Thomas Ruggles Pynchon (PIHN-chuhn), Jr., is the most controversial, the most discussed, and the most mysterious of the post-World War II writers who pioneered what is called metafiction (roughly, any fiction that calls attention to its fictive nature). Descended from eminent Massachusetts Puritans and raised in a conventional upper-middle-class Long Island family, Pynchon attended Cornell University as a student in engineering physics, left to serve a hitch in the Navy, and returned to graduate with a degree in English in 1959. He wrote his first stories while at Cornell. He worked as a writer for Boeing Aircraft from 1960 to 1962. As a result of Pynchon’s reclusiveness, little else is known of Pynchon’s life after 1962, other than that he has lived, variously, in Mexico, California, and New York, and that he and Melanie Jackson, his literary agent and mate, have a child. The only public photo of Pynchon is from his high school yearbook.
Pynchon’s early fictions weave their complex interactions around the twin themes of entropy and paranoia. In his decaying world, characters are always afraid that they have been singled out for some dreadful fate; in many cases, the fear is justified. Pynchon’s first novel, V., was greeted with puzzlement by many of its readers and with the fanfare accorded an important new talent by many critics. The book won the Faulkner Award as the best first novel published in 1963. Its characters, either Navy men who spend their shore leaves being drunk and disorderly or a group of raffish New Yorkers who speak of themselves as “the Whole Sick Crew,” are linked by the character of Benny Profane. Benny thinks of himself, accurately, as a “schlemiel.” He has left the Navy, but he returns to Norfolk to drink and fight with his old buddies when he cannot think of anything better to do. In New York, he is part of an equally pointless life.
V. is not, however, simply a depressing novel about sad and useless characters. Pynchon’s style and the way in which events are presented often make the grimmest scenes comic. In one sequence, Profane joins a motley group of men who are issued rifles and shotguns and sent into the sewers beneath the streets of New York to kill the alligators that, grown too big to be pets, have been flushed down the city’s toilets. The action is murky but hilarious, and its links to other actions in the novel are tenuous. The novel is held together by its characters’ search for a mysterious woman named V., who has appeared in various guises at crucial points in the history of the Western world ever since 1898. The search itself is ludicrous and tragic by turns. The only hope for the searching characters is provided by a tenor saxophone player: “Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.”
The same combination of the wildly comic and the mysteriously threatening marks Pynchon’s second novel, The Crying of Lot 49. Much briefer and more coherent than V., this story centers on a California woman named Oedipa Maas who is named executor of the estate of a wealthy industrialist who was at one time her lover. The paranoia that was an underlying element in V. is the major focus of The Crying of Lot 49. In her travels in California, notably to San Francisco, trying to fulfill her obligations as executor, Oedipa can never be sure of anything except that the world in which she lives is mysterious and menacing. She is not even certain that her former lover is dead or that her job as executor is not a colossal practical joke being played on her. She uncovers a secret right-wing organization which seems to be linked to a centuries-old subversive group. She comes in contact with various people who have been cast out by society, discovering that her own ties to the world are not firm. The novel ends before she finds answers to any of her questions.
While both V. and The Crying of Lot 49 attracted admirers and detractors, Gravity’s Rainbow created a literary sensation and made Pynchon the object of more critical books and articles than any of his contemporaries. Centering on Europe at the end of World War II but encompassing elements of the history of the Western world over the last three centuries, Gravity’s Rainbow goes beyond the earlier novels in its evocation of paranoia and entropy (a concept that Pynchon, following philosopher Henry Adams, adapts from physics: The loss of energy in any action within a closed system will lead ultimately to the death of the universe).
Gravity’s Rainbow describes a war-ravaged Europe where characters with any spark of decency are threatened with destruction. A mysterious and hidden “They,” acting through agents, seek to control and direct all life, removing emotion, chance, and love. “They” control gigantic business and political organizations that use technology to manipulate the war for their own ends. Resistance to “Them” is possible but temporary. In the end, technology and its products may succeed in abolishing life on Earth. Indeed it is arguable that the novel’s real protagonist is not Tyrone Slothrop, who disappears or “fragments” before the action closes, but the German V-2 rocket, which in many ways assumes a “life of its own.” The novel ends with an atomic missile about to strike the theater in which the book’s audience sits.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, as in the earlier novels, wild humor leavens Pynchon’s grim message. Characters with humorously unusual names (Bloody Chiclitz, Roger Mexico, Jessica Swanlake, Miss Muller-Hochleben) engage in fantastic antics: Two men try unsuccessfully to trap a wandering dog in a bombed-out house, the dog at one point speaking in the voice of radio comedian Fred Allen; the central figure, Tyrone Slothrop, is installed in a pig costume to act in a pageant staged in a small German town and lives for weeks in the costume. The grisly, the obscene, the tragic, and the burlesque combine in Pynchon’s imagination.
For seventeen years after Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon stayed out of sight, known only through a few published book blurbs, letters-to-the-editor, and essays, including a telling piece of self-criticism introducing Slow Learner, the volume of his early stories released in order to halt their publication in unauthorized printings.
Vineland appeared to widely mixed reviews in 1989. Detractors seem mainly to have missed the entropy and bleak landscapes defining his prior fictions, and they thought Pynchon had lost his edge as a critic of modern times. Yet the novel tells a subtle and wildly comical story about the slow death of 1960’s radicalism during the Reagan era, understood in reference to 1930’s leftism and nineteenth century progressivism. The story’s focus on a still-unassimilated hippie, Zoyd Wheeler, his daughter Prairie, and the girl’s mother, long missing after selling out to FBI agents, brings into play Pynchon’s old theme of an omniscient bureaucratic “They” controlling daily life. The new element is television as an insidiously banal yet effective mode of social regulation. Unlike his earlier fictions, Vineland concludes somewhat hopefully, on a scene of family reunion in nature.
Mason and Dixon once again aroused discussion as to whether Pynchon had lost his direction or simply moved on to slightly different pastures. His title characters are Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the eighteenth century surveyors responsible for drawing the Mason-Dixon Line that divides the North from the South. Pynchon takes this enterprise as symbolic of the delineation, both physical and metaphorical, of the modern United States, indeed, of the modern world.
Despite his relative lack of productivity and his long silences between publications, Pynchon is assured a place among the most significant novelists of the mid-to late twentieth century. His amazing range of knowledge, his mastery of a bewildering variety of styles, and his ability to combine serious materials with surrealistic comedy mark his work as unique.