Thomas Pynchon – Biblioklept

In 2018—six years ago—on Thomas Pynchon’s 81st birthday, I put together a thoroughly unnecessary ranking of his eight novels. I’m somewhat ashamed of the post, as I included two novels I had abandoned a few times—Vineland and Bleeding Edge. Three years ago, on Pynchon’s 84th birthday, I wrote a few sentences on each of Pynchon’s novels, having, at that point, made my way through all of them. The first post, perhaps because it contains the word “ranking” in its title gets far more traffic to this day than the more thoughtful and finished post from 2021. Indeed, the “ranking” post regularly shows up in the top ten percentile of my weekly and monthly stats on Biblioklept, which, I guess, has bothered me enough to write this (thoroughly unnecessary still) “ranking.”

I know that if I were to approach Pynchon’s eight novels on eight different days, I’d likely end up with a consistent #1, #2, #3, and #8—but the other spots would shift depending on my memory or fancy or whatever spell I’d fallen under, chemical, metaphysical or otherwise. But here’s the list I came up with today.

8. Vineland (1990)

In my 2018 post (where I ranked Vineland at number 7) I noted that “Vineland seems to have a strange status for Pynchon cultists—its a cult novel in an oeuvre of cult novels,” and I’ve found that intuition confirmed over the years. I stick by my assertion in my 2021 post in which I asserted that “Vineland is ultimately depressing and easily my least-favorite Pynchon novel, but it does have some exquisite prose moments.” I’m sure I’ll revisit it before seeing Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation though.

7. Inherent Vice (2009)

Speaking of Paul Thomas Anderson—I think I like his film adaptation of Inherent Vice more than I like the novel. And I love Inherent Vice. But I think PTA provides an emotional ballast that gives the narrative a center that’s missing from Pynchon’s novel (which is, likely, the point, or at least the byproduct of Pynchon’s shaggy dogging it). (I originally ranked Inherent Vice at number 6).

6. Bleeding Edge (2013)

So I finally found my way into Bleeding Edge in the earliest weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown. I’d stuck the book at the bottom of my 2018 list. I’m not really sure why I stalled out on—maybe it feels the closest to my own timeline of any Pynchon novel. Anyway, it’s one I want to revisit again soon. I riffed on it some in 2020, writing “Pynchon captures a time in America during which I was, at least theoretically, becoming an adult (a becoming which may or may not have happened yet). Reading Bleeding Edge helped evoke all the weirdness the 2000s were about to lay out for us. It made me angry again, or reminded me of the anger that I’d sustain for most of the decade. It reminded me of our huge ideological failure after 9/11, an ideological failure we are watching somehow fail even more today. But I also loved the novel’s unexpectedly sweet domestic plot, and found a kind of solace even in its affirmation of family, even as its final image pointed to the kind of radical inconclusiveness at the heart of being a parent.”

5. V. (1963)

So from here on out my rankings are identical to my stupid 2018 list, with that big caveat that I would easily swap, say, V. and 49 here. I’ll repeat my endorsement that “V. makes a good starting place for anyone new to Pynchon” and recommend that anyone interested in Pynchon but daunted by the scope check out the book from their library and read the ninth chapter, the story of of Kurt Mondaugen.

4. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

The Crying of Lot 49 is probably a better novel than V. but I think I like V. better. 49 is very funny and showcases Pynchon’s tonality of paranoia/hope wrapped up in zaniness/horror. It’s an excellent sophomore novel, but also dense, claustrophobic even. I guess I like the Pynchon sprawl a bit better.

3. Against the Day (2006)

Speaking of sprawl: Against the Day is Pynchon’s biggest novel, just fat and giddy and overstuffed with goodies. I think this novel would make an excellent American history textbook. Its thesis: resist the military-industrial-entertainment-complex. Start here!

2. Mason & Dixon (1997)

A measurement of the world and a story about friendship. It would be Pynchon’s best novel if he hadn’t written—

1. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

The best book. I reread it earlier this summer and it’s roomier and stranger and more rewarding each time.

Mass-market Monday | Thomas Pynchon’s V.

May 27, 2024 Biblioklept1 Comment

V., Thomas Pynchon. Bantam Books, third printing (1964). No cover artist credited. 463 pages.

Although artist James Bama is not credited, you can see his signature on the right side of the cover, just above the horizon.

I reread V. a few years back, concluding my piece with,

The grist, grit, and horror of the big postwar world will cling to the present. Nobody’s stepping down from heaven, or Heaven, and there are no magic words—but there is a kind of love, a loving with your mouth shut, a kind of radical, earnest, transcendent love that Pynchon evokes, soils, and sanctifies here.

Biblioklept Does Atlanta (Books acquired, some time last week)

May 24, 2024 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Last week, the wife and I drove five hours north to Atlanta, Georgia where we stayed five days in the Cabbagetown neighborhood. Our ostensible purpose was an anniversary trip focused around a Slowdive concert last Friday, but I think we really went to just hang out and eat and drink away from our kids for a few nights. It was famous times.

The Slowdive concert itself was excellent, despite the best efforts of the awful opening band, a dubious and I must assume ironic project called Drab Majesty, and the sound system at the The Eastern. The venue seemed ill-equipped to handle the tonality of either band. I don’t want to sound like a very old man but it was Too Fucking Loud. Opener Drab Majesty, whose sound came from a single guitar, a single synth, and, I’m guessing, a few loop pedals, seemed to have plugged directly into the PA system. It was the absolute worst sound I’ve ever heard. (Earlier that day, driving in awful Atlanta traffic, we listened to a seventeen-minute Merzbow song on the alternate band of Georgia Tech’s WREK radio station; although Merzbow is “noise” music, that song had more musicality, tonality, and depth of rhythm than Drab Majesty.)

Slowdive was excellent live–much more of a rock sound than I’d expected; I’ve really enjoyed their two newer records, particularly the self-titled one from a few years back, but the songs from Souvlaki sounded particularly fierce live. The setlist was great, and they closed with a cover of Syd Barrett’s “Golden Hair” that might have gone on for 10 or 12 minutes; it was hypnotic. Here is the single picture I took during the show:

But books—

Without children about and with my wife having to work half days from the rented garage apartment, I had enough time to indulge going to pretty much any bookstore I wanted to in Atlanta. I ended up sticking mostly to East Atlanta where we were staying though.

I had been to A Capella Books a few years ago and had somehow entirely missed their used book annex, which had some really great stuff in it, including a first edition of Blood Meridian and Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men. I ended up chatting with the owner Frank for a bit; a very nice guy, he showed me his personal collection of Vintage Contemporaries and we talked in general about our shared sickness of book collecting. I left with Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s new novel American Abductions and a first-edition hardback of McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain. This second purchase seems to have initiated the trip’s theme of buying editions of books I already own—but now I have all three Knopf editions of The Border Trilogy, so everyone can sleep easier.

