If you’d like to discuss any of the ideas in this Pynchon diary, email Kamran Nazeer

Introduction

Before anything else, there are the facts. No book since 1997. 1,085 pages, now it’s here. But the facts run out quickly. The dust jacket provides no photograph or biographical information about the author—it simply lists his previous titles. There is a synopsis, written by Pynchon, that situates the novel in time (”spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I”) and identifies some of its personalities (anarchists, balloonists, innocents and decadents, Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi and Groucho Marx). It says nothing about the plot.

I put the book on my bathroom scale. It weighs 1.6kg. I drop it on the bed and other padded surfaces. I hold it above my head for as long as I can, which is 1 minute 12 seconds.

But then that’s it: I have to begin reading. So I calculate. 40 pages an hour—I can manage that. 80 pages a day—which is an ask, but at a level of ambition that allows job, food, sleep, the maintenance of social relations, to more or less continue. On these assumptions, the book represents 13 days of reading, or 12 with an added heave on the last night. These are hostile calculations, treating the book as an intrusion, something that must be got through.

As I seek a comfortable way in which to hold the book, I wonder what will happen if my reading rate begins to slip, let’s say as a function of feeling, “I’m into it, I’ve cracked it,” or, more shamefully, “There is something I want to watch on television.” How long then? 26 days? 52? And so, as I contemplate this more extended period of co-habitation, a little more trenchantly, I ask myself: why?

One reason is that the novel is the most extendable form of art. Memory, stamina and cost constrain the length of plays, opera, dance and music. Film directors struggle to gain much more than 100 minutes from their producers. You can walk from one end of the largest painting to the other in a few seconds. Of course, art lingers. Even the experience of watching video art on YouTube lingers. But what actually happens when the artist has 1,085 pages, with an average of 425 words per page? Why? Why write like this, and why read?

This reading history comprises a response to that question and to the novel itself; includes an account of the paranoid six hours during which I thought the author was sitting opposite me on an aeroplane; and argues, against the day’s orthodoxy, that Pynchon is not a postmodern sage, a propagandist for the hyperreal or an artist of the floating world—but that he is instead a naturalist in extremis, the hardest-working day-jobber of a novelist that we have.

Part 1: The Light Over the Ranges (pp 1-118)


The book begins at the Chicago World’s fair of 1893. Though not exactly. It approaches the fair from above, inside the cabin of a “hydrogen skyship” called the Inconvenience. The balloon is manned by members of the “Chums of Chance,” including, in descending order of seniority, Randolph St Cosmo, the commander Lindsay Noseworth, Miles Blundell and Darby Suckling, though not to forget Pugnax, who is reading Henry James, and who is a dog, usually more interested “in sentimental tales about his own species than those exhibiting extremes of human behaviour, which he appeared to find a bit lurid.” Pynchon suggests that we may have read about the Chums before, in “The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit,” or “The Chums of Chance at Krakatoa.”

This is an odd, though very funny, opening, and some of the humour derives from our expectations of a Pynchon book. He won the National Book award; he captures something ineffably important about contemporary culture, right? So why does this book start in the mode of the recent “Pirates!” books by Gideon Defoe? Some of the jokes about Pugnax might as well have been inspired by the diaries of Buster (as dictated to Roy Hattersley). What’s more, even as you read this seemingly inappropriate opening, you can’t consult the back cover to be reassured by a black-and-white image of the author gazing back at you. There’s no half-smile, no rummaging stare into the distance; just the book and you. This is the loneliness of the long-distance reader.

But Pynchon doesn’t stick with the Chums of Chance for long (25 pages). Not that he leaps into the World’s fair. I wonder if there’s any other novelist who would behave like this. With the fair at his disposal, rich with fin-de-siècle resonance, a meeting place of cultures, ideas and personalities from around the globe, Pynchon either keeps us above it, somewhat to its west, or in the bushes close by (where two of his characters are observed in what, according to the prevailing farcical mood, must be called “cavorting”).

Of course, it isn’t that Pynchon is uninterested in the fair—and the themes that don’t so much lurk there as are advertised with exclamation marks on banners. Rather, these opening sections belie an interest in life over Life. Where a more impetuous or less confident novelist would nail down every shred of significance, aiming to make sure that we “get” the fair (and appreciate the cleverness of the setting), Pynchon wants to tell us a broad, funny, vivacious story, and he wants rid of the readers who are only along because they think it’s literature. The joy of this opening section—short, at a mere 118 pages—is that Pynchon is daring me to keep reading. Though soon, given how it really is impossible to find a comfortable way in which to hold the book, he’s going to have to do much more.

