Pynchon is among the best known of the writers who came to prominence in the 1960’s and 1970’s with a new kind of fiction. At first this movement was called “black humor” because the novels and stories written by such authors as Pynchon, John Barth, Joseph Heller, Bruce Jay Friedman, and Gilbert Sorrentino, among others, tended to present events that were grim and terrifying but to deal with them in a wildly humorous manner. This style was also called “fabulation,” a term coined by the critic Robert Scholes to reflect the idea that these writers rejected realism and deliberately called attention to the fabulous nature of their stories and novels. More recently, most critics have taken to using the term “metafiction” to describe the works of these writers. The term is intended to suggest that these writers have gone beyond conventional fiction and are creating works that make no pretense of representing reality.

Pynchon occupies a special place among this group of writers. All of them attempt to create distinctive styles, as style is an essential element in a fiction that does not try to represent human reality, but Pynchon commands a wider and wilder variety of styles than any of his contemporaries. He moves readily from wisecracking informality to obscenity to elegiac prose to fast-paced narrative. He employs humor ranging from high-comedy word play to pie-throwing and outrageous puns. From the beginning, he gives his characters names which are significant or simply silly (Jessica Swanlake, Benny Profane, Herbert Stencil, Mucho Maas, Stanley Kotecks, Dr. Hilarius the psychiatrist).

More important, Pynchon’s novels, especially Gravity’s Rainbow, generally acknowledged to be his masterpiece, deserve to be called “encyclopedic,” a critical term used to describe huge novels which contain vast amounts of information about the writer’s culture. In Pynchon’s work, this means that the reader is presented with obscure lore about films, technical data from physics and mathematics, folklore from a number of cultures, new readings of historical events, informed references to popular and classical music, and various other types of knowledge. No other contemporary writer commands such a wide range of information.

Pynchon’s stories and novels, at least until the publication of Vineland, have been dominated by two themes. The first is the concept of entropy (the second law of thermodynamics), which states that particles in any closed system tend to become increasingly agitated and their movements increasingly random as the system decays until they reach a stage (“heat death”) in which no energy is exchanged, no further motion is possible, and the system dies. Pynchon owes to Henry Adams, the nineteenth century American novelist, historian, and autobiographer, the idea of applying this principle from physics to human organizations, especially to political entities. One of Pynchon’s first stories is titled “Entropy” and tries to spell out how the idea can be used in fiction.

The other dominant concept in Pynchon’s fiction is paranoia, the psychological condition which has been popularly called a persecution complex: the idea that the individual is the target of the unmotivated hatred of almost everyone and everything. As the fourth of Pynchon’s “Proverbs for Paranoids” states in Gravity’s Rainbow, “You hide. They seek.” For Pynchon’s characters, the idea that they live in a world in which everything is connected and everything is hostile to them is basic; a few of these characters, however, find themselves even more terrified by antiparanoia—the idea that nothing is connected, that everything is totally random.

The paranoid concern is certainly present in Pynchon’s first novel, V., where hints of an all-encompassing plot disturb the lives of most of the characters, but it becomes more dominant in The Crying of Lot 49, whose central figure keeps stumbling across indications of an ancient conspiracy whose manifestations include mass murders which are sometimes fictitious, sometimes apparently real. Pynchon’s preoccupation with paranoia reaches a climax in Gravity’s Rainbow, which includes the five Proverbs for Paranoids, a song titled “Paranoia,” and discussions of the phenomenon by the narrator and by the characters. The problem is less noticeable in Vineland, Pynchon’s fourth novel, but it clearly affects a number of the characters.

The concerns with entropy and paranoia are developed, in all his novels, through plots that detail quests. The important characters in all these books are in search of something. Although in Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon relates his characters’ questing to the ancient search for the Holy Grail, these fictional quests are often for vaguely defined goals, and in Pynchon’s hands they almost always fail or end ambiguously.

Benny Profane, the nearest thing to a protagonist in V., is looking for something he cannot define, something that would give a meaning to life, but many of the other characters are involved in a search for the mysterious woman known by several names, all beginning with the letter “V.” This woman, or one of her manifestations, appears at places and times where violence is imminent. The violence may or may not occur, but the mysterious woman—becoming less and less human—may be the cause of it, or she may be attracted to it. The truth of this is never made clear, but the characters are no less determined in their quest for V.