I stopped by Criminal Records in Little Five Points and didn’t pick anything up, although I’m happy to see that CDs have made such a comeback. (I almost certainly would have bought the new Gastr del Sol box set if it was out yet.) I then made my way to Bibliotech Books in Candler Park. The proprietor assured me that he was in the process of reorganizing, but the store was frankly a mess. One bookcase was organized by the color of the book’s spines. The inventory seemed to be someone’s childhood and adolescent books.

I headed to Virginia Highland Books, a perfectly-respectable book shop in the perfectly-respectable Virginia Highland neighborhood. The perfectly-respectable inventory was not particularly interesting, although I imagine it perfectly suits the perfectly-respectable clientele. On the way to Virginia Highland Books, at a red light, I found myself stopped next to something called Videodrome, so of course I pulled in. I got dizzy in Videodrome a DVD-rental shop stuffed with thousands and thousands of cult films, non-English language films, art films, concert films…amazing stuff. The only thing I could compare it to were some of the rental shops I’d gone to decades ago when I lived in Tokyo. I mean, this place had the Cannibal Ferox soundtrack on vinyl. I spoke to the proprietor for a while. He gave me a sticker. I saw him at the Slowdive show the next night but left him alone.

My last bookshop visit that day was to Bookish, a small indie spot specializing in books by women. I liked the store but was honestly too tired to look around much after two tallboys at a PBR-themed bar in Virginia Highland.

Over the next few days, I visited three more bookshops, all more or less by chance. We went to Decatur, simply to check it out, and parked in Decatur Square right in front of Little Shop of Stories. Framed original artwork by visiting authors adorns the walls of this children’s bookshop, and there’s a life-sized reproduction of the room from Margaret Wise Brown’s classic Good Night Moon that one can hang out in. I felt a little melancholy that our children have outgrown children’s books.

On the way back to Atlanta, we swung by Eagle Eye Books, a Decatur spot specializing in used books (with a large collection of vintage sci-fi hardbacks in a back room). They have several carts of dollar books that are supposedly accessible 24/7—there are lock boxes to slide your dollars into. I ended up picking up different editions of two books I already own: Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned in hardback and the 1985 Elisabeth Sifton Books/Penguin Books printing of William Gaddis’s J R. The J R is basically falling apart and is crammed with annotations; I love it. I gave three crumpled dollars over for these two books and then drove back to our garage apartment so we could walk to tacos and then the concert.

The mid-morning after the Slowdive concert we hung out for a while at the Virginia Highland Porchfest. We parked at the Ponce City Market to walk to Porchfest and on the way back stopped at Posman Books. I’d been there before, and while it’s basically a gift shop, its literature section is surprisingly robust, and it even offers a decent number of Spanish-language novels. The vibe at Porchfest was more frat-boys-drinking-sixers and sunburned golf dads than it was hippies and freaks. The neighborhood is Nice, with plenty of In This House signs declaring Attested Beliefs. We felt more at home in Cabbagetown, with its murals and ambivalence, even if our own presence as fucking tourists made us balk at times. But in a plant shop in Virginia Highland, we did meet an interesting clerk who let me take a photograph of their Pynchon tattoo. So that was pretty cool.

Atlanta I heart you.

Gravity’s Rainbow — annotations and illustrations for pages 627-28 | Our optimum time is 8 May

May 7, 2024May 8, 2024 Biblioklept2 Comments

Page 628 from Zak Smith’s *Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow* (2006)

A week before she¹ left, she came out to “The White Visitation”² for the last time. Except for the negligible rump of PISCES, the place was a loony bin again. The barrage-balloon cables³ lay rusting across the sodden meadows, going to flakes, to ions and earth⁴—tendons that sang in the violent nights, among the sirens wailing in thirds smooth as distant wind, among the drumbeats of bombs, now lying slack, old, in hard twists of metal ash. Forget-me-nots boil everywhere underfoot, and ants crowd, bustling with a sense of kingdom. Commas, brimstones, painted ladies coast on the thermoclines along the cliffs.⁵ Jessica has cut fringes since Roger saw her last, and is going through the usual anxiety—“It looks utterly horrible, you don’t have to say it. . . .”

“It’s utterly swoony,” sez Roger, “I love it.”

“You’re making fun.”

“Jess, why are we talking about haircuts for God’s sake?”⁶

While somewhere, out beyond the Channel, a barrier difficult as the wall of Death⁷ to a novice medium, Leftenant Slothrop, corrupted, given up on, creeps over the face of the Zone. Roger doesn’t want to give him up: Roger wants to do what’s right. “I just can’t leave the poor twit out there, can I? They’re trying to destroy him—”⁸

But, “Roger,” she’d smile, “it’s spring. We’re at peace.”⁹

No, we’re not. It’s another bit of propaganda. Something the P.W.E. planted¹⁰. Now gentlemen as you’ve seen from the studies our optimum time is 8 May¹¹, just before the traditional Whitsun exodus, schools letting out, weather projections for an excellent growing season, coal requirements beginning their seasonal decline, giving us a few months’ grace to get our Ruhr interests back on their feet—no, he sees only the same flows of power, the same impoverishments he’s been thrashing around in since ’39¹². His girl is about to be taken away to Germany, when she ought to be demobbed like everyone else. No channel upward that will show either of them any hope of escape¹³. There’s something still on, don’t call it a “war” if it makes you nervous, maybe the death rate’s gone down a point or two, beer in cans is back at last and there were a lot of people in Trafalgar Square one night not so long ago . . . but Their enterprise goes on.

The sad fact, lacerating his heart, laying open his emptiness, is that Jessica believes Them¹⁴. “The War” was the condition she needed for being with Roger. “Peace” allows her to leave him. His resources, next to Theirs, are too meager.

¹ The she here, for those wishing to tune in, is Jessica Swanlake, who has decided post-War to return to her normie roots: she will choose a petite bourgeoisie life with Beaver/Jeremy, and reject Roger Mexico (and, implicitly, refuse the Counterforce and the mission to save Tyrone Slothrop).

² Normally wouldn’t give a gloss for this, as its so late in the novel, but it’s been like eight years since I’ve done one of these, so: Pynchon Wiki gives the following description for the White Visitation:

former mental hospital located in the fictional town of Ick Regis on the coast of southern England; now part of SOE [Special Operations Executive; aka the “Firm”]; location of PISCES; D-Wing still has “loonies”; “devoted to psychological warfare”

I like to imagine The White Visitation as a kind X-Men scenario–or, more geekily, an X-Force scenario–a group of the freaky preterite using their weird powers for Maybe Good. But at this point, post eurowar, it’s all over, a “negligible rump” to be absorbed into post-war administrative Control.