Part 2: Iceland Spar (pp 119-428)

I get into the heart of Part 2 in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. I am sitting opposite three Dutch women who are applying three different shades of lipstick, and I am nervous about what they will do when they’re finished. On my right, there is a Frenchman in a torn fisherman’s jumper, who is whispering to his wife that the title of the book I am reading must itself be a translation for it is so awkward to translate into French. On my left, there is an empty seat and I wouldn’t be too surprised if the Archduke Franz Ferdinand (briefly a character in this part of the book) came over to claim it.

This is one effect of reading Pynchon—it engenders a certain paranoia. His characters appear and disappear, without prologue or epilogue. Events you think ought to be significant are skipped over quickly. There are few of the obvious signs of what counts and what does not count, what is just texture and what will prove crucial to the story. And so you have to remain constantly alert or you might miss a secret or a shooting or a revolution.

This could be seen as a polemical resistance to conventional storytelling, where no character or event is more or less central to the novel, so that the climax might as well be the consummation of a long-unrequited love affair in Seattle as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Shanghai. But equally, we can praise Pynchon for capturing our mood. Perhaps putting on lipstick ought to be imbued with more dramatic significance than anything else that happens in an airport. My restless scanning of the departure lounge and Pynchon’s freewheeling storytelling style are provoked and legitimated by one another. This is plausible, but the real payoff of Pynchon’s technique is, I think, different.

It took me until page 395 to understand it. There I read of “a dark slash of blood that trailed in the air and feathered in a crescent slap, unheard in the noise of the shots, across the ancient soiling of the pulqueria floor. Fin.” This sentence is crucial, I think. But first, some plot.

The discharge just quoted originates from the body of Sloat Fresno, co-murderer of the father of Kit, Reef, Lake and Frank Traverse. Traverse Snr was suspected of anarchism in industrial settings belonging to Scarsdale Vibe. Vibe ordered in Fresno and his accomplice, Deuce Kindred, who fulfilled their contract but not without a certain leakage of information to the family of the deceased. The vengeful son, on this occasion, is Frank. And the remainder of the score-settling is yet to be told.

Now consider the many forms that Pynchon eschews for a story that occupies several hundred pages of his book. It is not a mystery, for we know who did it. It is not a thriller that leads us like clockwork to an unexpected denouement. The book neither begins nor ends with elements of this drama—they are scattered amid several other stories, featuring several other characters that the Traverse siblings meet, significantly or, as often, not.

And so back to the slash of blood. What made me pause on this line was the vivid language, the “dark slash of blood” that describes a “trail” in the air which ends in a “crescent” and pretty much audible “slap.” The sentence is designed to be read slowly, and it ends with a deliberate, even forced, pause: ” Fin.” This suggests that the passage from which it is taken may be portentous, but it is actually astonishingly light—there is no preceding description of Frank’s feelings on discovering his father’s murderer, on what courses through his mind as he pulls the trigger of his gun, and there is no succeeding description of how he feels after having downed Sloat Fresno or of Fresno’s final thoughts as he lies dying. This is critical, because it suggests that Pynchon claims no special privilege to be able to describe their feelings. Yet by placing this wonderful, slow-motion sentence in the midst of the action, he forces us to join him in thinking about them.

This, I conclude, at 8am in Schiphol, is critical to understanding Pynchon. Just as his mash-up narrative style heightens my awareness of what might be about to happen in the airport departure lounge, his astonishing description of the post-climactic moment, together with his refusal to stamp his view on to the page, heightens my motivation to think about his characters, to the extent of putting the book aside for a few minutes while I make up my mind.

To put this another way, Pynchon has written a massive book whose deepest achievement may be to focus our attention on what isn’t there, not even amid its 1,085 pages.

Part 3: Bilocations (pp 429-693)

It’s becoming harder. I am struggling to focus. I force my eyes on to the page, but I am re-reading each line two or three times and then forgetting my place. I’m on yet another flight and I can place the book on the tray table as I’m reading, so the issue isn’t comfort. I’ve kept to my regimen of completing 80 pages per day—on most days, I’ve exceeded it—so the issue isn’t endurance either. The problem is quite different: he is looking at me.