Oedipa Maas, the central figure in The Crying of Lot 49, is on a more clearly defined quest. She finds that she has been made the executor of the will of a former lover, a tycoon whose estate she must try to discover and define. Oedipa falls into a nightmarish California world, stretching from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, where she encounters hints of a secret organization called Tristero and what seems to be a subversive postal system called WASTE. She pursues her quest through encounters with human wreckage and scientific puzzles, never knowing with any certainty whether the tycoon is really dead or whether she is deliberately being led through a maze which has no solution.

The object of the quest involving almost every character in Gravity’s Rainbow is an advanced German rocket, fired in the final days of World War II. In more or less elaborate ways, each of the characters searches for evidence of the rocket. For the British, American, and Russian officials, the search is for technology that will be useful in trying to gain a military advantage in the postwar world. For the survivors of an African tribe which has been living in Germany, locating the rocket would provide a means to regain their tribal unity and character. For Tyrone Slothrop, the American lieutenant who is the central character in the novel’s early sections, the search is a compulsion forced on him by the manipulation of his subconscious mind. For other characters, the search for the rocket is an end in itself, something that gives form and meaning to otherwise pointless lives.

In Vineland, the quest is diffuse. Zoyd Wheeler is hiding out, looking for security, while his daughter Prairie searches for her mother, Frenesi Gates, who left husband and daughter years before, fatally attracted to Brock Vond, a menacing federal prosecutor. Prairie, whose search is the nearest thing in this novel to a genuine quest, is also trying to find the truth about her mother and the reasons for her departure. Frenesi seems to have disappeared; Vond is also looking for Frenesi and, incidentally, for Prairie. Other characters have their own searches; as in other Pynchon works, many of these have no real goal but serve to provide a shape for otherwise formless lives.

“Entropy”

First published: 1960 (collected in Slow Learner: Early Stories, 1984)

Type of work: Short story

Dwellers in two separate apartments provide a lesson in the workings of entropy.

“Entropy” was the second professional story published by Pynchon, and this comic but grim tale established one of the dominant themes of his entire body of work. The setting is an apartment building in Washington, D.C., on a rainy day early in 1957. In a third-floor apartment, Meatball Mulligan and a strange group of friends and interlopers are in the fortieth hour of a break-the-lease party. Some of Mulligan’s friends are listening to rock music played on a huge speaker bolted to a metal wastebasket; when the music ends they carry on a hip discussion of the jazz music of the time, centering on Gerry Mulligan’s piano-less quartet. The Duke di Angelis quartet, as they call themselves, carry on an experiment, playing music without any instruments and without any sounds, a kind of telepathic nonmusic. Women guests are passed out in various places in the apartment, including the bathroom sink.

As the party continues, more people arrive. One man comes because he and his wife have had a fight about communication theory and she has left him. A group of coeds from Georgetown University arrives to join the party. So does a group of five sailors, who have been told that Mulligan’s apartment is a brothel. They refuse to leave, latch onto the unattached women, and continue the party. At one point a fight almost breaks out between the sailors and the musical group, but Mulligan decides to intervene and calm people down. At the end of the story, the party is continuing.

On the floor above, a man named Callisto and his girlfriend, Aubade, live in a closed environment. Over seven years, Callisto has created a sealed space, complete with vegetation and birds, cut off from the world outside. The temperature inside and outside is holding steady at 37 degrees. Callisto is holding a sick bird, trying to make it well with the warmth of his body, but in the end the bird dies. They have reached the moment of stasis predicted by the theory of entropy: There is no longer any heat exchange. Aubade breaks the window, and they wait together for all life to end.

The story intends to illustrate Pynchon’s understanding of the theory of entropy as it might be applied to human beings and their activities. He acknowledges that the idea came from Henry Adams, who first applied the physical law to society, but Pynchon sets up the contrasting apartments as a means to demonstrate the differences between open and closed systems. Callisto’s system is totally closed, and in a relatively short time loses all motion based on the exchange of heat; when everything is the same temperature, nothing moves. The bird’s death prefigures the death of the entire system.