³ I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow like half a dozen times and rusting barrage-balloon cables is the kind of image I just keep going past, just kinda sorta like, letting my imagination fill in the details. But doing these posts makes me stop and look around a bit. A description from Keith Thomson’s website:

Barrage balloons are large balloons tethered to the ground or the deck of a ship with metal cables. They are deployed as a defense against low-level air attack, damaging aircraft on collision with the cables or, at the least, making flying in the vicinity treacherous.

1940s Barrage Balloon At The Kew Bridge Steam Museum, London. Jim Linwood.

⁴Everything in the Zone is disintegrating–including Our Hero Tyrone Slothrop.

⁵“Commas, brimstones, painted ladies coast on the thermoclines along the cliffs” — an absolutely gorgeous sentence, and also one we might pass over at this fragmented, surreal section of the novel as a bit of surrealist poetry.

But it’s not—these are butterflies. From Pynchon Wiki:

627.28-29 Commas, brimstones, painted ladies
Three taxa of butterflies. The Comma (Polygonia c-album) is one of the anglewings; sulfur-yellow brimstones are in the genus Gonepteryx in the family Pieridae; painted ladies are in the genus Vanessa. The Comma is named for a so-shaped white mark on the underside of its hindwing; a similarly-marked North American congener is called the Question Mark (P. interrogationis).

Cigarette card depicting a fanciful “brimstone butterfly”

^{6 “}Can’t say it often enough–change your hair, change your life,” Inherent Vice.

⁷“Wall of Death,” Richard and Linda Thompson, 1982:

Let me ride on the Wall of Death one more time / You can waste your time on the other rides / This is the nearest to being alive / Oh let me take my chances on the Wall of Death / You can go with the crazy people in the Crooked House / You can fly away on the Rocket or spin in the Mouse / The Tunnel of Love might amuse you / Noah’s Ark might confuse you / But let me take my chances on the Wall of Death

⁸Every time I go through Gravity’s Rainbow, I find Slothrop’s fate more distressing and dispiriting—but also more inspiring. I think what’s important to remember here is that Roger Mexico is a numbers guy, a statistics guy—in 2024 terms, he might be a spreadsheet guy, a potential money guy. But he finds himself dedicated to Something Bigger Even If It Destroys Him, which means dedicating hope to the ever-fragmenting figure of Tyrone Slothrop, who, through his dispersal, might sow new seeds.

⁹A devastating reversal of “They are in love. Fuck the war,” the lines we get from our first meeting of the failed lovers.

¹⁰Political Warfare Executive (an iteration of Them). From Pynchon Wiki:

In 1940, MIR and Section D were combined with the War Office to form the Special Operations Executive (SOE). A “black” (sub rosa) propaganda section of SOE, created by the Foreign Office and named “Electra House,” was attached to the SOE in 1940 to become the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), charged with political and psychological warfare.

¹¹Thomas Ruggles Pynchon was born on 8 May 1937. Today is his 87th birthday.

If you’re the kinda weirdo who likes to celebrate Pynchon’s work and legacy, indulge in Pynchon in Public Day.

Steven Weisenburger’s 2nd’ edition of the Companion gives the following gloss on the date:

8 May, just before the traditional Whitsun exodus. Recall that part 2 ends with Pointsman and crew spending “Whitsun by the sea” (V269.26n). This traditional British holiday weekend fell on May 20 in 1945.

¹²Roger Mexico “sees only the same flows of power, the same impoverishments” that he’s seen throughout the war. Unlike Jessica, he’s hep now to the knowledge that “the real business of the War is buying and selling.”

¹³Pynchon here reiterates one of GR’s central themes, of the preterite vs the elect, of a “channel upward” or crashing down. The theme permeates the book, right from its opening lines. Consider the novel’s fourth sentence “The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre.” The opening “evacuation” scene is surreal and apocalyptic, with each potential evacuee hearing an inner voice that cruelly coos, “You didn’t really believe you’d be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow. . . .” The narrator’s very early note that “it’s all theatre” is one of Pynchon’s central diagnoses of power in GR, and one that not every character comes to fully understand. As if to underline that it’s all kayfabe, Pynchon ends GR by introducing a new character, Richard M. Zhlubb, a parody of Nixon. Zhlubb is the night manager of the Orpheus Theatre.

¹⁴I think what finally most breaks Roger’s heart isn’t the loss of Jessica, but that “Jessica believes Them.” She’s subscribed to the theater of “war” and “peace,” an illusion that can no longer comfort Roger.

Gravity’s Rainbow — annotations and illustrations for pages 712-13 | The Man has a branch office in each of our brains

May 6, 2024May 6, 2024 Biblioklept1 Comment

Illustration for Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Gustave Doré, 1876

Well¹, if the Counterforce² knew better what those categories³ concealed, they might be in a better position to disarm, de-penis and dismantle the Man⁴. But they don’t. Actually they do, but they don’t admit it. Sad but true. They are as schizoid, as double-minded in the massive presence of money, as any of the rest of us, and that’s the hard fact⁵. The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit⁶. We do know what’s going on, and we let it go on⁷. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse, however rarely. We need that. And how they know it–how often, under what conditions. . . .⁸ We ought to be seeing much popular-magazine coverage on the order of The Night Rog and Beaver Fought Over Jessica While She Cried in Krupp’s Arms, and drool over every blurry photo–⁹

Roger must have been dreaming¹⁰ for a minute here of the sweaty evenings of Thermidor¹¹: the failed Counterforce, the glamorous ex-rebels, half-suspected but still enjoying official immunity and sly love, camera-worthy wherever they carry on . . . doomed pet freaks.

They will use us. We will help legitimize Them¹², though They don’t need it really, it’s another dividend for Them, nice but not critical. . . .

Oh yes, isn’t that exactly what They’ll do.

¹ Well, hell, the last time I composed one of these silly annotations posts was way back in the unfortunate Fall of 2016, when I lost my goddamn mind for a while. I never made any notes on the novel’s final quadrant, “The Counterforce,” and never mustered any more notes when I reread GR in 2020. Over the past two weeks, I listened to George Guidall’s excellent narration in a long, long audiobook that kept me good company through some serious Spring cleaning projects. As has been the case in each of my treks through GR, I found it intensely prescient, a wonderful, terrifying diagnosis of the grand ugly 20th c. that we will never recover from.

² I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow all the way through six or seven times now, and each time I always find myself buoyed by the Counterforce—Pynchon’s heroic band of preterite rebels who resist the forces of Control. And every time I reread it I seem to forget that the Counterforce fails—the Counterforce (I dare not use the appropriate pronoun they, for They is the enemy of the Counterforce’s We) simply can’t stop the coming new world order of the military-industrial-entertainment complex. The short passage I’ve selected here, with Counterforce hero and one-time lover Roger Mexico as its medium, showcases one of the many reasons the Counterforce will fail.

