Pynchon from A to V: Rocket redux; Gerald Howard on Gravity's Rainbow: Remembered, reread, reconsidered.

No account of American literature's past four decades can ignore the catalytic significance of Thomas Pynchon. In his fiction he has devised a luminous blueprint for understanding what it means to remain human, even as we are conscripted as citizens of a global technocracy. Writers who engage this brave new world--in which information begets social control, which itself generates ever more information--must necessarily look to him for instruction in both the materials and the methods of exploration. In presenting this stellar gathering of twenty-one such authors and critics, BOOKFORUM seeks to take some measure of Pynchon's achievement and enduring influence.

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"There is a key, among the wastes of the World."

IN 1973, THOMAS PYNCHON'S Gravity's Rainbow landed on my brain and exploded there like, well, a V-2 rocket. It was precisely the book I needed at the time, which tells you something about my mental and spiritual condition. Hey, it was the '70s. The country was low in the water and so was I. Tar-black humor, crushing difficulty, rampant paranoia, accelerating entropy, jaw-dropping perversity, apocalyptic terror, history as a conspiracy of the conjoined forces of technology, death, and sinister Control--it was all good. I preferred having my spirit crushed by a great American novel to the everyday humiliations of my first year of postcollegiate life and the cultural and political demoralizations of the era.

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The year before, I had graduated from Cornell, Pynchon's alma mater, with an instrumentally useless BA in English (at least in terms of gaining employment) and been redeposited, dazed and confused, in my natal neighborhood of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. If I tell you that I grew up on precisely the same street where Tony Manero lived in Saturday Night Fever, you may begin to grasp my plight. After six weeks of pounding the Manhattan pavement in search of "college graduate" positions--carrying with me, and I wince at this now, a remaindered hardcover copy of Nabokov's Ada as my downtime reading matter--I got a job as the most sullen and undermotivated advertising trainee in the history of hucksterism. Bluntly put, I was a big problem to myself (and my poor parents) and the world wasn't coming to the rescue.

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I decided, in the absence of any other alternative, to read myself out of the slough of despond. Metafiction therapy in the outer boroughs--not the most promising of strategies. But I was lucky to find a superb guide and boon companion in a most unlikely place: a playground basketball court along the Narrows, to which I repaired evenings and weekends for my two other chosen anodynes, hoops and weed. It turned out that the skinny regular by the name of Peter Kaldheim not only had a highly effective bank shot but was a recent Dartmouth grad and aspiring writer who had a synoptic acquaintance with the period's advanced fiction, especially Thomas Pynchon. So began one of those transformative friendships, fueled by passionate reading and conversation and similar taste in drugs, that change a life. At least it changed mine. I draw on our shared literary tutorials to this day.

Our reading list, I sometimes joke, was based on three principles: nothing more straightforward than Donald Barthelme; nothing less gothic and desperate than Harry Crews; nothing more inviting and less dense than William Gaddis. Avid for stronger wine and madder music, we plunged headlong into the thickets of early-to-middle-American postmodernism, getting lost in the funhouse with Barth and Abish, Coover and Elkin, Reed and Sukenick, Mathews and Sorrentino (a Bay Ridge boy!), Gass and Hawkes. A significant subset of our reading was concerned with the specifically male problem of surviving in our native land in the wake of the post-'60s crack-up; hence Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes, Tom McGuane's Ninety-two in the Shade, and Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers became our touchstones. We discovered the glories of early Don DeLillo, Americana and End Zone (football as a metaphor for nuclear war--precisely!), with almost ungovernable excitement.

We had, of course, little use for the standard-issue Big Names, Bellow had put himself beyond the pale with his churlish Mr. Sammler's Planet; Cheever and Updike were too suburban; Vidal wrote historical novels with plots, for God's sake (great essays, though); and Malamud was a downer but not our kind of downer. Only two Big Names escaped our scorn: Philip Roth, as a result of all the excellent trouble he caused with Portnoy's Complaint, and Norman Mailer, for his omnidirectional rage against the machine.

Dogmatic and hipper than thou, we were probably insufferable, but then again what rising literary generation isn't? We'd done the critical reading and so could sort through the often rebarbative yet always challenging works we favored. Roth had declared that American reality "stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarassment to one's own meager imagination." So fiction had to go to extremes of content and technique. Susan Sontag had as much as proclaimed "Matthew Arnold, he dead" when she erased high/low distinctions and aesthetic moralism, and proscribed interpretation in favor of simple sensation. William Gass, the reigning philosopher-critic, focused our attention on the not always obvious fact that fiction was made of language and elegantly drew out the implications of that. Most famously, John Barth's essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" propounded a theory and an aesthetic of ironic, parodic self-consciousness that felt appropriate to the tail end of the modernist period.