Mulligan’s apartment, on the other hand, is for the time being an open system. People come and go. The Duke di Angelis quartet can play its silent music, and the sailors can get drunk and flirt with the women. Choice is still possible, so Mulligan can choose to defuse the fight rather than allow the party to degenerate into total chaos. The laws of thermodynamics apply here as well as in Callisto’s apartment, however; the party verges on chaos because, as a system heats up, motion within it becomes increasingly random and violent. The system in this apartment will continue to function as long as fresh energy can enter from outside, but once external stimuli cease to arrive, this system, too, will reach a point of stasis.

“The Secret Integration”

First published: 1964 (collected in Slow Learner: Early Stories, 1984)

Type of work: Short story

Three boys and an imaginary playmate try to subvert the world of their prejudiced parents.

“The Secret Integration” is the longest and most interesting of Pynchon’s early stories. Set in Mingeboro, a small town in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, it concerns a group of teenage boys who have hatched a plot to disrupt the adult community and eventually to assume control of the town themselves. At the time of the story they are preparing their second annual trial run, pretending to attack the school and considering what other steps they might take.

The four boys most deeply involved are Grover Snodd, a kind of genius, an inventor whose inventions rarely work but who has convinced his parents and the school board to let him leave the local school to study at the nearby college; Tim Santora, a typical teenager; Étienne Cherdlu, a compulsive joker (his name is a pun on the old printers’ fill-in line, etaoin shrdlu); and Carl Barrington, son of a black family that has just moved into a new housing development. The mothers of Grover and Tim make anonymous obscene phone calls to the Barringtons’ home, trying to force them to leave town.

The story depends on misdirection. The four boys seem to be cast in the mold of Booth Tarkington’s Penrod and Sam or Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer—mischievous but good-hearted, involved in boys’ games that cannot harm anyone. (Tarkington was a twentieth century novelist who wrote about boys’ games in a small Indiana town; Twain was a nineteenth century American novelist, some of whose works dealt with boys’ adventures.) It seems to be merely a joke that one of their other friends, Hogan Slothrop, son of the town doctor, has been an alcoholic at age eight and a member of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) since age nine. The boys even have a secret hideout where they do most of their planning, a basement room in an abandoned mansion. The mansion seems to be haunted, and it has to be approached in a leaky boat—classic conditions from adventure tales for boys.

Their plot has been going on for three years and seems to be running out of steam as they leave their hideout, but then the story seems to lurch into a long digression on events that had occurred previously. It concerns Hogan Slothrop, who a year earlier was supposed to infiltrate a PTA meeting and set off a smoke bomb but was called by the local A.A. to go to the local hotel and sit with a fellow alcoholic who is under stress. Tim accompanies Hogan, and Grover and Étienne soon appear at the hotel as well. They try to help the black musician, Carl McAfee, who has somehow wandered into Mingeboro, broke and miserable. They are let in on McAfee’s life and his misery. They try unsuccessfully to help a man who is beyond any help they can provide. Eventually they witness his removal by the local police.

After this episode, the boys’ lives return to normal; they even have a successful adventure, using small children and a kind of stage set to terrify the crew and passengers of a railroad train one night. Then, the following summer, the Barringtons move into the new development, and the boys find Carl and make him their friend. As the climax of the story makes clear, however, Carl is a fantasy, made up by the three other boys to compensate for their parents’ prejudice and hatred. When the boys visit the new development and find definite evidence that their parents have been involved in dumping garbage on the Barringtons’ lawn, they try to clean up the mess, only to be sent away by Mrs. Barrington. Carl then departs; they send him away, because they cannot bear to give up their need for their parents and the comforts of their homes. They are becoming adults.

V.

First published: 1963

Type of work: Novel

Characters either wander aimlessly in postwar America or search for a woman who may provide a clue to the violent nature of the modern world.