The airline grumpily upgraded me to business class, because the economy cabin had already checked in full. Perhaps that makes it more likely; no doubt he travels business class. Even so, I certainly wouldn’t feel like this if he didn’t keep looking at me. He’s been looking at me from the moment he noticed what I was reading; I saw him spy the book when I took my seat, I saw the change in his expression.

Is it possible, is it remotely possible that the man in the seat opposite me is Thomas Pynchon?

He is the right sort of age (Pynchon was born in 1937). He is American (I heard him accept a glass of water). The flight is going to Boston (Pynchon was last “outed” in New York, by CNN, so it’s possible he moved but not too far). He has a plastic bag from Bibliothèque Française de Rome (Pynchon uses many French expressions in his books; Against the Day suggests that he is familiar with Italy as well). I have to rely on these oblique clues to make up my mind because there is no recent photograph in the public domain. Even after CNN found him in New York, they acceded to his request not to give him away. Teasingly, Pynchon has made three cameo appearances on the Simpsons (the latest—fleeting, silent—was broadcast shortly before the release of Against the Day). However, he wore a brown paper bag over his cartoon head and, though it’s reputed he voiced the two speaking appearances himself, I don’t remember his voice distinctly enough to make a positive match with the voice that accepted the glass of water.

The situation is paradoxical. As I pretend to continue to read the book, I work out that if the man opposite me is Pynchon, he will probably claim that he isn’t. And if he isn’t Pynchon, yet is so interested in my book that he is staring at me, he will probably claim that he is. So I stay in my seat. And I think about what it means for what I’m reading that I can never meet the author or know anything definite about him.

Perhaps the most significant consequence is that there is no way to check my interpretation of the text. I will never come across an interview in which Pynchon explains what he was aspiring to do. I will never hear him read any section of this book, with his preferred emphases, at his preferred pace. Though his book thrives on politics, I am ignorant of whether Pynchon is an anarchist or a social democrat, who he is cheering for from among the competing political actors in his book, or whether and how he hopes to educate me. Eventually, five hundred and a fistful pages through, I stop thinking about it; the author disappears and the reader goes marauding.

To empower the reader in this way requires quite fantastic selflessness on the part of Pynchon. This book was at least nine years in the writing—and yet, on finishing it, Pynchon thrust it fully into his readers’ arms with nary a word of advice. More than this, Pynchon has given up everything else that comes with being a renowned novelist: the applause of audiences, the satisfaction of looking at a queue of people that has formed seeking only a signature, the company of admiring journalists, critics and students. What matters to Pynchon is the lonely, slow, painstaking work. Even if he really is sitting opposite me on the plane, he must have faced the temptation to speak to his readers countless times before; he won’t crack now and I don’t want him to.

Pynchon’s anonymity depends not only on his own fortitude but on the collaboration of other people, who might gain from revealing his identity. CNN found him and didn’t show him, even though I doubt Pynchon would have had any grounds for suing them if they had. His friends, relatives and lovers might not keep entirely silent—they might whisper what they know to a few intimates—but the dearth of knowledge about Pynchon suggests that those who know him have been remarkably compliant. The Pynchon Avoidance of Light Experiment (PALE) involves tens, perhaps even hundreds, of people and the impressive results so far suggest that the participants are willing to set aside immediate gain for a finer literary purpose. I wonder if Pynchon makes a little speech to every new person he befriends, explaining the importance of his being absent, why the novel must speak for itself, why the reader must remain unmolested.

Needless to say, I didn’t ask my proto-Pynchon anything. I smiled at him as I was leaving the plane and I didn’t sleep until I had finished Part 3.

Part 4: Against the Day (pp 695-1062)


The penultimate part of the novel begins with what reads like an excerpt from a conventional, and much shorter, book: “Cyprian’s first post was at Trieste, monitoring the docks and the emigrant traffic to America.” Cyprian Latewood is a diplomat, or a spy, and the story of his work soon becomes mixed with the story of his romance with Yashmeen Halfcourt. Like the Traverse kids, who are pursuing their father’s murderers, these characters could come from an “ordinary” novel. The promise of the opening quoted above is that we will watch Cyprian grow up, and we do.

These bursts of normality are important. Not only because they come along when you might feel worn down by the more manic narrative style, but also because they seem to flow from a fleeting sense of comfort on the part of the writer. Even as we are told Cyprian’s story (relatively) chronologically, it features people whom we have already met, often very briefly, and for no contemporaneous reason. These characters might have vanished shortly after they first appeared, but when they come back, although their return may be unexpected, they are familiar. This is, I feel, an important effect and very different to the alternatives.