These ideas were our mental tools as we romped in the forest of first-growth postmodernism. What was strange and gratifying was how completely in sync this writing was with our educated baby-boomer sense of squalor and betrayal. Then, no less than today, a culture war was being fought--but the battleground was an interior one, within our minds and souls.

And then, enter Commandant Pynchon, a one-man government-in-exile, rumbling down from the mountains into the capital city of American consciousness with something like the ultimate weapon: Gravity's Rainbow. Peter and I had both read V. and The Crying of Lot 49 with fanatic attention, reverence, and awe, and plenty of criticism to go with them as well. We could cite the second law of thermodynamics accurately; we knew that Herbert Stencil's third-person prose had been modeled on The Education of Henry Adams; phrases such as "the dynamo and the Virgin" sprang from our lips with practiced ease. Like a number of other '60s classics, these novels weren't mere reading experiences; they seemed to demand a radical change of attitude on the part of the reader. We tried to embody McClintic Sphere's dictum to "keep cool, but care"; like Oedipa Maas, we strove to find the resources to master our vertigo and panic over a world turned illegible. Among American novelists, only Pynchon seemed to have the resources to master the intricacies and inner dynamics of this strange new post-Enlightenment era.

So when I spied a notice in Esquire of the imminent publication of Gravity's Rainbow, I was in the bookstore like a shot to plunk down $4.95 for Viking's original trade-paperback edition (clearly someone at that publishing house understood the impecunious nature of the Pynchon audience, I noted gratefully). Everything about the bright orange book appealed: the cover art; the minimalist approach to jacket copy (no promotional folderol, just that indelible first sentence, "A screaming comes across the sky...."); the dedication to dead folkie-hipster novelist Richard Farina; the darkly ironic epigraph from Wernher Von Braun. Oh yes, this was going to be something.

And it was. Its portrayal of a world rife with mendacity, corruption, and geopolitical intrigue, of a history whose surface chaos masked plots within plots, of technology off the leash and in the service of death offered us purchase on the scary drift of American life since 1945. The book's antihero, Tyrone Slothrop, the map of whose fornications in London during the Blitz predicts the pattern of V-2 landings, was a classic schlemiel in the mold of Nathanael West's Lemuel Pitkin and Joseph Heller's Yossarian. Here was Norman O. Brown's vision of Eros and Thanatos translated into brilliant novelistic terms. Slothrop was haplessly in the clutch of large, impersonal (or are they?) forces, yet he struggled with a sort of Mickey Rooney pluck to scry for some pattern of meaning in the phenomena of the world--like his Puritan forebears he had "a peculiar sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky." No overmarketed-to baby boomer could fail to identify with the suggestion that Slothrop had been from birth the subject of a secret experiment in behavioral modification. So had we all.

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The novel in which Slothrop yo-yo'd around seemed to sum up everything American fiction had attempted and achieved up to that point. It was polyvalent, polyphonic, and polymorphously perverse. Its contents were by turns phantasmagorical, hyperreal, surreal, and saturnalian. Like Moby-Dick, it made a complete hash of formalist or genre distinctions, obliviously mixing high and low. Pynchon shuffled scenes of horror and sexual obscenity with music-hall burlesques, with Busby Berkeley production numbers in prose, with historical tableaux of virtuoso authenticity, with anachronistic, punbesotted humor of the sort more often found on comedy albums by Cheech and Chong or Firesign Theatre. The latter was fine with us; we were usually smoked anyway, and floating free from linear thought was a fruitful frame of mind in which to approach Gravity's Rainbow's labyrinthine complexities.

You could glean a tremendous amount of fresh and pertinent information from this book--about the Zoot Suit riots and Maxwell's Demon, the Kirghiz Light and the Herero uprising, Ufa Studios and the history of expressionism in German film, the psychedelic properties of the rye fungus called ergot and its effect on European history, August Kekule's discovery of the structure of the benzene ring in a dream, and especially the physics and technology and analytical geometry and calculus of the process whereby a multi-ton package of steel, fuel, and explosives could be sent special delivery from thousands of miles away with lethal accuracy to a spot just above your head. We duck-and-cover kiddies took this sort of thing seriously. As the narrator says of Slothrop, "He has become obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name written on it--if they're really set on getting him." Indeed.

