Loosely Is the Word

Vineland a novel by Thomas Pynchon.  Penguin.  385 pp.  $21.00 ****

One Battle After Another a film by Paul Thomas Anderson.  With Teyanna Taylor, Leonardo Di Caprio, Sean Penn, Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro.  *****

I have now read my third Thomas Pynchon novel, and all I can say is, I’m trying, folks, I’m trying.  I greatly admire the man’s talent.  I admit he’s a great writer.  He is also a voracious knower of things, all kinds of arcane knowledge, physics and math, spiritual disciplines, martial arts, television shows (did the man watch a lot of television?  Why?), things people ate, wore, the landscapes they walked through.  He not only notices a lot but remembers everything (reminds me of David Foster Wallace).  Paranoia is a serious theme in his work, as everyone has noticed.  If there’s a way to be paranoid in a situation, he’ll find it.  His work is also quite funny, intricately plotted, sexy, intelligent.  I could go on and on.  My admiration is boundless.

But somehow I don’t warm to it.  I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

It may just be that I’m not the pop culture type.  I mean, Ninja nuns?  With supernatural powers?  A group of ghostlike not-quite-humans called thanatoids?  A place where you go to be cured of your television addiction (Pynchon is a prime candidate), a man who apparently dies but doesn’t know when it happened?  There’s a certain Kurt Vonnegut feel to this guy’s work.

I was especially interested in this book because the movie One Battle After Another is loosely based on it.  I loved and greatly admired the movie, so I thought I would be interested in the book.

What I would say now is that director Paul Thomas Anderson took the basic situation then did what he wanted.  I thought what he did was brilliant.  But he made a completely different story out of it.

In the novel—whose present time is in the eighties—a burnt out musician named Zoyd Wheeler is living on disability, and all he has to do to qualify is perform one outrageous act per year, which a cohort of fellow hippies gathers to watch; lately he’s been diving through a plate glass window in pursuit of someone, shattering the glass.  He’s father to a teenager named Prairie, whose mother abandoned her and Zoyd when the girl was an infant, leaving him to raise her alone.  He’s not Father Knows Best material (there!  I too can make a television reference), but he’s devoted to his daughter.

Her mother is a woman named Frenesi Gates (in a book of great names, she has the greatest) who comes from a long line of political activists (in the movie she’s black, but there’s no mention of race in the book).  She was a nonviolent radical in the sixties and believed that documenting wrongdoing was her best weapon; she was constantly making films of the repressive measures of the government, especially the violent repression of a demonstration at a small college.  But she fell in love, or at least in lust, with one of her oppressors, a man named Brock Vond.  Of all the things that happen in the book, that’s the most inexplicable, or at least unexplained, though of course there’s no accounting for taste.  Apparently she had a thing for authoritarians, though Zoyd is a far better human being.  Eventually Vond caught her an illegal activity, and in an effort to protect herself she ratted on some of her friends and disappeared from the movement.  Prairie has no memory of her.

In the early eighties, Vond has resurfaced to come after Prairie, who herself has political leanings.  When he is pursuing her, she encounters a woman named DL Chastain, an accomplished martial artist and an old friend of Frenesi’s, who realizes she needs to protect the young woman.  She takes her to the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives, a group of Ninja nuns that DL previously trained with.  DL has all kinds of fantastic powers, including the ability to kill a man with a single blow, or deliver a blow that will kill him a year later (Kung Fu movies were apparently among Pynchon’s pop culture interests).  The Sisterhood knows Frenesi was a rat, but they also own the movies that she took all those years ago.  Through watching them, Prairie sees what her parents were like.

The sisterhood also exists in One Battle After Another, though I believe they have a different name.  But in the movie the daughter is herself a martial artist, trained by a man she calls Sensei, though he is Latino, played by Benicio Del Toro.  I don’t know where Paul Thomas Anderson got that idea, but Del Toro’s character is one of the most memorable and heartening in the movie.

The novel’s plot, such as it is, involves Vond coming after Prairie, and he eventually settles on a family reunion of the radical family that Frenesi belonged to.  Unlike in the movie, Frenesi is still around in the eighties, and the big question for me was whether Prairie would actually encounter her mother and how that would go (and how Zoyd would do with all that).  I won’t answer that question, but the book winds up in a much different place from the movie.  They’re completely different works of art.

The day after I finished the book, I watched the movie again.  I told my wife we had to watch it over two nights—it’s almost three hours long—but we couldn’t stop ourselves and stayed up way past our bedtime.  As brilliant as the book is, I honestly thought, this one time,[1] that the movie was better.  You should read the book.  But you’ve got to see the movie.

[1] Talking to my wife, I thought of one other such instance.  The Godfather.