³Those categories refers to Pynchon’s previous paragraph, an academic spoof highlighting various “albatross nosologies”; nosology refers to the classification of diseases; the albatross is a metaphorical curse, of course.

⁴ The Man: authority, control, They, the force, the fuzz, the cops, the heat, the money guys, the enemies of art, love, and the human soul…

⁵ A depressing notion, of course, and one Pynchon would return to in his 1990 follow-up to GR, Vineland, a novel that parodied the so-called counterculture of the 1960’s massive ideological failure, to, like, follow through with any true revolutionary project.

⁶ The economic metaphors here are appropriate. Again, fuck the money guys whose mission in this world is Bad Shit.

⁷ An even more depressing notion—that the double-mindedness of Counterforce consciousness includes knowing that we let the Bad Shit go on; maybe our resistant spirit curdles into a brittle apathy; maybe we overindulge in mindless pleasures; maybe we explode.

mindless-pleasures — An early trial cover for GR, featuring one of its working titles, Mindless Pleasures

⁸ The date of publication for this post coincides with the May 6, 2024 annual Met Gala, a capitalist spectacle of wealth and fame costumed in the trappings of art. This year’s ticket is $75,000, more than the average U.S. salary. And yet it might be fair to consider that those “massively moneyed” costumed revelers at the Met Gala aren’t even really the true massively moneyed, but rather their avatars, projected on innumerable screens, avatars of mindless pleasures to distract us from all the Bad Shit the massively moneyed are up to.

⁹ Pynchon here plays on lurid tabloid headlines that aren’t too different from the ones we see today, reconfiguring the one-time lovers Jessica and Roger as the elect, figures of celebration. It’s all fantasy though—literally; as the next lines seem to suggest, we’ve been in Roger’s addled mind. Pynchon’s headline reminds me of Donald Barthelme’s 1964 short story “Me and Miss Mandible,” which includes a list of trashy titles about Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, and Eddie Fisher like “The Private Life of Eddie and Liz,” “Debbie Gets Her Man Back?” and “Eddie’s Taylor-Made Love Nest.”

I found the wartime love affair between Jessica and Roger more depressing this time than in previous reads of Gravity’s Rainbow. When we first meet them, we get one of the best lines in the novel: “They are in love. Fuck the war.” But it is the war that licenses their love; in its absence (or, really dormancy), a bureaucratizing control subsumes their ardor. They fail.

The Lovers card from the Rider–Waite tarot deck

¹⁰ The gerund dreaming here helps to foreground Roger’s current tabloid-headline-revenge-against-the-powers-that-be-fantasy as fantasy while also analeptically connecting the post-WW2 Counterforce’s nebulous mission to the fallout of the French Revolution. Dreaming also suggests that Roger is the “narrator” of this section; it also reminds me of Roger’s mentor Pirate Prentice, whose dream (of failed escape, “all theater”) initiates Gravity’s Rainbow. Pirate’s psychic power is to inhabit the fantasies of others; this is also Thomas Pynchon’s power.

¹¹In the second edition of his A Companion to Gravity’s Rainbow, Steven Weisenburger gives the following gloss:

If Roger Mexico is dreaming of these evenings, then his dreams contain a warning. Thermidor was the eleventh month of the French revolutionary calendar, corresponding to the period from July 19 to August 17. Moreover, it was on the eighth of Thermidor, in the French Revolution’s second year (in other words, July 27, 1794), that Robespierre, Saint-Just, and other leaders of massive redistribution of wealth and upheaval of the aristocratic order, known as the Reign of Terror, were arrested and, the next day, executed.

Weisenburger’s annotation here is a significant update from the Companion’s first edition, which essentially gives a brief definition of what Thermidor was without any greater political or historical context.

The Pynchon Wiki Gravity’s Rainbow annotation gives the following, which repeats (or precedes?) Weisenburger’s note, adding also that, “In one of his newspaper articles later, Pynchon would speak of the Nixon years as a ‘Thermidorian reaction’ to the 1960s.”

I have no idea what “one of his newspaper articles” is being referenced here. What immediately came to mind was likely “Is It Okay to Be a Luddite?” or “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee,” both of which appeared in The New York Times, and neither of which, as far as I can tell, use the phrase “Thermidorian reaction” or “Nixon.” (In “Luddite,” Pynchon does refer to the French Revolution—and also gives us a nice little summary of Roger’s complaint against Power in our little passage here: “there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed”). The closest phrasing I can find to the Pynchon Wiki’s framing comes from a 2016 essay by James Liner that primarily deals with Inherent Vice. Liner writes: “Even in the Thermidor of Nixon’s 1970s, on the eve of the Reagan/Thatcher ’80s, Doc holds fast to utopian hope and the possibility of antisystemic praxis.”

Execution de Robespierre et de ses complices conspirateurs contre la liberté et l’egalité : vive la Convention nationale qui par son energie et Surveillance a delivré la Republique de ses Tyrans

¹²Doomed pet freaks. The money guys will put the counterculture on the market as a Fuck You to freaks and rubes alike, icing on their cake.

Don’t legitimize their grasping at capital as culture.

We might be freaks, but We are not doomed and We are not Their pets.

John Barth’s brief description of Donald Barthelme’s so-called postmodernist dinners

April 3, 2024 BibliokleptLeave a comment

1fa8c7cbf8dc977653f7750905725da4 — Photograph from “The Postmodernists Dinner,” 1983 by Jill Krementz (b. 1940)

In John Barth’s 1989 New York Times eulogy for Donald Barthelme, Barth gives a brief description of two so-called postmodernist dinners, both of which I’ve written on this blog before.

…though [Barthelme] tsked at the critical tendency to group certain writers against certain others ”as if we were football teams” – praising these as the true ”post-contemporaries” or whatever, and consigning those to some outer darkness of the passe – he freely acknowledged his admiration for such of his ”teammates,” in those critics’ view, as Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, William Gaddis, William Gass, John Hawkes, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut, among others. A few springs ago, he and his wife, Marion, presided over a memorable Greenwich Village dinner party for most of these and their companions (together with his agent, Lynn Nesbit, whom Donald called ”the mother of postmodernism”). In 1988, on the occasion of John Hawkes’s academic retirement, Robert Coover impresarioed a more formal reunion of that team, complete with readings and symposia, at Brown University. Donald’s throat cancer had by then already announced itself – another, elsewhere, would be the death of him – but he gave one more of his perfectly antitheatrical virtuoso readings.