Pynchon’s first extended work of fiction focuses on two disparate plots. At the center of the first of these is Benny Profane, a self-styled schlemiel, a veteran of the Navy who spends his time going up and down the East Coast (in the novel his movement is called “yo-yoing”) between New York City and the naval base at Norfolk, Virginia. Profane’s life has no real purpose, and he has no deep attachments to anyone; his parents are never mentioned, and his girlfriends come and go. He takes only jobs that are by their nature temporary. At one point he is a night watchman in a crazy kind of computer laboratory; at another he is part of a crew that roams New York’s sewers at night, shooting the alligators that have been flushed down when they grew too big to be pets. His friends are a group who call themselves the Whole Sick Crew; like him, they have no sustaining purpose in life.

The other continuing thread running through V. has to do with a mysterious woman who began appearing around the time of a crisis in East Africa before World War I, known in history as the Fashoda affair, which seemed likely to bring about an armed conflict between Great Britain and France. The woman has many names (Veronica, Victoria, Vera), all beginning with the letter V. She appears in other places, as well, first in German Southwest Africa at a time of native rebellion, living among a besieged group of Europeans in a fortified farmhouse. She is present when a group of South Americans in Italy is planning a revolution in their homeland, and still later she is the lover of a young ballerina in Paris between the two world wars. Finally she appears on the Mediterranean island of Malta during World War II, at a time when the island is subject to intense bombing by the Italian and German air forces.

V. metamorphoses from a seemingly innocent English girl with a fascination for violence into a cosmopolite whose ethnic origins are obscure and who seems to feed on violence done to herself as well as to others. In the German redoubt she is German herself, but in her later manifestations her origins and her real nature are unclear; one mad priest in New York even believes that she manifests herself as a rat living in the sewers beneath the city. Over the years she becomes less and less human, as mechanical devices are substituted for parts of her body. By the 1940’s she is almost entirely a machine.

The connection between Benny Profane and the Whole Sick Crew on one hand and V. on the other hand is an Englishman who associates with them named Herbert Stencil. Stencil’s father, a British agent, had known and been fascinated by V. since the Fashoda affair. There is also a link through a young woman, Paola Maijstral, who is a friend of Benny and a member of the Whole Sick Crew. Paola is Maltese by birth; her parents had married during the war and had endured the air raids together. Paola’s father, Fausto Maijstral, has written a diary (it occupies a long chapter of V.) which provides important information about the character V. Paola finally convinces Benny to visit Malta in the 1960’s.

In general terms, the different plot lines represent the two different themes of V. Benny and the Whole Sick Crew represent the forces of entropy; their activities become increasingly frenzied and random as the novel progresses and as the system of which they are a part becomes more closed. The searchers for V. are subject to strong forces of paranoia, believing that there is a gigantic plot they can uncover if only they can find the key. The mysterious land called Vheissu, a kind of fantasy British colony of which no one knows anything real, reinforces their belief. At the same time, it is evident that the characters in Benny’s world are subject to paranoid fears; moreover, the world of the spies and agents is also a closed system, increasingly frenetic and destructive, likely to either explode or end in an inertial balance.

Despite all the humor and wild improbability it involves, V. is finally a grim book. Benny Profane is loved by several women but is unable to return their love in a meaningful way. When last seen, he is standing on the shore in Valletta, the capital of Malta, in total darkness, no happier and no wiser than he was in the beginning. The epilogue to the book shows that the older Stencil, having located V. on Malta in 1919, disappeared when a waterspout suddenly appeared on a calm day and destroyed the boat on which he was leaving the island.

V. is not, however, a hopeless book. The very vividness of its writing, the inventiveness of many of its characters in the face of potential disaster, and the humaneness some of them exhibit show that some of these strange creatures, at least, are capable of a sort of redemption. Pynchon in V., as in other stories and novels, suggests that art, in its many forms, can provide potential alternatives to chaos or to entropy. He puts in the mind of a black jazz musician named McClintock Sphere the palliative words: “The only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work. Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.”

The Crying of Lot 49

First published: 1966

Type of work: Novel

A California housewife embarks on a quest for the real nature of a secret organization called Tristero and its underground postal system called WASTE.

The Crying of Lot 49 is Pynchon’s briefest book and the one with the least complicated plot, although it contains plenty of twists and turns. Oedipa Maas, a bored California housewife, is informed that she is the executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a former lover. Oedipa is plunged into an increasingly complicated and increasingly sinister search for the estate, which becomes a search for meaning.

