A Pynchon Primer, or speaking of conspiracies

Well, he's done it again.

The master of the truly inexplicable yet compelling novel of postmodern weirdness, Thomas Pynchon has just released upon the literary and pop culture world his ninth novel. Still blowing our minds at the age of eighty-eight, Pynchon's latest novel Shadow Ticket is  a detective novel featuring "criminal cheesemongers, Jazz Age adventuresses, Hungarian magicians," and according to Washington Post books writer Jacob Brogan it is "bonkers and brilliant fun."

I was first introduced to Pynchon during my undergrad years in a contemporary novel class where we read the reasonably accessible Pynchon novella The Crying of Lot 49. I wish I knew enough then to really appreciate what the teacher was offering. For, it was nearly a decade later in grad school that my cohort read and literally devoured V.. Some of the discussions are still rattling around my head. And I appreciated the class because, like most, I would never have truly understood what Pynchon was doing without multiple viewpoints.

Which leads me to this excellent Pynchon Primer put together by New York Times critic-at-large A.O. Scott.

Since the 1960s and ’70s, when he made his name with “V.,” “The Crying of Lot 49” and the 900-page, National Book Award-winning “Gravity’s Rainbow,” Thomas Pynchon has been tagged with various highfalutin epithets: experimental writer, postmodernist, systems novelist. Gore Vidal, writing in The New York Review of Books in 1976, assigned Pynchon to the “R and D (Research and Development)” wing of contemporary literature. For Vidal, the opposite of R&D was R&R — the kind of fiction people might read for pleasure.

Nearly 50 years and five novels later, we can say that Vidal was half right. While Pynchon is properly celebrated as a formidable literary innovator, he is less often recognized as a great entertainer, a master of R&R. His books are challenging, mind-blowing, precedent-shattering — all of that, yes. They’re also a lot of fun.