskey blurry phase of the conversation and then I’d really start to speculate about the great faceless polyvalent complexity that is the War, the possible putative mysterious controlling force of the narrative and History and then try to find some contemporary analogies…the event an always deferred eventuality, a delayed reverberation of its own consequence. And then I’d confess my recurring daydream that I sit next to TP on a plane and recognise him from that early Navy photo and the James Bone expose and play it cool about the whole secret identity thing and he knows that I know and we get on like a house on fire and it’s all really knowing and we have a long convoluted cryptic conversation which turns into a mutual admiration session and then we become friends and hang out from time to time and exchange slightly obscure but vital emails and I have to somehow keep it under my hat that Thomas Pynchon and I are Great Mates, Chums in spite of Chance…