Pynchon's vocabulary was fantastically recondite, and I still have the notebook in which I jotted down the meanings of oneiric, abreaction, runcible spoon, hebephrenics, Antinomian, rachitic, velleity, preterite, and a couple dozen other words impossible to use in ordinary conversation. To readers adrift in the spiritually rudderless '70s, the bold willingness of Pynchon's narrator to tell us What It All Means, in eloquent homiletics, was a tonic, a lifeline, a sign, and a revelation:

  Don't forget the real business of the war is buying and selling. The
  murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to
  non-professionals.... The true war is a celebration of markets ...

  Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and
  "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the
  rest of the World those vast quantities of energy to keep its own
  tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of
  humanity--most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid
  waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's
  only buying time.

  It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all
  theatre, all just to keep the people distracted ... secretly, it was
  being dictated instead by the needs of technology ... by a conspiracy
  between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the
  energy-burst of war, crying. "Money be damned, the very life of
  [insert name of Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely, dawn
  is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, abh
  more, more.

The man was channeling Randolph Bourne, C. Wright Mills, Max Weber. I damn near got whiplash from nodding my head in furious assent.

Reading Gravity's Rainbow was admittedly a slog. Many pages at a time would pass with only the dimmest comprehension of what the welter of character, event, and implication actually meant. But at reliable intervals I would encounter something that left me gasping with amazement. There was the virtuoso comedy of the two old biddies virtually asphyxiating Slothrop with vile British candies; the shocking act of coprophagia between Katje Borgesius and Brigadier Pudding; the plainsong-inflected epiphany of Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake's Christmas visit to a country church; the shattering emotional impact of Slothrop's "Tantivy ..." when he learns of his friend Mucker-Maffick's demise, which my friend the critic John Powers calls "the most poignant cllipsis in all of fiction." Most unforgettably, there is the immortal scene in which Slothrop, hooked up to a sodium Amytal drip, hallucinates dropping his harmonica down the toilet of the Roseland Ballroom, a nightclub where Red, aka Malcolm X, sells gage while Charlie Parker is onstage laying down some very advanced changes on "Cherokee." Down the shitter Slothrop goes, into the murky, fecal depths of white America's racial imagination, in an inward journey that reads like a cutting session with Ralph Ellison, James Joyce, Sigmund Freud, and Leslie Fiedler. Astounding.

As Peter and I raced to the chilling finish, the rocket poised to boliterate a movie theater in Los Angeles, managed by a Nixon surrogate named Richard Zhlubb, we confirmed for each other the conviction that this was the finest novel by an American--hell, by anybody--that we'd ever read. It was our great book, in our time, a visionary and instructive text which summed up all that could possibly be said about the meaning of postwar history. In this belief the wider literary world provided plenty of support. To this day I have not seen a more impressive Anschluss of critical praise. Richard Locke raved about it in a splashy front-page write-up for the New York Times Book Review, brilliantly edited in those days by the irreplaceable John Leonard. An even more extraordinary effusion appeared in the daily New York Times from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who famously concluded, "If I were banished to the moon tomorrow and could take only five books along, this would have to be one of them." Most important, Richard Poirier wrote an eloquent essay for the generally middle-brow Saturday Review that firmly placed the book in the wider context of Western literature--Faust, Moby-Dick, Ulysses--and correctly predicted that Pynchon's effort to renew that literature by drawing his material from such nonliterary realms as parapsychology, statistical analysis, and film would get up the noses of certain of the Authorities: "If literature is superior to any of these things, then it takes a book as stylistically wide-ranging as Gravity's Rainbow to prove it." Poirier's piece remains the single best work of criticism on the novel yet produced, the takeoff point for all commentary to come.

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Gravity's Rainbow received the National Book Award for fiction in 1974, alongside, in a strange split decision, I. B. Singer's Crown of Feathers. At the award ceremony, to the audience's perplexity, the professional bafflegab artist Professor Irwin Corey accepted the award for, or maybe as, Pynchon, and launched into a semicoherent leg-pulling speech that began, "However ... accept this financial stipulation--ah, stipend in behalf of, uh, Richard Python for the great contribution and to quote from some of the missiles which he has contributed...." Und so weiter, and it being the '70s, there was also a streaker. That sublime stunt may have been on the minds (and I use the term in its loosest possible sense) of the idiots on the Pulitzer Prize advisory panel when they decided to ignore the unanimous recommendation of the fiction jury--consisting of (for God's sake) Benjamin DeMott, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Alfred Kazin--that Gravity's Rainbow get the prize, and instead awarded it to ... nobody. It was decades before anybody could trust the Pulitzer Prize again as anything other than a dish for dullards.

