This isn’t my first Pynchon. I read Bleeding Edge when it came out. I liked it but didn’t love it. Pynchon’s quirky sense of humour didn’t always register; I didn’t always feel like I was in on the joke. Reading the reviews of the time, I wasn’t entirely alone (though Jonathan Lethem loved it). Having read The Crying of Lot 49, with its ridiculous tangents, sophomoric humour and convoluted, even contrived plot, I now recognise the linguistic and literary genius on display. I feel compelled to not only reread Bleeding Edge but to confront those longer novels that made Pynchon famous – namely, V. and Gravity’s Rainbow (which was nominated for a Nebula).

 Outlining the plot of The Crying of Lot 49 feels like a mug’s game. It’s not that there isn’t one; it’s that it’s so self-reflexive and knotted it’s an almost pointless task. But if you carve away all the colour, including a faux Jacobean tragedy called The Courier’s Tragedy (a poor man’s Hamlet), what you get is this: Oedipa Mass becomes the executor of the estate of an ex-lover, the inordinately wealthy Pierce Inverarity. In attempting to figure out how to deal with the Estate, Oedipa gets drawn into a centuries-old conspiracy involving the postal system.

Maxwell’s Demons! The symbol of a muted horn! The aforementioned The Courier’s Tragedy! W.A.S.T.E.! Thurn and Taxis! Nazi psychiatrists with a penchant for faces and Freud! And, of course, the foreboding Trystero! All linked together via a cast of eccentric, sometimes oversexed men. And poor Oedipa, ostensibly the only woman in the story, trying to make sense of it all. It’s absurd and silly and wild in the best counter-culture, drug-addled ways. If it regularly reminded me of Vonnegut, maybe it’s because they were cut from the same satirical and surrealist cloth (they attended Cornell together). It’s audacious: you could spend days peeling away all the references and allusions or flowcharting the byzantine plot of The Courier’s Tragedy. You can see how this novel (and likely V., etc.) would have influenced a generation of mostly male writers. David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, George Saunders and so on. (If The Crying of Lot 49 had footnotes, it could easily be an excised section of Infinite Jest). 

But what struck me about the novel (or novella, it’s been called both) is that the issue it deals with: a distrust towards communication controlled by a centralised distribution system, resonates all the moreso today. And not just the way social media has been co-opted by the powerful. The mail is also under threat, especially if you live in the States and you need access to abortion drugs post-Roe v. Wade.

As I was writing this, I briefly wondered what Pynchon would make of the current moment, only to realise that he’s still alive (he’s 87). All we know of the reclusive author is through his work, and given that his last novel was written more than a decade ago, we’re likely never to hear (unless papers are released posthumously) his views on the current culture war. Maybe it’s for the best. In the meantime, I still have his great work to catch up on.