Oedipa uncovers what seems to be a vast underground conspiracy with ancient origins. Its present manifestation is an illegal communications system whose origins go back to the Middle Ages, when the private European postal service operated by Thurn and Taxis (this is historically accurate, as is so much in Pynchon’s work) gained a monopoly on mail delivery in Europe. In the novel, a rival group calling itself Tristero began a bitter and violent attempt to take business away from Thurn and Taxis. Remnants of the subversive group found their way to the New World and tried to subvert the U.S. Postal Service. Their system is called WASTE, which may mean that the alternative system is a waste of time and effort (some of their mail drops are garbage cans), but which may be an acronym and slogan: “We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire.”

Oedipa first finds the system operating among employees at a Silicon Valley electronics company called Yoyodyne, located in a town called San Narcisco, which, seen from a hill, looks like a printed computer circuit. She follows clues to a housing development in the area, where she is told a story about an American detachment in World War II that was wiped out by Nazis on the shores of an Italian lake. Later she attends a play, “The Courier’s Tragedy,” supposedly written by a contemporary of William Shakespeare, in which a similar massacre took place at the same spot as the climax of an Elizabethan tragedy of revenge. There are suggestions that Tristero was somehow responsible for both events, but Oedipa is unable to track down the original version of the play. The man who staged and acted in it mysteriously dies.

Oedipa’s search continues through encounters with strange people, including a crazy psychiatrist; a scientist who is trying to prove the existence of a puzzle in physics called Maxwell’s Demon, named for the famous British physicist Clark Maxwell; her increasingly deranged husband, Mucho; and a conference of deaf people who dance in perfect rhythm to music they cannot hear. At the end of the novel she is waiting for the opening of a stamp auction (the title, The Crying of Lot 49, refers to the opening of bidding for one item or group of items at an auction) which may reveal the meaning of Tristero, if indeed it has a meaning.

All of this sounds somewhat grim, but like Pynchon’s other works, The Crying of Lot 49 is lightened by the style, by high and low comedy, and by Pynchon’s verbal gymnastics. The characters’ names include Mike Fallopian, Stanley Koteks, Randolph Driblette, Bloody Chiclitz, and Arnold Snarb, among many others. There is a rock group calling themselves the Paranoids, who imitate the Beatles in every possible way. There is a law firm called Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus. The canned music in Oedipa’s local supermarket plays a nonexistent Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto, performed by the Fort Wayne Settecento Ensemble (also nonexistent). “The Courier’s Tragedy,” summarized at considerable length, is an accurate parody of the Elizabethan tragedy of revenge, exemplified by Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (pr. c. 1585-1589, pb. 1594?) or by Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1594).

More clearly than V., The Crying of Lot 49 focuses on questions of behavioral psychology and free will. It is never clear to Oedipa whether Pierce Inverarity has really died; she becomes uncomfortably aware that if he has not, all of her investigations may be part of a complicated game in which Inverarity maneuvers her every move. If she is little more than a robot, the possibility exists that American culture has eliminated most possibilities for diversity. If Tristero exists (and even this is never certain), it may be only a feeble final protest against a society that is as carefully organized as a computer chip. It is also possible that Oedipa is hallucinating the whole thing. Yet there is the chance that a genuine resistance to an overly controlled society is really functioning. The Crying of Lot 49 raises these issues but leaves them unresolved.

Gravity’s Rainbow

First published: 1973

Type of work: Novel

A huge cast of characters searches through post-World War II Europe for a super rocket invented by the Nazis.

The questions of free will and determinism in a universe which may be subject to entropy are most sharply defined by Pynchon in his longest and most complete novel, Gravity’s Rainbow. Set in the closing days of World War II and the months immediately following the end of the war, this novel takes the themes and techniques of the two earlier novels to higher levels. Gravity’s Rainbow—in part because many regard it as a masterpiece and in part because it is so complex, involves so many strands of action, and poses so many unanswered questions—has been the subject of more critical attention than any novel in English since James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

The central symbol of Gravity’s Rainbow is a new type of rocket developed by the Germans at the end of World War II, designated the A-4. The first rocket designed to carry a human being into space, it is a triumph of technology. It suggests the possibility that humankind may have found a way to transcend its earthly origins, but it is much more likely that it carries beyond previous limits—beyond any limits—people’s ability to destroy themselves. Technology, in Pynchon’s view, has a capacity for destruction that threatens to overwhelm its capacity for construction. At the beginning of the novel, a screaming in the sky seems to indicate that a rocket is on the way; at the very end, the reader sits in a theater with a descending rocket poised just overhead.