Meanwhile, back in Bay Ridge, I began to pursue my Pynchonmania at a higher energy level. I reread Gravity's Rainbow six months after first finishing it. I made murky photocopies at the New York Public Library of uncollected early stories in Epoch, New World Writing, and the Saturday Evening Post(!), and a superb nonfiction piece, "A Journey into the Mind of Watts," in the New York Times Magazine. I was seized by the conviction that Stanley Kubrick had to bring Gravity's Rainbow to the screen and that somehow I could be involved in this task. I did nothing at all about it, but I still think it was a damned good idea. And I continued to read and read and read, but now in a vaguely postcoital mood. If literature was exhausted, a dying star, then Gravity's Rainbow was the inevitable supernova, compacting all that was exciting and explosive into a spectacular end-time display. William Gaddis's JR, which won the National Book Award in 1976, felt like the last aftershock of the whole imperial novel enterprise. Pynchon's novel took up residence in my head as the peak of posthumanistic achievement, a work finally adequate to the beauty and terror of a world utterly transformed by science and technology. The human imagination could still avail, but it had to adapt radically to do so--a great solace wrapped in a bold challenge. And somewhere along the way, I got my first job in publishing, which led to a position as an assistant editor at Viking Penguin, which brought me, by a commodius vicus, to my first meeting with Corlies M. Smith, Pynchon's longtime editor.

One Friday in summer 2004, I spent a memorable afternoon in the half-deserted offices of Viking Penguin going through the thick editorial file for Gravity's Rainbow. There was in this experience the poignance of office technologies past (carbons, telegrams, memos typed on manual typewriters) and the names of the distinguished departed--from Malcolm Cowley, Viking's longtime literary adviser, to other colleagues, mentors, and friends. But there was also the sheer fascination of peering behind the curtain like Dorothy to discover how the levers had been pulled to launch one of the most consequential novels of the twentieth century.

As most Pynchonians know, Corlies Smith--universally called Cork--was Pynchon's editor from the very start of the author's career. A tall, handsome, casually aristocratic publisher of the old school (tweed jackets, unfiltered Pall Malls), he was idolized by the younger set at Viking for his staggering achievements, his impecable literary taste, and his dry and sometimes startlingly profane wit ("It does, however, have the best horse-fucking scene I've ever read," he deadpanned memorably about a novel at one sales conference). A kinder, more honest, more straightforward man you never met. Cognoscenti of the art of fiction editing put Cork at the very top of the heap. Authors he has worked with besides Pynchon include Muriel Spark, Robertson Davies, Jimmy Breslin, William Kennedy, Harriet Doerr, Madison Smartt Bell, Gloria Naylor, and Carolyn Chute. About three hours after I got to Viking Penguin in 1980, I was in Cork's office, which led to a small but excellent Pynchon adventure. Loyal Big Red alum that I was, I deplored the fact that Richard Farina's great (well, pretty good) Cornell novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, was out of print, and maybe his pal Pynchon would like to contribute an introduction to a Penguin reissue? He did, writing a piece of surpassing grace and affording me the opportunity to talk to him on the phone--his voice reminiscent of late-night beatnik DJs in the early '60s--on some issue of Spanish verb tenses. Heaven! Cork told me that when the Farina novel had been submitted to him in 1965 he had rejected it, telling the agent it struck him as (ouch!) "imitation Pynchon."

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Cork had been a young associate editor at the Philadelphia-based publishing house of Lippincott in 1960 when he bought one of Pynchon's first short stories, "Low-lands," for the literary magazine New World Writing. A contract for an untitled novel on an unspecified subject was signed around the same time, the legendary Candida Donadio serving as agent. I have--I'll never tell how--photocopies of some twenty editorial letters between Cork and Pynchon about the novel that would eventually come to be called V. But not before some simply awful alternative titles were at least briefly considered: The Yo-Yo World of Benny Profane, The Quest of Herbert Stencil, World on a String (all Cork's ideas), and Blood's a Rover, Down Paradise Street, And His Ass Falls Off, Footsteps of the Gone, Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails. The Republican Party Is a Machine (Pynchon's). How they settled on the perfectly obvious title of V., the letters do not say. Early on, Cork visited his new author during a "scouting trip" to Seattle, where Pynchon worked as a technical writer for Boeing on such projects as the Minuteman missile--perfect research for the future bard of the V-2 (interestingly, the late poet and teacher Richard Hugo, a veteran of the bombing campaign against Germany, worked in the same department at that time). The tone of their correspondence is serious, affectionate, and droll, by turns. A lot of close-in editorial work got accomplished on both ends, and Pynchon comes across as a young writer not in the least resistant to advice ("I do not, frankly, know dick about writing novels yet and need all kinds of help") but confident enough to stand his ground when he had to. One small shocker is that Cork somehow thought the McClintic Sphere material angled the book unhelpfully in the direction of a "Protest novel" on "the Negro Problem" and suggested it be cut. Pynchon, thank Monk, thoughtfully but firmly demurred.