It’s Boxing Day (Gravity’s Rainbow)

December 26, 2023December 25, 2023 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Inside the bowl, the two goldfish are making a Pisces sign, head-to-tail and very still. Penelope sits and peers into their world. There is a little sunken galleon, a china diver in a diving suit, pretty stones and shells she and her sisters have brought back from the sea.

Aunt Jessica and Uncle Roger are out in the kitchen, hugging and kissing. Elizabeth is teasing Claire in the hallway. Their mother is in the W.C. Sooty the cat sleeps in a chair, a black thundercloud on the way to something else, who happens right now to look like a cat. It’s Boxing Day. The evening’s very still. The last rocket bomb was an hour ago, somewhere south. Claire got a golliwog, Penelope a sweater, Elizabeth a frock that Penelope will grow into.

The pantomime Roger took them all to see this afternoon was Hansel and Gretel. Claire immediately took off under the seats where others were moving about by secret paths, a flash of braid or of white collar now and then among the tall attentive uncles in uniform, the coat-draped backs of seats. On stage Hansel, who was supposed to be a boy but was really a tall girl in tights and smock, cowered inside the cage. The funny old Witch foamed at the mouth and climbed the scenery. And pretty Gretel waited by the Oven for her chance. . . .

Then the Germans dropped a rocket just down the street from the theatre. A few of the little babies started crying. They were scared. Gretel, who was just winding up with her broom to hit the Witch right in the bum, stopped: put the broom down, in the gathering silence stepped to the footlights, and sang:

Oh, don’t let it get you,

It will if they let you, but there’s

Something I’ll bet you can’t see—

It’s big and it’s nasty and it’s right over there,

It’s waiting to get its sticky claws in your hair!

Oh, the greengrocer’s wishing on a rainbow today,

And the dustman is tying his tie . . .

And it all goes along to the same jolly song,

With a peppermint face in the sky!

“Now sing along,” she smiled, and actually got the audience, even Roger, to sing:

With a peppermint face in the sky-y,

And a withered old dream in your heart,

You’ll get hit with a piece of the pie-ie,

With the pantomime ready to start!

Oh, the Tommy is sleeping in a snowbank tonight,

And the Jerries are learning to fly—

We can fly to the moon, we’ll be higher than noon,

In our polythene home in the sky. . . .

Pretty polythene home in the sky,

Pretty platinum pins in your hand—

Oh your mother’s a big fat machine gun,

And your father’s a dreary young man. . . .

(Whispered and staccato):

Oh, the, man-a-ger’s suck-ing on a corn-cob, pipe,

And the bank-ers are, eat-ing their, wives,

All the world’s in a daze, while the orchestra plays,

So turn your pockets and get your surprise—

Turn your pockets and get-your surpri-ise,

There was nobody there af-ter all!

And the lamps up the stairway are dying,

It’s the season just after the ball . . .

Oh the palm-trees whisper on the beach somewhere,

And the lifesaver’s heaving a sigh,

And those voices you hear, Boy and Girl of the Year,

Are of children who are learning to die. . . .

From Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow.

Thomas Pynchon’s recipe for the first British pizza

November 21, 2023November 20, 2023 BibliokleptLeave a comment

“Lud wishes to know,” Whike relays at last, “Mr. Emerson’s Cousin’s Views, upon the Structure of the World.”
“A Spheroid, the last I heard of it, Sir.”
“Ahr Ahr ahr, ’ahr ahhrr!”
“ ’And I say, ’tis Flat,’” the Jesuit smoothly translates. “Why of course, Sir, flat as you like, flat as a Funnel-Cake, flat as a Pizza, for all that,— ”
“Apologies, Sir,—” Whike all Unctuosity, “the foreign Word again, was . . . ?”
“The apology is mine,— Pizza being a Delicacy of Cheese, Bread, and Fish ubiquitous in the region ’round Mount Vesuvius. . . . In my Distraction, I have reach’d for the Word as the over-wrought Child for its Doll.”
“You are from Italy, then, sir?” inquires Ma.
“In my Youth I pass’d some profitable months there, Madam.”
“Do you recall by chance how it is they cook this ‘Pizza’? My Lads and Lasses grow weary of the same Daily Gruel and Haggis, so a Mother is ever upon the Lurk for any new Receipt.”
“Why, of course. If there be a risen Loaf about . . . ?”
Mrs. Brain reaches ’neath the Bar and comes up with a Brown Batch-Loaf, rising since Morning, which she presents to “Cousin Ambrose,” who begins to punch it out flat upon the Counter-Top. Lud, fascinated, offers to assault the Dough himself, quickly slapping it into a very thin Disk of remarkable Circularity.
“Excellent, Sir,” Maire beams, “I don’t suppose anyone has a Tomato?”
“A what?”
“Saw one at Darlington Fair, once,” nods Mr.”“Brain.
“No good, in that case,— eaten by now.”
“The one I saw, they might not have wanted to eat . . . ?”
Dixon, rummaging in his Surveyor’s Kit, has come up with the Bottle of Ketjap, that he now takes with him ev’rywhere. “This do?”
“That was a Torpedo, Husband.”
“That Elecktrickal Fish? Oh . . . then this thing he’s making isn’t elecktrical?”
“Tho’ there ought to be Fish, such as those styl’d by the Neopolitans, Cicinielli. . . .”
“Will Anchovy do?” Mrs. Brain indicates a Cask of West Channel ’Chovies from Devon, pickl’d in Brine.
“Capital. And Cheese?”
“That would be what’s left of the Stilton, from the Ploughman’s Lunch.”
“Very promising indeed,” Maire wringing his Hands to conceal their trembling. “Well then, let us just . . .”
By the Time what is arguably the first British Pizza is ready to come out of the Baking-Oven beside the Hearth, the Road outside has gone quiet and the Moorland dark, several Rounds have come and pass’d, and Lud is beginning to show signs of Apprehension. “At least ’tis cloudy tonight, no Moonlight’ll be getting thro’,” his Mother whispers to Mr. Emerson.”

From Thomas Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon.

Books acquired, 13 Oct. 2023

October 15, 2023 Biblioklept2 Comments

I couldn’t pass on a used copy of the second edition of Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion even though it ate up most of my trade credit. I used the first edition of the Companion when I reread Gravity’s Rainbow about eight years ago and then gave it to a friend I had been encouraging to read GR. He still hasn’t read it.

I also picked up a hardcover first edition of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and a pristine 1946 hardback edition of Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ll probably trade in the Gabler edition of Ulysses I have, but I think I’m too sentimental to let go of the copy of The Road I read in the hospital over a few days when my daughter was born.