The action of Gravity’s Rainbow centers on attempts to trace the A-4 rocket and its components, especially an advanced form of plastic called Imipolex-G. The British, the Americans, and the Russians, nominal allies in the war against Adolf Hitler’s Germany, are rivals in trying to find the rocket and its makers in order to gain an advantage in the postwar world. One part of the British effort is managed by a behavioral scientist named Ned Pointsman.

Pointsman is the spokesman in the novel for the Pavlovian idea (named for the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov) that people, like all other animals, act in response to stimuli. Pointsman believes that if the correct stimuli are applied, anyone can be trained to undertake any action his or her controller directs. He makes use of the fact that an American lieutenant named Tyrone Slothrop (he is, incidentally, the younger brother of Hogan Slothrop in “The Secret Integration”) was the subject of an early experiment in conditioning a young baby. The experimenter, a mysterious figure named Lazslo Jamf, who also invented Imipolex G, supposedly removed “Baby Tyrone’s” early conditioning, although remnants of it apparently remain.

Using a variety of behavioral methods, Pointsman sets Slothrop on the track of the A-4 rocket, and for much of the first half of Gravity’s Rainbow, Slothrop is the center of the action. He moves from London to the French Riviera to Switzerland. When the war ends he moves into the “Zone,” an area geographically similar to the British, American, French, and Russian zones of occupied Germany but much larger, symbolically encompassing all the postwar world. Slothrop has a variety of adventures, some frightening, some hilarious.

Other characters are involved in their own quests for the rocket. The Hereros, remnants of a tribe transplanted to Germany years before from what was (before World War I) German Southwest Africa, have assisted in work on the rocket and now search for leftover parts to construct a rocket for themselves. Their leader, Enzian, is convinced that the rocket will provide a new center for the tribe, without which it will wither away. Enzian’s path crosses Slothrop’s from time to time. So does that of the chief American searcher, Major Marvy, a gross and vicious scout not only for the American armed forces but for American industrial interests as well. All of them, at one time or another, encounter the Soviet agent, Tchitcherine, who happens to be Enzian’s half brother.

There are dozens of other characters and other plots involved in the novel. Countering Pointsman is a British officer named Roger Mexico, a mathematician who rejects Pointsman’s determinism and argues that traditional Western ideas of cause and effect are too limited. In his view, new scientific ideas about chance and indeterminacy are more important. Mexico’s affair with a member of the British WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) named Jessica Swanlake is the nearest thing the novel contains to a love story. It ends when the war is over and Jessica chooses a more conventional man. A British secret agent called Pirate Prentice is also involved, along with one of his spies, a Dutch woman named Katje Borgesius.

While these characters (and many others) are engaged in their quests, the novel also recounts the story of the German characters who built and launched the rocket. Chief among these is the sinister Captain Weissman (also known as Blicero), who was responsible for assembling the men with the special skills needed to create and build the rocket. Once the rocket was launched, he evidently died. He has been Enzian’s lover. One of his aides is a scientist named Franz Pokler, who is forced to keep working on the project because his wife, a radical, and his daughter are being held in a prison camp; if he fails to cooperate, they will presumably be killed.

Entropy is less important in Gravity’s Rainbow than in Pynchon’s earlier work; it still operates, but it seems to be less an immediate threat than the nuclear weapons that could destroy the known world in a few minutes. Paranoia, however, is more important than ever. The novel includes many episodes in which characters’ suspicions that they are involved in some gigantic plot are supported by all the available evidence. The most perceptive characters have frequent intimations that there is a group called only “They,” which is international in scope and which intends to gain control over everything: people, resources, and ideas. At one point, for example, Enzian experiences a revelation that all the destruction caused by bombing and shelling in World War II has been specifically planned to wipe out the old industrial establishment in order to make way for a new and more efficient physical plant.