They did pretty good work, V., published in 1963, is now generally considered one of the finest first novels of the twentieth century. Three years later, Lippincott published The Crying of Lot 49, regarded at the time as something like an elegant coda to V., but really more like an elegant overture to the operatic production to come. By that time, Cork had left Lippincott for the Viking Press, and, as editors do, he arranged to bring his star discovery along with him.

On January 24, 1967, Pynchon signed an option agreement with Viking in the low five figures for an "as yet untitled novel," the final terms, including advance and royalties, to be agreed on upon delivery. The delivery date was optimistically scheduled, heh heh heh, for December 29, 1967. This would seem to imply that Pynchon had already written a significant part of the book, although nothing in the file indicates whether anyone at Viking had read anything as yet, or even if anyone knew its subject matter, let alone its projected length. My publisher's guess is that Pynchon and Cork had had some very general conversation or correspondence about a novel dealing with German rocketry at the end of World War II, and given Pynchon's blue-chip status and how badly Viking wanted him on its list, that had been sufficient.

Time passed. On January 21, 1969, Cork wrote to Edward Mendelson, perhaps Pynchon's most astute and devoted academic critic, that "we have been expecting a manuscript of his new novel momentarily for some months.... I don't know what Pynchon is doing in Los Angeles of all places, but like to think he's writing a novel." On October 20 of the same year he wrote again to the eager critic: "Sorry, nothing new on Pynchon's novel." On March 5, 1970, Pynchon wrote to Cork to apologize that he was not going to make an April 1 deadline and asking that it be moved to July 1, 1970. He thanked him for his forbearance and ended by expressing his worry, with what degree of irony only he can say for sure, that the novel "could be the biggest piece of shit since The Crying of Lot 49." More time passed. Then, on January 27, 1972, Cork wrote to Candida Donadio: "It is with an inordinate amount of pleasure that I enclose our check for $______, the amount due Thomas Pynchon on delivery of his novel." Untitled novel had arrived; the "Brief Description" on the contract signing notice reads, "Free-swinging, wide-ranging story of numerous far-out characters in England and Europe at the end of World War II and immediately after--most of them haunted by the V-2 rocket bomb."

And what a big untitled novel it was! The first read alone took quite a while. Alida Becker, Cork's assistant in those days, told me that one day not long after delivery, Pynchon called the office to speak to Cork. He was out, however, so Pynchon asked Becker what she thought of the book. Cautiously she replied that she was enjoying it very much, but that it was very demanding and she hadn't yet finished it. "It's quite long," she explained, to which Pynchon replied proudly, "I typed it all myself, you know." The editorial file I examined has some obvious lacunae and is very thin on letters from Pynchon (someone probably filched them, alas). There is not much at all of an editorial nature in there, especially in contrast to the V. letters. On the other hand, not much large-scale editing was actually done on the book. I'm told there were some weak initial noises made to Pynchon about the desirability of cutting, but he refused to consider it. Speaking as a book editor myself, I would not know where to begin or where my cuts might be severing important subterranean connections of plot and symbol, and apparently neither did anyone at Viking. So the untitled novel that Pynchon delivered--which at some point acquired the working title Mindless Pleasures--is at least 99 percent the book that readers of Gravity's Rainbow encountered.

The task of close-in, line-by-line editing was assigned to Edwin Kennebeck, Viking's head copy editor, who emerges as one of the undersung heroes of this saga. His letters to Pynchon are warm, chatty, and exceptionally meticulous--he obviously "got" the book, and he and Pynchon clearly got on. I remember Ed Kennebeck from my time at Viking Penguin as a pleasant, mild figure. In addition to his fine wordsmithing skills, he brought an exceptionally useful qualification to this important job: In World War II, Kennebeck had served in the Eighth Air Force as a radio operator on B-17s and made thirty-five bombing runs over Germany, including the Dresden mission. He was able from firsthand knowledge to correct a number of technical mistakes (Spitfires were fighters, so they did not carry bombs; B-17 bombing runs took place so early in the day that the planes would never have been seen flying east in the afternoon). In one letter he shares his memories of London during the V-2 attacks of 1944-45 and reassures Pynchon: "I must say though that, except for the most meager things like the slang, your evocation of the scene is totally convincing."

