The Real Pynchon and Mailer Stand Up
ALLEN, BROOKE
On Fiction The Real Pynchon and Mailer Stand Up By Brooke Allen One of the unchanging characteristics of hu man nature is that as we age we become more distinctly ourselves....
...Why has this happened to two highly respected literary elder statesmen...
...This is a mind-boggling proposition...
...Pynchon has created a massive edifice composed of hundreds of plots that are impossible to keep track of, plus hundreds of robotic characters remarkable only for their extravagant names...
...The answer is yes...
...These are undisputed masterpieces...
...In their youth they had to prove they were marketable...
...Not at all: I suffered through enough of it to see that further perusal would be unedifying...
...And you thought the big Russian novels were hard to follow...
...every word...
...it is enough that they buy them and display them on their coffee tables...
...If a name of the caliber of Pynchon or Mailer submits a manuscript, it will be published...
...They are of considerable use to us when they do not know that they are lying because the mistruth is so vital to their needs...
...Tolstoy’s War and Peace is, in the Modern Library edition, 1,312 pages...
...Parodying science fiction and boys’ adventure stories, Pynchon is able to indulge his apparently insatiable taste for quasi-science and quasi-history, as he did in Mason & Dixon...
...but his imagination is hardly indefatigable, as this soggy, gluey, vulgar, ugly book proves...
...Thomas Hardy’s late poetry, for instance, distilled his hard and fatalistic vision into singular beauty...
...But this is acute reductionism...
...Literary editors, as many have remarked, have effectively ceased to exist...
...Let’s just say that it is set in the years between the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition and the end of World War I; that it deals with Pynchonesque incidents like the mysterious 1902 collapse of the campanile in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, and the Tunguska Event of 1908, in which hundreds of square miles of Siberia were squashed, apparently by an asteroid...
...Pynchon’s artistic sins are overwriting, digression, forced slapstick, and gigantism...
...Unless Mailer has been taking a page from Pynchon’s book: When in doubt, throw in a numbing quantity of pointless arcana...
...The late William Styron, always a perfectionist, simply stopped writing novels when he felt he could no longer achieve excellence...
...This got me thinking about other older writers now at work...
...always...
...They no longer labor under that necessity...
...Michelangelo in old age gave up the smooth finishing touches he provided his statues in response to commercial necessity...
...Recent technology, it must also be said, encourages writers with a logorrheic tendency, for the word processor has made the mechanics of writing seductively easy...
...Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov is a mere 822, Joyce’s Ulysses 816...
...Setting these aside, there really isn’t much...
...Kaye...
...Our lives are limited, after all, and to ask someone to invest so much reading time in a single novel is either hugely arrogant—an assertion that what the author has to say is really worth a couple of weeks of the reader’s time and close attention—or, alternatively (and I think with Pynchon this is an alternative that can actually be considered) a nasty practical joke on the book buyer, along the lines of Barnum’s dictum that there is a sucker born every minute...
...his late figures, stripped of decorative values, are merely the essence of whatever structural and emotional ends he was trying to achieve...
...Miniseries masters...
...In fiction as in life it has a distancing effect, as the author knows perfectly well...
...On Fiction The Real Pynchon and Mailer Stand Up By Brooke Allen One of the unchanging characteristics of hu man nature is that as we age we become more distinctly ourselves...
...All of this takes Hitler’s life out of the realm of moral choice and into that of the supernatural, making it irrelevant to the novel’s stated theme—unless one is an Augustinian Catholic, which as everyone knows the author is not...
...Mailer, at 83, is already far into his...
...Pynchon’s novels in general, and Against the Day in particular, seem to be written for the sort of reader who savors fiction as a pure intellectual exercise, rather than as an exploration into the human soul...
...Two new books this season are prime examples of such lateperiod self-indulgence: Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (Penguin, 1,085 pp., $35.00) and Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest (Random House, 496 pp., $27.95...
...it will simply be an insight into Pynchon’s mind, terra I am content to leave forever incognita...
...Part of the difficulty faced by our culture’s sacred cows—and both Pynchon and Mailer belong in that category—is that they are no longer presented with limits...
...and an act of true artistic hubris...
...the examples are legion...
...For instance, the narrator quotes the Maestro (Satan) as saying: “There is no better way to usurp the services of a high political leader than by this method...
...Publishers do, after all, owe their readers the same respect they give their writers, and in the long run they are not doing any good for their authors’ reputations...
...and that it features characters with Pynchonesque names like Pl?iade Lafris?e, Scarsdale Vibe and Cyprian Latewood...