There are small rays of hope. Art provides an alternative to the regimentation of modern society. Rebellion is still possible; when Slothrop disappears, his friends and supporters form a group called the “Counterforce” to oppose “They.” The Counterforce inevitably becomes bureaucratic and public relations-oriented, but members are capable of individual acts of defiance which can provide hope. The style of the novel, varied and spectacular, is itself the strongest denial of the grayness and blandness that result from the control of society by those who use technology for their own ends. At the end of the novel, however, destruction seems to be inevitable.

Vineland

First published: 1989

Type of work: Novel

In 1984, a teenage girl searches the past and present-day California for information about her mother, who disappeared around 1970.

Vineland is Pynchon’s most accessible novel, the one in which he makes his most direct statements about politics and repression in the United States, and the one in which the “good guys” and “bad guys” are most clearly distinguished. It is also, paradoxically, the one in which he makes use of the most indirect narrative methods.

There has always been an element of indirection in Pynchon’s fiction, a technique related to sleight-of-hand in which the author seems to be pointing in one direction, only to shift to something unforeseen. There have also been elements of surprise in the depiction of many of Pynchon’s characters. In Vineland, however, indirection becomes a basic technique. For example, an important chapter that will lead Prairie Wheeler, the central figure, to essential information about her mother begins with an extended depiction of a mobster, Ralph Wayvone, Sr.

At the outset, Vineland centers on a former hippie named Zoyd Wheeler. He lives in Northern California with his daughter, Prairie, a teenager who works in a “New Age” pizza parlor. Zoyd has a small business and receives a government allotment for engaging in one crazy act a year, usually leaping through a plate-glass window in a local restaurant. He is harried by drug enforcement agents and, early in the novel, by a federal prosecutor who is trying to find Zoyd’s ex-wife, Frenesi. It seems clear that Zoyd will be the central character in the novel.

The fact is, however, that Zoyd virtually disappears from the action for a long period once Prairie leaves with her boyfriend and his punk band, Billy Barf and the Vomitones.

The real quest in the novel is Prairie’s search for her mother, Frenesi Gates, and for the truth about Frenesi. Her father and grandmother, Frenesi’s radical mother, have always told her that Frenesi offended the establishment and was forced to go underground. Through a series of improbable coincidences (another common element in Pynchon’s fiction), Prairie meets DL Chastain, a woman martial arts expert who was a close friend of Frenesi when both were involved with radical politics during the Vietnam War era. DL takes Prairie to a women’s colony, the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives, where women learn Ninja, and where she finds records that begin to reveal the truth about Frenesi.

What Prairie learns, over a period of time, is that her mother had been part of a radical film collective which had, at the height of the protests against the Vietnam War in the late 1960’s, been filming a student uprising on a college campus in Southern California. Her friends did not realize that Frenesi had been seduced by Brock Vond, the federal prosecutor and the blackest of all Pynchon’s villains. Just as the troops and police were about to move in to break up the students’ rebellion, Frenesi betrayed her friends by acting as the agent for the murder of a professor, the leader of the student movement (and incidentally one of Frenesi’s lovers). When the troops moved in, Frenesi was taken to a detention center, from which DL Chastain rescued her. She then married Zoyd and gave birth to Prairie before Brock reclaimed her. Since then she has lived as a protected government informer, with a fellow informer named Flash and their son, Justin.

As the novel nears its end, the characters gather in Vineland, a fictional town and county in Northern California. Zoyd, Frenesi, Prairie, DL, her partner Takeshi, and some others attend a reunion of the large extended family of Sasha, Frenesi’s mother. Brock Vond is on hand as the leader of what is supposed to be a huge government operation aimed at the marijuana crop but which is, in fact, intended to be more generally repressive; on a personal level, it is his opportunity to kidnap Frenesi and Prairie, whom he believes is his daughter. Hector Zuniga, a drug enforcement agent, is trying to arrange a motion picture based on Frenesi’s life.