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Kennebeck's letters solve one mildly important interpretive question, sort of. It is generally thought that the line of seven squares that serves as a graphic device to separate the unnumbered chapters in the novel is meant to suggest the sprocket holes in film reels, indicating that the book is to be "read" cinematically as a kind of film in prose. Wrong. In one of his letters Kennebeck refers pointedly to the "oblong holes" in censored correspondence from World War II soldiers, then termed V-mail (there's that letter again), and in a letter to Donald Barthelme accompanying a finished copy of the book, Kennebeck makes jocular mention of the sprocket-hole theory, first floated in the Poirier review, and comments, "I little knew what I was contributing to the history of literature." Sometimes a rectangle is just a rectangle--or maybe a censor's mark.

The copyediting of the novel was done by Faith Sale, a Cornell classmate of Pynchon's and the wife of the social critic Kirkpatrick Sale, who appears as a character in Farina's book. Sale, who at the time was also working as an editor at Fiction, a metafiction hotbed, was an early reader of Pynchon's work and did a superb job of addressing the stylistic, orthographic, and punctuational complexities of the massive manuscript. I have heard that her editorial involvement went much deeper than the average copy editor's, but there is no written proof of that, and Sale, who went on to a distinguished editing career herself, died in 1999. I would certainly have loved to see her style sheet.

Then there was the thorny question of the title. Although Mindless Pleasures was used in Viking's original announcement to the press, no one at all seemed pleased with it (it comes from a phrase that occurs twice in the book), and Kennebeck floated, with the air of semidesperation one feels in these situations, such duds as Powers That Be, Angel of the Preterite, Control, and Slothrop Dodging (well, you try it). I'm guessing that Pynchon came up with Gravity's Rainbow, which was perfection. But Kennebeck was the one who hit on the minimalist-jacket-copy approach, which had the effect of making the book's first sentence the most famous since "Call me Ishmael."

Now the real problem presented itself: How to publish a seven-hundred-plus-page book at a price that would not be grossly prohibitive for Pynchon's natural college and postcollegiate audience. V. and The Crying of Lot 49 had each sold more than three million copies in their Bantam mass-market editions. (Let us pause here to contemplate what these numbers say about the extent of literacy in the America of the '60s. Then I suggest we all commit suicide.) According to a letter from Cork Smith to Bruce Allen (who reviewed Gravity's Rainbow for Library Journal but wrote to Viking complaining about the novel's price), Viking would have had to sell thirty thousand copies at the then unheard of price of $10 just to break even. By comparison, V. and The Crying of Lot 49 had sold about ten thousand copies apiece in hardcover. So how to reach even a fraction of the cash-strapped Pynchon-loving millions? Cork himself hit on the then unique strategy of publishing an original trade-paperback edition at $4.95 and "an admittedly highly priced hardcover edition" at $15, each identical in paper stock and format, differing only in their binding. The gamble: "We also thought that Pynchon's college audience might, just might, be willing to part with a five-dollar bill for this novel; after all, that audience spends that amount over and over and over again for long-playing records." The other gamble was with the reviewers, who rarely took paperback fiction seriously, but as Cork wrote, "We feel--as, clearly, you do--that Pynchon cannot be ignored."

Thus locked and loaded, Viking proceeded to do what it did as well as any American publisher in those days: generate high-end literary anticipation and excitement. The advance galley and complimentary copy lists in the editorial file offer a vividly detailed snapshot of elite American literary culture circa 1973. Bound proofs were sent for possible blurbs and general buzz generation to the likes of Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Leslie Fiedler, Frank Kermode, Ken Kesey, William Gaddis, Benjamin DeMott, Paul Fussell, John Updike, John Cheever, George Plimpton, Lionel Trilling, Richard Ellmann, Kurt Vonnegut, and similar folks. In the file there is a memo, in Cork's hand, in which are written the names Heller and Puzo, both Donadio clients, and alongside them the annotation "still trying to get through V." Richard Poirier was sent a very early photocopy of the manuscript by Elisabeth Sifton, the superb editor just then starting out at Viking. There is a much longer list of people who received complimentary copies, which spreads an even wider net among writers and review editors, and included as well a great many publishing figures, some still around, some sadly gone (I had not thought death had undone so many). It also includes, amusingly enough, the recently departed actor Jerry Orbach and the society bandleader Peter Duchin. One complimentary copy is so puckishly hilarious that its accompanying letter, from Kennebeck, needs to be quoted in full. It is addressed to Fairchild Industries in Germantown(!), Maryland, and reads, "Dear Dr. Von Braun: I am sending you herewith a copy of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, with the compliments of the author."

