The Case For Thomas Pynchon

By Joel Stein

I should prefer Philip Roth. Roth, like me, is a Jew from New Jersey who pens embarrassingly explicit sexual confessions. But his prose is not poetry. He is not breaking new ground. He is not Thomas Pynchon.

Pynchon created epic modernism. He took the detail-saturated realism of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, removed it from the confining world of marriage problems and parental blame and everything else that has made novels so small, and used it as a lens for Greek-size tales.

His books are sloppy and convoluted, and parts of them often fail entirely, but that's only because of the enormous chances Pynchon takes. In Pynchon's books something huge is always at stake: the arms race begun in World War II, the scar of our country dividing North and South, the fascism of the post office. Stick to what you know is good advice for a writing seminar, but it will never get you into the ring with Homer.

And even though Roth gets all the credit for being funny, Pynchon is funnier, finding the joke in much harder places than doing an American Pie with a piece of liver. In Mason and Dixon--written entirely in 18th century English, not an easy patois for slapstick--Ben Franklin gives people electric shocks as a bar trick, and George Washington gets high on the hemp from his own farm and speaks Yiddish. In Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop engages in a Malcolm X-assisted dive into a jazz-club toilet bowl that puts Trainspotting to shame. And in V., the New York City department of sanitation has a division arming men to kill the alligators in the sewers.

Pynchon dips in and out of perspectives in a single paragraph without notice, fuses reality with fantasy without rousing disbelief and purposefully obscures to make the reader feel the same discomfort and paranoia that his characters experience. His intelligence shines on the thick mud of his prose to reveal its beauty.

In a media-saturated age, in which a text is always polluted by the author's real life, Pynchon, 64, lets his work stand alone. He has done no interviews and allowed no current pictures. Almost nothing is known about his life after his graduation from Cornell in 1959.

In a steel-caged, no-holds-barred match in which our country had to send one living writer to wrestle against the globe's Gabriel Garcia Marquez and history's Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky, I'd feel most comfortable sending in Thomas Pynchon.

--By Joel Stein