I’m a big fan of Vintage Contemporaries, but I’d never seen Terry McDonell’s California Bloodstock. I pulled it out because of its spine, and found the cover intriguing–it reminded me of these weird paintings that hang in a decrepit hotel in St. Augustine Beach that we stay at for a few nights every year. The blurb from H.S. Thompson didn’t hurt either.

I opened it to find that the novel is inscribed:

Anyone know Lou Schultz? Or what SMART might be?

(This is not a review of) The Dragon Waiting, John M. Ford’s lost classic of fantastical history

October 12, 2023October 13, 2023 Edwin Turner2 Comments

So what’s this book you liked so much?

It’s called The Dragon Waiting. It’s a 1983 novel by a guy named John M. Ford. It’s this erudite historical fantasy, or maybe fantastical history, that—

Wait, it’s called The Dragon Waiting? It’s like about dragons and shit? Dungeons and dragons?

There are dungeons, or really towers—the whole medieval motif of hostage-taking is part of the novel—but no, no dragons. Or, there is a dragon at the very end of the novel, but it’s essentially a shared illusion manifested by the dreams of an approaching army. The dragon manifests as this illusory spectacle, a spectacle based on lack and imagination—it’s kinda Lacanian, really, because—

Okay, so, is it a fantasy novel or not? I mean are there wizards and monsters and shit?

There are wizards. But really, they operate more like, I dunno, spies or chemists or thieves. One of the four main protagonists is a Welsh wizard named Hywel Peredur, and he isn’t like, doing sorcery so much as he’s trying to shape events by aligning personalities, throwing out political and personal gambits, heroic scheming, and—

Like Gandalf.

Yeah, like Gandalf I guess. Or Merlyn. But really, the stuff in The Dragon Waiting is like, reality-based, by which I mean history-based, or at least historical-fantasy-based.

So there aren’t any orcs or trolls or elves or whatever and the dragon is just a shared illusion?

There are monstrous people. Oh, there are also vampires, but they’re not all bad.

So it’s a vampire novel? A horror novel?

No, not a horror novel, although it has some gothic tinges, and definitely not a “vampire novel,” whatever that is—although one of the four protagonists is afflicted with vampirism. He’s a German engineer named Gregory von Bayern who specializes in artillery.

So he’s a vampire who makes guns and bombs?

Kind of, but that makes it sound silly.

And so he kills people?

Yeah, but not to feed on them, and not like, in general. He’s one of the heroes of the story, enlisted by Hywel to—

Hywel is the Gandalf?

Not a great analog but sure, Hywel is your Gandalf. And he kinda puts together this squad whose long-term goals are never really stated clearly, but they are essentially forming a Western resistance to the Byzantine Empire.

The Byzantine Empire?

Yeah. So, in the alternate reality of The Dragon Waiting, the Byzantine Empire is the great unified force in the East. And because of this, Christianity never emerges as a major religion, so instead there’s this plurality of all kinds of Gods worshipped—Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and son on. And the sort of background action of the novel is Byzantium encroaching into Europe, threatening Italy, which is a bunch of disunified city states, so even if the Medici are powerful, they still have their own internal opponents, that’s one of the major themes of the novel—political infighting. We see the political scheming thing most strongly in the novel’s dominant plot, which is Hywel’s gang’s attempt to get Richard the Duke of Gloucester on the English throne.

Richard the Duke of Gloucester—that was a real guy, right?

Lots of the characters in The Dragon Waiting are real guys from history, yes.

So what do I know Richard the Duke of Gloucester from?

He was Richard the III of England.

The hunchback guy? The winter of our discontent guy? The guy who killed his nephews?

That’s how Shakespeare depicted him in the play, yes. But Ford’s novel takes a different approach. He’s very human, and he has flaws, but he’s not a Machiavellian child-killing prick.

Okay, so all of this is taking place in like Byzantium and Italy and England and like, when? When is Richard III? 1600 something?

No, not Byzantium—that Empire is trying to spread west. No, the action takes place in Western Europe—Wales, Italy, France, Switzerland, England, and so on. And the dates would cover a few decades, but a lot of the prime action is happening at the end of the fifteenth century. Richard III was coronated in the summer of 1483, if that helps. But because Christianity never really takes off, the whole AD thing never happens, so those numbers don’t really show up in the book.

This sounds really complicated. Do I need to know a lot of European history, world history to understand what’s happening?

Oh, I think even if you knew a lot of the historical background very well you’d have a hard time understanding what’s happening.

Great. So why are you into this dragon book?

I love how it’s written; I love its themes, its layering, its construction. It’s a dense book that feels light; it’s serious and erudite but also psychologically drawn. Ford eschews exposition. In fact, at times he even sets the reader up to look the wrong way. And this fits with a lot of the themes and motifs and bits of the novels—illusionists, forgers, secret agents, disguises, spies, thieves, and so on. So it’s not just happening in the plot; it’s also happening at the rhetorical level. Like, for example, okay, so we get this kind of overture in the first three chapters, which establish three of our four protagonists: Hywel the Welsh wizard, Dimitrios Ducas, an exiled Greek mercenary, and Cynthia Ricci, an Italian doctor initially in the service of the Medici. And Ford’s camera sits close to their perspective, we get into their heads, get to know them a bit. And then all of a sudden we get to the book’s second section, and all of the characters are in disguise in this remote mountain inn, way up in the snow, using false names. And Ford never shows his hand, we just have to figure out what happens, who the characters really are, and how they relate to each other. And he sort of wedges this neat little murder mystery in there (in the snow in a hotel no less—reminded me of Crane’s “The Blue Hotel” or Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight). And Ford does this again and again, but in new ways—misdirection, disguise, illusion. I ended up having to read each chapter twice.

I bet the vampire did the murder!

Okay.

But so like there are vampires in this book, but that’s not, like, a thing?

The novel treats vampirism as a disease, not as a supernatural thing, and like many diseases, there is folklore and superstition that develops around the disease, some in common with our own concept of “vampirism.” The vampires in The Dragon Waiting are sensitive to light and they do have to consume blood, but they aren’t necessarily immortal, and to a large extent, they are shunned and feared. Although some of them become powerful.

And the vampire Gregory is good?

I guess. The motivations for the four main characters aren’t necessarily good or evil, per se, although the four of them are generally sympathetic to decency, humanity, and compassion over violence and raw power. But ultimately, they seem mostly motivated by the strange friendships they forge with each other.

That sounds corny.

It’s not.

Ok. So you like the writing, but what about the subject matter? I mean, I didn’t really think you were into historical fantasy fiction? Does a body have to know a lot of European history to get into this? I tried to ask you earlier and you deflected.

I think I answered just fine: No, not really. There’s a lot of English history in there, and a lot of it will be familiar (but strangely so) if you know Shakespeare’s plays on the Plantagenet kings—a cycle that ends with Richard III, obviously.