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That's how the thing was done three decades ago. Even if Pynchon hadn't been the reclusive man he was, venues for author readings were largely nonexistent, and the idea of discussing a book of this length and difficulty on Carson or Cavett was laughable. The dark arts of author publicity were in their infancy; it was the reviewers who had to do their job. And did they ever. The publication date of Gravity's Rainbow was February 28, 1973. By March 9, a Viking press release was crowing that the house was receiving seven hundred orders an hour as a result of ecstatic lead reviews everywhere. After a first printing of 23,000 copies, a second of 12,500, and a third of 25,000, the publishers rushed through "an order for paper for 50,000 more copies"--a perfectly astonishing number even in retrospect. Viking had an awfully hot hand that year; two other commercially significant books it published at the same time were Frederick Forsyth's Odessa File and Peter Maas's Serpico. I'm sure you could have cut the giddy joy in the halls of 625 Madison Avenue with a knife. Thomas Guinzburg, Viking's president and publisher, was in London in early May, and there are two marvelous telegrams to him in the file. One, from Rich Barber, Viking's shrewd publicity director, says simply, "PYNCHON DELIGHTED FREDDIE LUKEWARM MAAS ENRAGED." The other, from Pynchon himself, reads, "DEAR TOM GUINZBURG, WHEREVER YOU ARE, I THOUGHT YOU WOULD LIKE TO KNOW I'M NUMBER EIGHT AND MY FRIEND FREDDIE IS NUMBER TWO." In other words, by some accounts the most difficult American novel of the twentieth century was selling as well as or better than a high-octane assassination thriller and a high-profile copper as-told-to--an amazing feat of publishing prowess. Gravity's Rainbow went on to spend four weeks on the Times fiction list, selling some 45,000 copies in paper and cloth combined. Its Bantam mass-market edition, published one year later, sold about 250,000 copies over the course of ten years.

The award nominations were inevitable, of course. In those days the National Book Awards were announced before the ceremony, so Viking knew ahead of time that Gravity's Rainbow had won half of the fiction prize. There was no expectation that Pynchon would actually show up, but his publisher was nervous that he might simply refuse to accept the award--as indeed he was to do a year later, for somewhat tortuous reasons, when he declined the Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was Guinzburg who hit on the inspired wheeze of smuggling in Professor Irwin "The World's Foremost Authority" Corey as Pynchon's alter ego. Corey could be seen in those years from time to time on the late-night talk shows, a manic figure in a frock coat, half-knotted bow tie, and mad-scientist haircut who tied the English language into knots with mock erudition. Poor Ralph Ellison got saddled with the job of presenting the award ("My apologies if we're as ... if you were as confused as I was") to the man he thought was Pynchon. Remember, nobody knew what Pynchon looked like, so the disheveled being who leapt to the podium from the audience could have been the guy. Oh, the delicious perplexity there must have been in the room as Corey launched into his price-less speech, the text of which can be easily found on the Web. When the streaker raced through the place, Corey ad-libbed brilliantly, "I want to thank Mr. Knopf, who just ran through the auditorium."

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The Pulitzer Prize episode was by contrast a distinctly unfunny joke. John Leonard summed it up best in a New York Times Book Review column. He pointed out that the advisory committee, in deciding simply not to give an award that year, had ignored such plausible candidates as Vonnegut, McGuane, Vidal, Singer, Cheever, Malamud, and Gardner. He concluded his scathing piece thus: "What was laughable or boring about the behavior of the Pulitzer people in the past is now scandalous. Either the advisory panel and the trustees of Columbia University should take a crash course in remedial reading or they should get out of the awards business altogether." Pynchon readers everywhere simply concluded that our hero had told the truth about things in so definitive a fashion that the Authorities couldn't handle it.

Thirty-one years later, a very different person inhabiting a radically altered literary landscape, I undertook to reread Gravity's Rainbow but not without trepidation. It might be no country for middle-aged men. Did I have the mental stamina to go the distance, to keep its fissured and forking narrative scheme, dozens of oddly named characters, daunting thematic, scientific, and symbolic materials, and baroque syntax straight in my head? Had a professional life devoted to the service of clarity and linear development in the written word unfit me for this magical mystery tour? Suppose I didn't like it? I read in the spirit of a thought experiment--no recourse to the criticism and companions and concordances and crib notes that have proliferated from the academic Pynchon industry in print and on the Net. Mano a mano, me against the text, just like in 1973, minus the drugs.

My first reaction: Jesus, this is a tough book. The prose was gorgeous, with a density of allusion and implication and hyperalertness that almost no one writing today would even attempt, let alone pull off. If you did not pay maximum attention and, paradoxically, avoid, Keats-like, an "irritable reaching after fact," you were going to be lost. And as a fifty-four-year-old with responsibilities rather than a feckless twenty-two-year-old luftmensch, I had stuff to do that confined my reading to the 10 PM--midnight slot. I'd stumble off to bed, my brainwaves commandeered by Pynchon's insinuating narrative voice, to a night of uneasy dreams that fed off some of the most disturbing latent content modern fiction can provide. It was a strange six weeks, and I had the sense that I was leading a kind of secret life in my own Zone.

