The end of his rainbow

...Of course, Pynchon is a postmodern writer as well, his work famous for its endless portrayals of paranoia...

...The German V-2 rockets, tracing their rainbow arc to London in World War II, traveled faster than sound, with the first result that by the time you heard them you had already lived through them, and the custom-made paranoid second result that whenever you didn't hear them, they were falling on you...

...Both these judgments were correct...

...In an essay on the languors that occasionally come in a life of reading, Joseph Epstein reports the sigh that must inevitably escape a reader who encounters a prostitute defecating into the mouth of Brigadier Pudding and realizes that there are still 400 pages left to go in the mammoth book...

...The fiction judges for the Pulitzer prize who picked it as the year's best novel found themselves promptly overruled by their editorial board, who declared the book unreadable and obscene...

...But while his contemporaries were busy writing novels that declared the postmodern impossibility of ever explaining anything, he was still on the hunt for an old-fashioned kind of unity...

...Set in his ways, he now never will...

...Able to force himself over seven years to write 800 clever, complicated pages of archaic prose glorifying a pair of surveyors, Thomas Pynchon obviously has considerable discipline, in a certain sense of the word...

...Later, upon arriving in America, they manage to meet not only Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, but a series of bizarre, invented characters: the French chef Armand Allegre (the haunted love-object of a sexually confused mechanical duck), Zepho Beck (an unfortunate were-beaver), and a host of others...

...And if a juvenile paranoia is the only nexus of language, history, and human nature that remains in a postmodern world, it is still some The End of His Rainbow Thomas Pynchon Fails to Deliver By J. Bottum There's Thomas Pynchon the literary event and then there's Thomas Pynchon the writer of novels...

...While an undergraduate science major at Columbia, Pyn-chon attended Nabokov's class on fiction-writing...

...Now 60, with only two novels in the last 24 years, he will never deliver on his promise...

...If you must use the latter, do not inhale"—but they quickly pall, as though the reader were being nudged for the thousandth time to understand that everything in the book is an allegory for our own time...

...But mostly, the book is a one-horse joke, an annoying and in many ways predictable disquisition on the strangeness and ultimate immorality (when viewed with a postmodern eye) of the rationalist Enlightenment project of running an imaginary survey line across the wilderness...

...Though the novel vastly improves with the surveyors' arrival in America 250 pages into the book, it comes much too late to salve the irritation of anyone capable of distinguishing the literary event that is Mason & Dixon from Mason & Dixon itself...

...Intellectual history becomes one with political and social history, marking out a line across the forests and signaling the Enlightenment break of reason from nature...

...The unreadable hodgepodge that is Mason & Dixon—nearly 800 pages of the absurdist adventures of the surveyors of the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, written in a deliberately annoying mockery of 18th-century prose and narrated by a clergyman with the typically Pynchonesque name of Cher-rycoke—confirms what his oddly casual Vineland had suggested: With his self-indulgence and lack of literary discipline, Thomas Pynchon has wrecked himself...

...After the insignificance of Vine-land, Mason & Dixon stands as an undeniably major work...

...The early reviewers of Mason & Dixon universally proclaimed it an instant classic, a great American novel...

...So too his innumerable echoes and parodies of the novels of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and nearly every other classic American literary work (including his own novels) eventually become tiresome, both the humor and the serious meaning lost in the numbing repetition...

...The literary event seems stronger than ever, with each new shot at privacy by the reclusive author of V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973) engendering frenzied publicity—peaking now with the publication of his fifth novel, Mason & Dixon, just as it did in 1990 with his fourth, Vineland...

...But Gravity's Rainbow was also the best novel of 1973: the best novel of the decade, the only book since Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita, Pnin, and Ada in the '50s and '60s to suggest that the huge, modernist project was not yet quite dead and that a master could still seek for language, history, and human nature a single explanation...

...A screaming comes across the sky," the book began...

...And with Gravity's Rainbow, he brought his fascinations all together in his most potent symbol...

...But as far as Thomas Pynchon the novelist goes, we seem to have come at last Contributing editor J. Bottum last wrote for The Weekly Standard about Jonathan Rosen's Eve's Apple...

...In the midst of all the hoopla sort of explanation, and Pynchon's genius was to carry it to its logical extreme...

...But as the novel drags on and on—and on and on—the author finds no solution and lets himself fall back into the postmodern humor of reference and the vein of paranoia he already exhausted with Gravity's Rainbow...

...But reading their proclamations, buried as the second or third review in their journals, one has the sense that they were mostly responding to its author's literary prominence and didn't really mean it...

...And as the years passed after Gravity's Rainbow, with rumors of his long-meditated masterwork in progress, it seemed possible that he would turn to the adult artist's project of seeking a livable explanation of the world and produce at last the restoration of the magisterial novel...

...With the Mason-Dixon Line, Pyn-chon found what is perhaps the richest possible metaphor for showing the direct origin of all of later America in the initial events of colonization...

...The pseudo-18th-century prose and picaresque anti-structure—a technique previously employed by John Barth in The Sot-Weed Factor— quickly becomes unbearable...

...The author was always capable of mocking his own fascinations ("Watch the paranoia, please" a mysterious voice suddenly whispers in the ear of a character in Vineland), but he never let a postmodernesque self-reference become dominant in his work...

...After V, which told the story of a hopeless quest for a mysterious unnamed woman, he produced The Crying of Lot 49, his shortest and most accessible work, a classic tale of conspiracy, California, and the centuries-long survival of the Holy Roman Empire's Thurn und Taxis postal monopoly...

...But he lacks the discipline to force himself to fulfill his promise and find an answer to the intellectual and artistic problem that he alone of his generation could have used the novel to solve...

...Pynchon's is a teenager's explanation of the world, but with the humor of his characters' mock names ("Oedipa Maas" in The Crying of Lot 49, "Tyrone Slothrop" in Gravity's Rainbow) and his skill with wordplay, science, and the disassociated sort of logic that invariably produces conspiracy theories, Pynchon seemed the James Joyce of the adolescent mind, the Jorge Luis Borges of pubescence...

...to the end of him...

...It is brilliant in spots, and funny sometimes, and occasionally the prose hits a rhythmic canter and runs along in the compulsive, maniacal pace that allowed one to keep reading Gravity's Rainbow despite its 900 pages and indigestible scatology...

...it is perhaps typical of both the camouflaged younger author and his prickly elder that Nabokov claimed not to remember him...

...Pynchon's repeated forays into anachronism are often funny— "Keep away from harmful Substances, in particular Coffee, Tobacco, and Indian Hemp," Mason and Dixon are warned...

...Cherrycoke's sprawling narrative becomes a tale not just of dispossessed Indians, rebellious colonists, and uninformed British rulers, but also the paranoid account of a Sino-Jesuit conspiracy to rule the world...

...Framed with the device of the Rev'd Cherrycoke visiting relatives in 1790s Philadelphia and telling the story of the real-life adventures of Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) in the envenomed years before the American Revolution, the novel begins with the surveyors' early efforts at erotic conquest and Enlightenment science...

...about the man—rumors that he was cooking hamburgers in the pipeline camps of Alaska, or barricaded with guns and whiskey in an Appalachian stronghold, whereas he is actually living a fairly straightforward middle-class life in that last redoubt of anonymity, Manhattan—it's hard to remember nowadays just what Pyn-chon's literary promise was when Gravity's Rainbow appeared in 1973...

...Gravity's Rainbow is in many ways unreadable and obscene...