Obviously.

I think Ford knows his history really, really well, but part of his rhetorical technique is withholding certain clues, baiting and switching, reshuffling the deck, moving the cups quickly in a shell game…the story is really about shifting identities, shifting names, shifting allegiances, and so on. I suppose it might be easy to compare it to George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books, but, like better written, smarter, and trimmed of all the fat.

Rude.

That’s not what I meant. It’s sort of like Gene Wolfe’s New Sun novels. Although I’d really compare The Dragon Waiting to something like Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day or V.—those are historical fantasies too—or fantastical histories?—encyclopedic ones that frequently defer meaning and stun or bewitch the reader. There’s like a specter there in the prose, pushing out an illusion that the reader has to chase—

The reader has to chase the dragon?

Shush.

So you’re saying this dragon book is Pynchonian?

No, no. But many things I like in Pynchon—the paranoia, the showing of the parts while withholding the revelation of the whole, the dazzling encyclopediaism—I find that in The Dragon Waiting too. Ford’s style also reminds me a bit of Cormac McCarthy, who’s so good at simply showing actions while refusing to tell the reader what they mean—either to the characters or to the narrator or whomever. Things just happen and the reader has to sort it out.

But won’t I get confused?

I was confused but not frustrated. I was confused, but then I’d reread the chapter and realize I had been looking in the wrong direction or following the wrong thread. Again, rhetorical misdirection doubles the novel’s themes of political/magical misdirection.

But the history might get me all confused.

Okay, so, the names can cause confusion. Pretty much every character has multiple names or titles, and they all use aliases as well. And lots of the historical background characters, particularly the English ones, have the same names. Lots of Richards and Elizabeths and Edwards and Henrys in here. Ford provides a little overture of historical personages, and Wikipedia is always there. Oh, and there’s this really cool site called Draco Concordans which is a series of annotations on the novel.

Wait, I have to read annotations on a website to follow this book? Is this fucking Finnegans Wake or something?

No, and I only found the site after I finished the book. I might have liked to have used it when I reread each chapter though. But I would definitely recommend reading it the first time cold. I think the pleasure in the book is looking back to realize where you lost the thread, where you were misdirected. I’m sure I’ll consult the Concordans when I read The Dragon Waiting again.

So you’ll read it again?

Oh yeah, definitely. Loved it.

That sounds like a recommendation then.

It is. I highly recommend it.

Gravity’s Rainbow is a picaresque, apocalyptic, absurdist novel that creates a complex mythology to describe our present predicament

October 1, 2023September 30, 2023 Biblioklept3 Comments

L.E. Sissman’s contemporary review of Gravity’s Rainbow offers one of the better summaries I’ve ever read of Thomas Pynchon’s enormous novel:

Gravity’s Rainbow is a picaresque, apocalyptic, absurdist novel that creates a complex mythology to describe our present predicament. It is supposedly about a brief period in the decline of the West—fall, 1944, through fall, 1945. It is actually about our entire century, from the roots of the First World War through the final calamity, which keeps on threatening right up to press time. Beyond that, it is about the whole modern tendency of man to subordinate himself to the whims of the products of his intelligence, to the self-aggrandizing dictates of machines. It is also about the paranoia this subordination instills in men—a paranoia of which they are absolved as their persecution dreams come true and, ironically, destroy them.

Later in the review, Sissman, a poet, discusses Pynchon’s prose:

Pynchon’s talent is far greater than mere mimicry, though he is master of that. He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks. Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat of a painful and delicate love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a drugged and drunken orgy.

Sissman’s review was published in a May 1973 issue of The New Yorker. I think the review would work as a strong introduction for anyone daunted by but interested in reading Gravity’s Rainbow.

Portis’s Gringos, Essays on Pynchon, Elkin’s End (Books acquired, 29 Sept. 2023)

September 29, 2023 Biblioklept1 Comment

So two of the three books I picked up today I’d read before, but I couldn’t pass on the editions.

I read Stanley Elkin’s The Living End last summer, checking a digital version out from the library. I wanted something very short and funny at the time, and it worked wonders. I couldn’t pass up this Warner Books edition with design by Gene Light featuring art by Don Ivan Punchatz. I have a few other Elkins in this series and I adore them, even if my eyes are fading to the point that mass market paperbacks cause me to squint.

I also picked up another book I’ve already read, a book I already own a copy of—Charles Portis’s last novel Gringos. But I didn’t own a first edition with this fun, silly cover.

On the last day of 2020, the year I read Gringos, I wrote:

Gringos was the last of Portis’s five novels. I read the other four greedily last year, and pulled them all out when he passed away in February. I started in on Gringos, casually, then just kept reading. Sweet and cynical, spiked with strange heroism, strange grace, and very, very funny, Gringos might just be my favorite Portis novel. But I’d have to read them all again to figure that out.

I also picked up Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, a 1976 collection that seems ahead of its time. From Scott Sanders’ essay “Pynchon’s Paranoid History”:

Steven Moore on the wild talents of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and the occultist Charles Fort

September 7, 2023September 7, 2023 BibliokleptLeave a comment

At Socrates on the Beach, there’s a nice long essay by critic Steven Moore that traces the occult influence of Charles Fort on Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis.

From “Wild Talents: Pynchon, Gaddis, and Charles Fort“:

Pynchon and Gaddis are “wild talents” not in Fort’s original sense, but in their daring willingness to incorporate such exotic material into their novels, which previously had been confined to science fiction, fantasy, and occult novels. At any rate, it is an extraordinary coincidence that two of the greatest American novels of the 20th century evoke Charles Fort, of all people, despite what he thought of coincidences.

A review of Stone Junction, Jim Dodge’s alchemical pot-boiler

July 16, 2023July 16, 2023 Edwin TurnerLeave a comment

Jim Dodge’s 1990 novel Stone Junction tells the life story of Daniel Pearse, a young man of preternatural talents and sharp intelligence who trains under various tutors in a secret society, steals an enormous diamond, and eventually attains enlightened apotheosis. A lot of other stuff happens too.

Dodge subtitled his novel An Alchemical Pot-Boiler, a description that punctures any premature accusations of pretension, yet also calls attention to the novel’s arcane subject matter. The subtitle’s also a joke, of course—Dodge invites us to read his 500-pager as a kind of alchemist’s cauldron, a kitchen sink overloaded with spies and thieves, gamblers and quick change artists, holy fools and madmen.