It is clear in Vineland that Pynchon’s sympathies are with anyone and anything that represents resistance to what he regards as an increasingly repressive government. The use of drugs such as marijuana, LSD, and even cocaine is seen as part of such resistance; any harm they might do is harm only to the user, while a character such as Vond, in his lust for power, harms everyone he touches. Government installations built in recent years to house potential resisters in a time of national emergency are used by Pynchon to suggest the lengths to which the government is prepared to go in stamping out resistance to its policies. Raids on marijuana growers are seen as exertions of power aimed at controlling everyone.

Despite the power wielded by Vond and his agents, the ending of Vineland is more hopeful than that of any of Pynchon’s other novels. At the very moment when Vond is about to abduct Prairie, her sharpness and a sudden cutting off of his funding by Ronald Reagan-era reductions in government spending frustrate him; he is then carted off and destroyed. Prairie, although she has felt the power and attraction that seduced and nearly destroyed her mother, is safe. In the final lines, her dog, Desmond, who had disappeared when Zoyd’s house was occupied by government agents, reappears. At least for a time, she has escaped from danger.

Vineland includes elements of fantasy, most important among them the creatures called “Thanatoids,” who are spirits of the unquiet dead, and there are plenty of coincidences and improbabilities. For the most part, however, this novel attempts to depict what Pynchon sees as the important realities in the world of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Paranoia is clearly present, but the emphasis on entropy has largely disappeared, replaced by concern about the effect on individual freedoms of these recent developments. Pynchon finds these frightening, but not yet clearly triumphant.

Mason and Dixon

First published: 1997

Type of work: Novel

Pynchon’s account of the lives of Mason and Dixon and their creation of the Mason-Dixon line is metafiction, a blending of the historical and fictional, and a satiric look at the nature of colonialism and science.

Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon is narrated by the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, whose protracted stay at his sister’s home in Philadelphia depends upon his entertaining his two nephews, Pliny and Pitt. The entertainment consists of his account of the adventures of Mason and Dixon, the surveyors who created the line dividing Pennsylvania from Delaware and Maryland. Although he knew the two surveyors, he was not privy to all the information, factual and otherwise, with which he regales his audience. His embellished account is occasionally interrupted by the nephews and other members of his audience.

The novel is divided into three parts, the first of which concerns the backgrounds of the two surveyors; their first meeting; their travels to South Africa and St. Helena to conduct transit of Venus observations; their meeting with Nevil Maskelyne, a rival astronomer who wins the post of Royal Astronomer that Mason seeks; and their encounters with the fictitious Vroom family. The first part of the novel also introduces three themes that permeate the novel. First, Mason and Dixon are part of the Age of Reason, which stressed science, but that science was imperfect at best and is subject to Pynchon’s satire. Second, slavery, with its necessary “engine,” the gallows, is seen as a means by which white people become more “savage” than the indigenous people they exploit. Third, Mason’s inability to escape the guilt he feels about the death of Rebekah, his wife, and his subsequent abandonment of his sons.

The “meat” of the novel’s “sandwich” structure is ostensibly the actual creation of the Mason-Dixon line in the United States, but the second part not only continues the first part’s focus on drinking in taverns and uttering bombastic speeches, but also introduces some historical figures and several lengthy digressions. In Philadelphia, Mason and Dixon meet Ben Franklin, who entertains them with his electrical experiments and his buxom assistants, Molly and Dolly, and gives them the sage advice to “never pay the Retail Price.” George Washington is portrayed as a land speculator and a hemp addict, and Martha Washington resembles Barbara Bush as she presents the surveyors with a plate of home-baked cookies. Perhaps the most humorous character is Gersom, a black Jewish servant who is cooking hog jowls. The digressions include a story about a mechanical duck capable of defecation and intent on pursuing a cook, and the account of Eliza Field’s kidnapping by Indians and her captivity in Quebec. The melding of fact and fiction, fictional characters and historical personages, history and fiction—these are all characteristics of metafiction.

Part Three, “The Last Transit,” is a short wrap-up of the material. Mason remarries, brings his children to America, and then returns to England. Despite his scientific contributions, he is never admitted to the Royal Society, but Maskelyne, his rival with political connections, is. While in London, Mason meets Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, his biographer; the meeting is appropriate because Pynchon’s novel is itself a biography of sorts, one told by the Boswell-like Cherrycoke, as well as being a satiric look at colonialism with its attendant evils and the nature of science and progress.