...Next, there is his treatment of the subject...
...In that novel, the main characters were surveyors and the science was astronomy...
...If older writers with a long career of success and fame behind them feel they can get away with anything, they should not be abetted by the craven passivity of the publishing industry...
...without such a boundary line, the end is never in sight...
...Both of these books display traits long associated with their authors, and have now been allowed to spiral wholly out of control...
...Eager publishers will publish whatever they get from them, at whatever length they decree...
...that has already been done, exhaustively, in all the newspapers and magazines by critics who seem to think a book review must necessarily contain a plot summary...
...Roth is as good as he has ever been, but he is rigidly disciplined...
...Creative artists are not exempt from this universal human tendency...
...No one (except Truman Capote) has ever denied that Mailer is a writer of talent, though “immense” is going a little far...
...They must not be able to distinguish certain lies from the truth...
...Assuming Mailer’s intention was genuinely educative, The Castle in the Forest only baffles...
...they had to make people want to read them...
...Who are those people...
...This tendency, as these examples illustrate, can either benefit or harm an artist’s late work, depending on the particular characteristics that are exaggerated...
...Occasionally a real insight slips in, almost by accident...
...The Castle in the Forest, like Against the Day, insults its readers by assuming they have nothing better to do with their time than spend it on such foolishness...
...his previous novel, Mason & Dixon, was 773 pages and already overbrimming with infuriating riffs and digressions...
...First of all, he reveals his rather mysterious narrator is a minion from Satan, sent to watch over the young Hitler and keep him in line...
...The once readable Larry McMurtry has, sadly, succumbed to Pynchonesque antics...
...Although I literally wept with boredom throughout Mason & Dixon, I read it all...
...But such insights are very, very rare, and are dropped casually between mind-numbingly boring descriptions of apiary techniques, drunken evenings in pubs, rude carnality...
...It is pointless to summarize the exceedingly complicated plot of Against the Day...
...Propensities for sentimentality, gore, verbosity, pretentiousness— whatever ill has unobtrusively affected their work from its beginnings—move more and more into the forefront...
...No earlier novel of his, not even the massive Gravity’s Rainbow, broke the 800-page mark...
...I know any enlightenment achieved will not be of a general nature...
...It all appears, at first, like the work of a novelist badly afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder who must go on compulsively inventing to keep himself, as well as his readers, entertained...
...Pynchon has always allowed a lot of gas and bloat into his fiction, certainly, but this represents a significant increase...
...One gets the impression that in their different ways Pynchon and Mailer are floundering...
...Even Stalin and Mao, each of whom was responsible for more deaths than Hitler, have nothing on him as archvillain in the popular imagination...
...Do I feel my confession disqualifies me from writing about the book...
...Why, for example, is something like 75 pages spent on the passion of Alois Hitler, the future dictator’s father, for beekeeping...
...perfection, or close enough to it, could be achieved...
...Popular writers who know very well that their job is to entertain...
...Who could possibly think Pynchon is addressing the entire world...
...It has always been popular among mathematicians and physicists, which tells us a lot...
...Over the course of the novel a complex demonology is posited, clearly based on Dante and medieval scholasticism, and the narrator’s chatty tone and Jesuitical logic are strangely reminiscent of C.S...
...he wrote the books that make up A la recherche du temps perdu individually, for consumption in smaller bites...
...so is Updike, who although he is no longer producing his best work is still near the top of the field...
...and that it trots out time-honored Pynchonesque themes such as surveillance, paranoia, totalitarianism, apocalypse, conspiracy, anarchism (which nowadays conveniently ties into terrorism), and the marriage of power and technology...
...You, reader, take an interest in a certain story, a certain person...
...Here I have a confession to make...
...Lewis’ persuasive devil, Screwtape...
...The act of producing a book has traditionally been a collaboration between writer and editor, and there is no writer so good that he can do without an editor...
...Otherwise, when you look for books that run on for more than 1,000 pages (except for David Foster Wallace’s obnoxious Infinite Jest), it is all Herman Wouk and James Clavell and James Michener and M.M...
...How true, and how well-put...
...George W. Bush, wishing to drum up public outrage against the two men, in fact had to resort to comparing them with Hitler, clearly the ultimate demon...
...Proust we can discount...
...But this is immaterial, because Mailer has invented all the emotional material—that is, the family background we don’t know much about—and his inventions are grotesque, implausible and irrelevant to the dictator’s subsequent career...
...As a relief from laboring over Pynchon and Mailer, I picked up the latest mysteries by Alexander McCall Smith and John Mortimer (both demonstrably in their “late” periods themselves) and could not suppress the philistine notion that both books were better, on every level, than the biggies I was supposed to be reviewing...
