The Sublime and the Ridiculous

Gravity’s Rainbow a novel by Thomas Pynchon.  Penguin Classics.  776 pp.  *****?

A Hell of a Woman and After Dark, My Sweet by Jim Thompson.  From Jim Thompson: Five Noir Novels of the 1950’s and 60’s.  Library of America.  pp 1-284.  ***

I can’t remember when I’ve both been annoyed by and admired a novel as much as I have Gravity’s Rainbow.  It’s another one of those gifts from my Asheville friend Levi, who every year gave me a book for Christmas while I figuratively—if not literally—rolled my eyes, thinking, I’m never going to read this thing.  He liked writers I had no interest in.  But now, years after his death, I’m coming around.[1]  I loved The French Lieutenant’s Woman.  I grew interested in Thomas Pynchon after I watched One Battle After Another, based on Vineland, and read about the director’s enormous admiration for the author.  I thought I would begin with the Pynchon novel considered his most accessible and enjoyed Inherent Vice, thought it was beautifully written and hilariously funny, though the plot escaped me (what the hell, I could say the same thing of The Big Sleep).  At that point I thought, if I want to continue with Pynchon, I should read what everyone considers his masterpiece, one of the great novels of the 20^th century.

I took that step and fell into an abyss.

One of my problems—though in some situations it’s a virtue—is that I’m extremely stubborn (as both of my wives would attest).  I get started with someone and won’t give up.  My feeling about Gravity’s Rainbow is that the writing is fabulous—line by line it’s some of the finest prose I’ve read—but I have no idea what the hell’s going on, especially in the book’s long first section.  It reminds me in that way of Samuel Beckett’s Three Novels, except that Beckett had a bright Irish lyricism that Pynchon does not.  I was reading the book at a snail’s pace (I thought it might last the rest of my life) and, though the writing was exhilarating, the subject matter was heavy and depressing, to the point that I didn’t want to pick the book up in the evening (then would start reading, and become entranced by the prose).  I was afraid I was going to have to get a prescription for Zoloft before I finished the book.

The general subject matter—forgive me if I’m completely wrong; I still have no idea what’s going on—is a battle of wits (and often excruciating violence) among spies and scientists following World War II.  They had all been involved in trying to develop a rocket to end the war, and that attempt will continue now that the war has ended (and the cold war has begun).  Nobody knows who knows what, or who’s working for whom; the situation involves spies, double agents, and—for all I know—triple and quadruple agents.  People might want to kill one of these agents, or torture him to find out what he knows, or maybe torture and then kill him, if they’re satisfied they’ve gotten everything out of him (and that he’s not working for the same side they are).  Despite the gruesomeness of what I’m describing, there’s a mirthful tone to the novel—there’s something ridiculous about all this, right?—and it’s loaded with sex, beautifully and graphically described.  There’s more sex than in my novel The Autobiography of My Body, which was excoriated by readers who didn’t like it as a vile work of pornography.  Nobody says that about Gravity’s Rainbow probably because the sex police can’t penetrate (so to speak) that first section.

If Pynchon’s major topic is paranoia—as people often say—he’s found his perfect subject.  This is the book he was born to write.

I don’t think—as some people do—that he’s contemptuous of his readers.  He just has a finer mind than the rest of us—a grander, more encompassing mind—and he’s writing at the top of his powers.  We can’t keep up.  It’s nobody’s fault.

Around the middle of the novel, I was contemplating giving up, which would be a real blow to my ego, but I consulted a couple of my favorite readers, one of whom told me he read the book years ago but with zero comprehension, the other who said he was overwhelmed by the book but had read (this is a man who normally reads much faster than I) “about a page a day.”  I realized there was no reason I had to focus exclusively on a novel that was leading me into depression and incipient alcoholism, that I could take a break from time to time (how about right now?), that it didn’t matter if I interrupted it, because I wasn’t following the plot anyway (there are dozens of characters; I’ve long since given up trying to keep track of them), so what the hell, why not read something easier when I got worn out, then go back to it.

I had just received the Library of America’s Jim Thompson volume.

Talk about stark contrasts.  I can’t possibly say how flat Thompson’s prose is.  He makes Philip K. Dick look like Thomas Wolfe.  And on the unlikely plot scale, he’s one of the all-time greats.  After reading Pynchon, I feel overwhelmed but virtuous.  I read Thompson and feel slightly ashamed, the way I used to feel when I walked out of a porn store[2] (though there’s nothing sexy about his books)

If paranoia is Pynchon’s subject, Thompson writes about how the average Joe turns to a life of crime.  A Pynchon character thinks there’s a world-wide plot of some kind in which everybody’s out to get him.  A Thompson character thinks life has dealt him a rotten hand, no one ever helped him out or gave him a break, and now, finally, he’s going to get his, and if he has to break a few heads in the process, so be it.  That’s the way the game is played.

Pynchon’s apprenticeship was graduate school in physics.  Thompon’s was writing for magazines like True Detective, where he was supposedly writing about actual crimes, but sometimes fudged it a little.  He didn’t like to do the research for true crime stories, because he was a slightly squeamish(?).  He would send his sister and mother out to collect the sordid details (they apparently loved it).  And if they needed a photograph of a corpse, one of them might play dead out in a field and the other would take her picture.  Those magazines did not specialize in verisimilitude.

Thompson has continued that tradition.

I will admit (now that I’ve dragged you this far) that I haven’t finished either book.  I’m within shouting distance of the end of Gravity’s Rainbow, and I haven’t continued with Thompson, though the next two novels were both made into movies I enjoyed—The Getaway and The Grifters—and I do expect to read them.

In closing I should say that certain episodes of Gravity’s Rainbow absolutely astonish me, and are worth all the agony this book has put me through.  For example, go to a bookstore, pick up this edition, then sit down somewhere and read from the last paragraph on p. 597 to the break on p. 601.  It’s a short passage about how the Masons control everything, and one character’s involvement with them.  That passage includes a religious/spiritual perspective that the book often teeters on.  I’m hoping that shows up more in the last hundred or so pages (and that I finally have some idea of the title’s meaning).

But we’ll see.

[1] This is an example of what Eihei Dogen meant when he said that sometimes the future flows into the past.

[2] That was before people made their phones into porn stores.