And Dodge, as promised, keeps his pot boiling. Stone Junction is a propulsive and engaging read largely because of the world he imagines for Daniel to grow up in. Stone Junction isn’t a magical realism act, but magic exists here. From a very young age, Daniel is initiated into a clandestine organization called AMO. Said aloud, as a young Daniel points out, the name “AMO” is suggestive of both “ammo” and the Latin verb amo, it’s really an acronym:

AMO is the acronym for Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws – or, as some members claim, Alchemists, Magicians, and Outlaws, which they contend was the original name. Another faction, small but vocal, insists AMO has always stood for Artists, Myth-singers, and Outriders. As you might sense, there is constant and long-standing contention about AMO’s origins and development

…AMO is a secret society – though more on the order of an open secret, in fact. Basically, AMO is a historical alliance of the mildly felonious, misfits, anarchists, shamans, earth mystics, gypsies, magicians, mad scientists, dreamers, and other socially marginal souls.

After the violent and mysterious death of his mother (and his own near-death), Daniel comes under the tutelage of those dreamers and socially-marginal souls. Extended episodes of Daniel’s working and growing under a new teacher make up the bulk of Stone Junction; these inventive and enjoyable sections are the finest parts of the book. Thomas Pynchon offers a nice catalog of Daniel’s various mentors in his introduction to the 1997 reprint of Stone Junction:

Wild Bill Weber teaches meditation, fishing, waiting. Mott Stocker teaches Dope, its production and enjoyment. Ace safecracker Willie Clinton (yep) instructs the boy in how to get past all kinds of locks and alarms, rendering him thus semi-permeable to certain protected parts of the world, setting him on his path to total dematerialization. For a while Daniel teams up with poker wizard Bad Bobby Sloane, roving the American highways in search of opportunities to risk capital in ways that cannot be officially controlled… The shape-shifting genius Jean Bluer teaches Daniel the arts of disguise… At last Daniel comes circling back to Volta…who teaches him the final secret of Invisibility. None of your secular Wellsian tricks with refractive indices and blood pigmentation here, but rather the time-honored arts of ceasing to be material.

It makes sense that Pynchon (who praises Stone Junction as “an outlaw epic for our own late era of corrupted romance and defective honor”) would stick on that big “I” Invisibility, always a byword in his own novels.

Dodge’s byword in Stone Junction is another i-word: imagination. Especially in its final third, Dodge’s novel, and its characters, repeat the importance of imaginative possibility, of imagining new realities, new states of being.

Volta is the dark sage magician guiding Daniel on his quest toward imagination. Or, rather, his quest to steal an enormous, perfectly-circular diamond from the U.S. government. He might throw Daniel into a den of lions, but our boy’s an escape artist. His last name, Pearse, among other transmutations (pierce, purse, pairs), suggests Percival, one of Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. (Like Percival, Daniel is raised alone in hermetic seclusion by his solo mother.) The diamond is Daniel’s grail.

In her contemporary New York Times review of Stone Junction, Michele Slung pointed out the novel’s debt to Arthurian legends, among other sources, calling it “a post-psychedelic coming-of-age fable that’s part Thomas Pynchon, part Tolkien, part Richard Brautigan, a story that owes as much to The Once and Future King as it does to Huckleberry Finn.” Like Huck Finn, Stone Junction has a ramshackle, picaresque energy, but it nevertheless adheres to a plot, with the mystical diamond a MacGuffin for Daniel (among other thieves and spies) to quest after—once he’s matured and advanced in his outlaw skills, of course.

As I stated above, the strongest elements of Stone Junction revolve around Daniel’s adventures and training. (His time on the poker circuit with Bad Bobby Sloane is a particular highlight.) Dodge transmogrifies the raw material of American Weirdo Mythos into new inventions, zany recapitulations of occult outlaw fables.

Dodge’s prose style, while effective in its descriptions of characters, cannot quite approach the register of his imaginative inventory. The novel relies heavily on exposition, and while major characters like Volta and Bad Bobby Sloane speak with authentic and differentiated voices, a monolingual sameiness pervades too much of the prose. In its strongest moments, Stone Junction reads like a YA Pynchon novel; in its weakest moments, it reminded me of Tom Robbins.

The stronger moments prevail, however—Stone Junction is a fun, flighty, and at times unexpectedly heavy summer read. The novel might also be read in (stoned) conjunction with Pynchon’s 1990 twin Vineland. Both novels diagnose the fallout of the 1960s counterculture wave crashing against the Reagan eighties; both seem attempts to, at least in the world of letters, check the burgeoning nostalgic romanticization of that turbulent decade. Pynchon’s is the more flawed, sillier, and better-written effort; Dodge’s is likely his magnum opus.

If I’ve namechecked Pynchon too much in my review, forgive me: His name is on the cover of Jim Dodge’s novel, and his own (far more-detailed, far better-written) review precedes Jim Dodge’s novel, and his endorsement is frankly the reason I sought it out to begin with. I called Stone Junction “YA Pynchon” above, but I didn’t mean it as an insult—it’s YA in an older sense, in the sense of the novels handed me when I was young, hardly adult, novels that etched their own versions of reality onto our own banal reality; realities more real: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Outsiders, The Once and Future King, The Lord of the Rings, Hatchet… Stone Junction is about youth, but it’s also about maturation, and the ache and melancholy of aging out of the game, personified in the semi-tragic figure of Daniel’s would-be mentor, Volta.

I don’t think I would’ve appreciated the depth of Volta’s melancholy as a much younger person, which is the time I wished I had first read Stone Junction. I should’ve found the novel almost 30 years ago—let’s say the summer I stayed in my cousin’s old bedroom. I was fifteen or sixteen, and he, a decade older than me, was doing Adult Things. I listened to the tapes and records he had left in his high school bedroom, taking a few with me at the end of the summer. (Tripp, if you’re reading, I still have your cassette of New Order’s Low-Life in a box somewhere. Drive up sometime and we can search it out together.) I read almost all of his cheap paperbacks, and took as many as I thought I could reasonably get away with with me: Fear and Loathing, Cat’s Cradle, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, both Miller Tropic novels, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Dharma Bums, Delta of Venus, The Beautiful and the Damned. That would’ve been the perfect summer for me to first read Stone Junction, but I didn’t read it then. I read it now. Let a younger person in your life steal it from you, sooner rather than later.

Three books (Books acquired, 8 June 2023)

June 8, 2023 BibliokleptLeave a comment

I got a facsimile hardback sixtieth anniversary edition of Thomas Pynchon’s novel V. for my birthday. I also picked up two Ishmael Reed books: Conversations with Ishmael Reed and an Avon Bard edition of Shrovetide in Old New Orleans. Before I even physically picked up these last two, I knew that they formerly belonged to a guy from Perry, Florida and that a stamp with his name and address would be on the inside of the cover or first page. I was correct in this intimation. I now have probably thirty to forty books once owned by this person. I wrote about some Reeds, formerly his, here.

Maybe I should compare my shelf with the checklist he made in the inside cover of Conversations with Ishmael Reed—