...Publishers’ blurbs are invariably a little overwrought, but the one on Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest is laugh-out-loud funny: “The premise is so astonishingly bold—who was Adolf Hitler, and how do we best explain his evil?—that only a writer of Norman Mailer’s immense talents and indefatigable imagination could make it real...
...In the January 11 New York Review of Books, Luc Sante wrote that “Pynchon’s work has absorbed modernism and what has come after, but in its alternating cycles of jokes and doom, learning and carnality, slapstick and arcana, direct speech and poetic allusiveness, high language and low, it taps into something that goes back to the Elizabethans, who potentially addressed the entire world, made up of individuals with differing interests and capacities...
...Fine—let’s drop that for another 400 or 500 pages...
...Writing of Michelangelo’s and Leonardo’s late efforts, Mary McCarthy made the perceptive remark that “Perfection can be achieved if a limit is accepted...
...In a recent Q & A, Mailer made the surprising claim that many people do not understand “how deep a negative presence was Hitler to the Jews of my parents’ generation and to mine as well...
...that in the absence of either entertainment or immortal art, there is absolutely no excuse for 1,000 pages...
...Certain inherent personality traits intensify and crystallize over the years until an old person all too often becomes a bit of a caricature of the youth he or she once was...
...Except among the nation’s very small lunatic fringe of anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers, it would be hard to think of any name that conjures up a more “negative presence” than that of Hitler, despite every current effort to demonize Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein...
...In the case of Against the Day I simply gave up, with a sense of utter relief...
...And why expend such a large portion of the book on Alois’ gross sexual exploits...
...Mailer’s are crudeness and bombast...
...In the 15 years or so I have spent reviewing books, I have often been asked whether I always read the whole book I am writing about...
...Against the Day’s size alone marks it as a gauntlet thrown down to the reader—“I dare you to tackle this...
...The more one delves into Against the Day, a distillation of all previous Pynchonesque tendencies, the more one is forced to the conclusion that if Pynchon can be said to be addressing anyone, it is himself and himself alone...
...The original personality is distilled and ultimately reduced almost to its essence...
...Pynchon, at 69, can now be considered as entering into his late period...
...But with Against the Day I cried uncle, finally defeated by Pynchon’s relentless assault...
...The inclination toward abstraction evident in James Joyce’s work as early as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man eventually led to his late “novel” Finnegans Wake, a book that comes so close to pure abstraction the ordinary educated reader finds it impenetrable...
...Because Smith and Mortimer were working within a clear set of limits...
...Then there is Pynchon’s dogged punning (a smirking habit inflicted by Joyce and eagerly adopted by his modernist and postmodernist disciples...
...Perhaps the author has been carried away by his own voyeuristic pleasure (a pleasure he signally fails to communicate...
...Very few major novelists have been presumptuous enough to write a single book of over 1,000 pages...
...Actually, Against the Day is an anti-entertainment, a deliberate attempt to frustrate your instinct to invest your interest or emotion in any one of its subplots or characters...
...I am not tempted to work out its elliptical and elusive puzzles...
...But until editors once again assume the responsibilities they once took as a matter of course, more and more rogue authors will undoubtedly inflict their illconsidered work on the public...
...in this one the scientific focus is broader: Pynchon identifies the turn of the 20th century as a moment when a rapid acceleration in scientific and technological knowledge set the world on the fateful course we are embarked on today...
...The big Victorian novels of Thackeray and Dickens were written as installments of newspaper serials...
...Henry James’ later novels (The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove) are far more “Jamesian” in style than his early ones, and carry his lifelong predilection for qualification and indirection to an extreme that borders on the avant-garde...
...It doesn’t even succeed in its stated purpose, for Mailer gets stuck on Hitler Senior, a character crude enough (at least according to the author’s “indefatigable imagination”) to be fatally appealing, so that the famous son receives only the most cursory treatment...
...Mailer has appended a six-page Bibliography that suggests he grounded his novel in serious historical research—and indeed, he is scrupulous in treating the Hitler family’s background, changes of name and abode, and family tree...
...Other writers too often let their worst instincts take over...
...What...
...No one, apparently, dares suggest that a book might be improved if 200 or 300 pages were cut, because big-name authors can take their manuscripts elsewhere...
...To begin with Against the Day, look at its length: 1,085 pages...
...It doesn’t really matter, I would venture to say, whether many people actually read the books or not...
Vol. 90 • January 2007 • No. 1