The first alternative is that the minor characters in Cyprian’s story don’t matter; they can be props and plot devices. They can be chucked around because the artistic focus is Cyprian, or perhaps a handful of central characters. This is how most novels work, and we can hack it because it’s the individual experiences we want the writer to render; eventually, we want to find ourselves caught, like a butterfly in a glass jar, within the protagonist’s conscience. Pynchon, obviously, doesn’t adopt this small-bore approach. Cyprian is Cyprian, just as much as Kit, mentioned in Part 2, is Kit; he is more than a cipher, definitely a hero, but Pynchon refuses to place Cyprian at the forefront of Cyprian’s social world. We don’t only encounter Cyprian’s world through his own experiences.

The second alternative is the one adopted by a writer such as Salman Rushdie (and his apprentices, such as Zadie Smith or Hari Kunzru). They too aspire to master a milieu, not merely a single mind. But their mode of storytelling is individualistic. The narrative begins in several different places and we know all along—we are given hints in case we’re not sure—that the diverse elements will eventually come together. When the coincidence occurs, and it is badly handled, it’s either unconvincing (Smith) or the writer comes across as smug (Kunzru). If the writing is better (Rushdie), the effect is powerful; but so powerful that it threatens to overwhelm the characters, transforming them into vectors of the forces of history (see the ending of Rushdie’s latest novel, Shalimar the Clown).

What Pynchon does instead—by starting with the social and then focusing, as he does with Cyprian, on the personal—is to enable the reader to understand both levels of narrative, and to consider individually the relationship between the protagonist’s experience and whatever is “really” going on (in Cyprian’s case, this is the long prologue to the first world war, or an abusive relationship, depending on whether you are thinking about Cyprian at work or Cyprian in love).

In Pynchon’s work, the one never becomes the other. The world isn’t reduced to the individual imagination, as in the first alternative, and the individual imagination doesn’t disappear and become an entertaining pretext to some bigger meaning, as in the second. What’s more, Pynchon’s narrative sequencing is so random that we are distracted by trying to ensure that everything keeps making sense—and so we don’t second guess ourselves as to how we might feel come the end.

That end, by the way, is less than 30 pages away.

Part 5: Rue Du Départ (pp 1063-1085)

The final section of Pynchon’s book ought to have the title “To Infinity and Beyond,” but a Disney animated film got to the phrase first. Aside from that glitch, it is a brilliant ending. Though obviously it refuses to behave like an ending.

It begins in the middle of a narration and in the middle of a sentence: “‘… he would have asked you for my hand,’ Dally was saying.” There are useful tips on French pronunciation: “Dally walked away waving au ‘voir with an awkward twirl of her hand behind her.” The whole section is written in the flippest of the tones that Pynchon uses: “absent a working time machine he didn’t see any real way he could deny Dally her part.”

These are this section’s characteristics, and it is not, for example, about the first world war, which has been, it must be said, impending, for much of the book. Nor does it reveal the secret of the ether, which was pursued by Tesla and others in the early sections. The Traverse siblings do not reach a peace with their murdered father. There is no final showdown between capitalism and anarchism. Perhaps it is misleading to think of Part 5 as the ending; it is just the last few pages of the book.

Nevertheless, it is just the right ending. It reaffirms what Pynchon has been trying to do. It is an ending that never behaves like an ending in a book that never behaves like a book. This is not a matter of deliberately being unconventional. The point is not to allow the life in the book to become bound by convention.

The conclusion therefore is so inconclusive because Pynchon does not require his characters to reach epiphanies in the closing pages, to rush around fixing their bad relationships and making sure to grasp their good ones. His characters lived before the book began (and they never tell that history in the contrived ways that many fictional characters are forced to do). They will live after the book ends as well.

Pynchon’s mission throughout has been to create a set of people and a social world. He doesn’t want simply to immerse us in that world and then bring us out again; he’d give interviews if that was his game, for the interviews would help to orient us to the world before we even began reading. Instead, Pynchon means for the world inside the book to go on when the book runs out. And that’s where we come in. He wrote 1,085 pages. We can take it on from here. Having read this far, we owe a responsibility to these characters. And Pynchon is confident that we will discharge it as best we can. As he puts it happily, in his very last sentence, “They fly towards grace.”

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