www.bookforum.com/pynchon.html
Don DeLillo It was as though, in some odd quantum stroke, Hemingway died one day and Pynchon was born the next. Pynchon has made American writing a broader and stronger force. He fou nd whispers and apparitions at the edge of modern awareness but did not lessen our sense of the physicality of American prose, the shotgun vigor , the street humor, the body fluids, the put-on. I was writing ads for Sears truck tires when a friend gave me a copy of V . The scale of his work, large in geography and unafraid of major subjects, helped us locate our fiction not only in small anonymous corners, human and ever-essential, but out there as well, in the sprawl of high imagin ation and collective dreams. Don DeLillo's most recent novel is Cosmopolis (Scribner, 2003). Jeffrey Eugenides I have a coffee cup in storage in Berlin. It bears a fe tching image of a V-2 rocket and the name of the touristic locale in Ger many where I bought it: Peenemnde. The most brilliant epigraph in the history of literature (I'm making a sw eeping claim not out of omniscience but wild enthusiasm) comes at the be ginning of Gravity's Rainbow: "Nature does not know extinction; When I first read those words, as a college freshman, I took them at face valueas scientific proof (ve ry much in vogue at the time) of the reality of the spiritual realm. I h ad no idea that Von Braun, developer of the V-2, was Hitler's chief rock et scientist. Still less did I know of his salvation at the hands of Ame rican troops, as Berlin fell, or of his subsequent rehabilitation in the United States, where he became Nixon's chief rocket scientist and a mem ber of the nasa team that put the first man on the moon (no wonder Von B raun believed in life after death). Let's appreciate everything this epigraph accomplishes: It stems from, an d summons, the historical period Pynchon writes about; it simultaneously inspires and lampoons religious sentiment; and, with savage irony, it c omes out of the mouth of someone personifying the novel's central theme that the Powers That Be operate behind the scenes, owing allegiance to n o nation or ideology. Twenty years after first reading Gravity's Rainbow, I rented a car and dr ove to the island of Usedom, which lies on the Baltic in what used to be East Germany. I didn't know much about the island and was heading for t he beach resort of Heringsdorf when I saw the sign pointing to Peenemnd e Immediately, I made the detour. But I wasn't desperate to see Peenemnde or the V-2 rocket on display outside the local museum. The mission I was on, in my rented diesel Mercedes, was one of pilgrimage. I wanted to vi sit a crucial setting in Gravity's Rainbow and, by doing so, pay homage (for here was a spiritual realm I did believe in) to the writer who, pro bably more than any other, set the example for my generation of what an American novelist should be. Pynchon's fiction made it clear that, if yo u wanted to write, you had to know everything: everything about history, science, politics, even calculus; you had to know everything while bein g funny at the same time, and lyrical, bringing into the novel a freewhe eling, present-tense, colloquial-poetic American voice, in books that we re like adventure stories and comedy routines, and where the characters were forever breaking into song. I've never been temperamentally disposed to conspiracy theories, and the darker preoccupations of Pynchon's work weren't what got to me. But grea t writers don't only describe the past or the present; Pynchon's estimate, back in 1973, of the path the postwar Americ an imperium would take only seems more acute, valid, and prescient today that it did at the time. The things he was trying to teach me at twenty I'm only now beginning to learn, another life later. When I bought the souvenir coffee cup, I had the idea to send it to Pynch on. Every summer, when I go back to Berlin, my Peenemnde cup comes out of its box and back onto the kitchen shelf. It's a sacramental o bject for me, the tiny V-2 rocket on its side, like Shiva, no longer a d estroyer of worlds, but a creator, too. Jeffrey Eugenides's most recent novel is Middlesex (Farrar, Straus & Giro ux, 2002). Lorrie Moore Pynchon's mind is the steel trap of American literature: Not hing, large or small, has ever escaped it. Each "novel of ideas"because Pynchon is arguably our brainiest novelist, this anemic and offputting label gets slapped on his books like an award stickeris built detail up on detail, painstakingly, by a man with a tireless eye and appetite for the world. The narrative mosaic that emerges is strong and dazzling as a mirror, depthlessly reflective as a mirror, and, not unlike a house of mirrors, each novel manages to ensnare an entire era, its facts and wand ering energies enticed and held captive there, though rarely without mer cy. Pynchon has a historian's sense of story (front and back), a musician's s ense of line, a philosopher's sense of truth and woe, a hip vaudevillian 's wit. His books keep unearthing a hidden America and reinventing the l anguage in which we think and speak of itor might think and speak of it , or will soon think and speak of it. they even violate the oft-repeated advice not to begin a story with a charac ter waking up (Gravity's Rainbow; Shelby, at what's coming over t he Hill'" (Mason & Dixon). Pynchon's work is fearless, funny, questing, teeming with all manner of o riginality and surprise. Lorrie Moore is the author of two novels and three story collections, the most recent of which is Birds of America (Knopf, 1998). Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only rea l medium of exchange?" I thought I knew how fiction worked, what fiction did, the p roper object of its only subject. Then those sentences, screaming across the page, each one skywriting: You dream. For three decades, I've retraced that arc once a year, that shape of no s urprise, no second chances, no return. The war is everywhere and real, our terrors threat ening to perfect us, the technologies of our desire extending into netwo rks too complex for anything but unhinged and macaronic fiction even to hint at. For thirty years, early each winter, as the newspapers roll out their end -of-year obituaries and take to listing the year's proudest, most achiev ed disasters, I've read out loud, to myself or to anyone who will listen , a passage from that book that ruined me for science and made me think of writing as a life. Nine pages: that battery-ringed evensong service, set somewhere in Kentthe closest thing I have to a private religious ri tual. I do it to remind myself of the size of the made world, of what st ory might still be when it remembers itself, of the look of our maximum reach outward, of the devastating charge of words. I do it to remind mys elf of our only real medium of exchange. George Saunders I don't think anyone has gotten closer than Thomas Pyncho n to summoning the real audacity and insanity and scope of the American mind, as reflected in the American landscape. I read Pynchon all out of order, starting with Vineland, and I still remember the shock of pleasur e I got at finally seeing the America I knewstrange shops and boulevard s, built over former strange shops and former boulevards, all laid out t here in valleys and dead-end forests, heaped on top of Indian cemeteries , peopled with nut jobs and hustlers and moral puristsactually present in a novel, and present not only in substance but in structure and langu age that both used and evoked the unruly, muscular complexity of the wor ld itself. In Pynchon, anything is fair gameif it is in the world, it can go in the book. To me there is something Buddhist about this approach, which seem s to say that since the world is capable of producing an infinity of for ms, the novel must be capable of accommodating an infinite number of for ms. All aesthetic concerns (style, form, structure) answer this purpose: Let in the world. This is why Pynchon is our biggest writer, the gold standard of that over used word inclusiveness: No dogma or tidy aesthetic rule or literary fas hion is allowed to prefilter the beautiful data streaming...
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