I got impatient more than I had in 1973. I certainly never felt that I was reading gibberish, but there were stretches of the book that felt so private and hermetic I decided that Pynchon was mostly talking to Pynchon. Some of the puns and other humor were so silly as to be regrettable ("I Ching feet"), and the anachronisms bothered me a bit. I believe that the me who read Gravity's Rainbow back then was a more flexible and generous, less peckish reader than I am today. I also think that kid was faking it a lot.

But in the end (and the middle), Gravity's Rainbow impressed me even more than it did three decades ago. There is simply no work in all of American literature that approaches its staggering intellectual reach and erudition. And the cosmic drama of the thing! Pynchon is our Melville and our Blake, our epic poet of good and evil, innocence (the American variety) and experience. Vidal, in a dissenting essay on what he termed the "R and D" novelists, has hard things to say about Pynchon's ear for prose, but I disagree. His quicksilver shifts of register--from the lyrical to the scrupulously historical to the scatalogical (he is also the poet of shit) to the ontological/hysterical to the goofball to the vatic and prophetic--are the work of a virtuoso. It seems to me now that Pynchon's great achievement was to create a narrative voice that is supple enough to say and do anything. The narrator is almost premodern in the freedom he exercises to comment on matters large and small. Gravity's Rainbow is not, I finally realized, a novel in the generally accepted sense--it is a text, intended for moral instruction. This is fitting from a writer whose Puritan ancestor William Pynchon came to this country on John Winthrop's fleet and wrote an anti-Calvinist tract, "The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption," so controversial that it was banned in Boston. Far from being the nihilistic work some lazy critics have accused it of being, Gravity's Rainbow contains a superabundance of meaning, of signs, portents, and pedagogical occasions.

It is also farsighted. It is no more valid to judge Gravity's Rainbow on the accuracy of its predictions than it is to rate Orwell on how close he came to describing the real 1984, but from the perspective of the present there are a number of startlingly proleptic moments in there. A German engineer in the Zone foresees the mass commodification of guilt: "Extermination camps will be turned into tourist attractions, foreigners with cameras will come piling through in droves." This is exceptional, as is Pynchon's drilling down into the history of such German concerns as IG Farben and their scummy wartime activities--and the disturbing connections they had to American business. Even more exceptional is the book's prefiguring of a digital world and an information-based economy. Here, after all, is a book obsessed with the human tendency to reduce all phenomena to "the zero and the one." Uh-huh. In Zurich, a Russian black marketeer complains to a Slothrop in search of information, "Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?" and predicts, "Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are the wave of the future." Quite true--the hypersurveillance of Slothrop's precognitive erections and all else anticipates our lives today, every keystroke noted by spyware, every transaction transmitted to a data bank. Slothrop's ego decay and psychic dispersal can easily be regarded as all our eventual fates in the real kingdom of the zero and the one.

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Gravity's Rainbow has, in my view, only gained in stature and pertinence in the intervening decades. But what has been its wider effect on American fiction? To begin with, it has no real rival among the novels published since. Certainly not in either of Pynchon's subsequent novels, Vineland and Mason & Dixon, each of which has its many excellences, but neither of which anyone is planning to take with them to the moon. William Gaddis's JR is a virtuoso turn, and a highly predictive one, but it has the air of a formal stunt, while his subsequent books were marred by his ultra-Swiftian disgust with human stupidity. Then there is the special case of Don DeLillo, the other giant figure in postwar American fiction, who, like Pynchon, has used the novel as a vehicle of inquiry into the uniquely unsettling state of being a late-twentieth-century American, with all its attendant terrors, mysteries, and absurdities. As definitive a summing-up of the meaning of the cold war as Underworld was, the scope of DeLillo's achievement is best grasped by considering that book in the company of its three great predecessors, Mao II, White Noise, and Libra. Like Gravity's Rainbow, those books comprehend American life as mediated by science and technology, and the vast systems that underlie and are made possible by them. They show how the dream of perfect safety and control breeds paranoia, and how free radicals like Lee Harvey Oswald can wreak havoc in such a world. In temperament and style DeLillo is Apollonian, a secret sharer with his technocrats and obsessives, whereas Pynchon is chthonic, in touch with darker gods. In the end one is relieved not to have to choose between the two, secure in the thought that a century from now, people will read these authors' books to understand the contours and nature of our odd lives.

What about the question of Gravity's Rainbow's "influence"? Certainly its effect can be seen in what I think of as the "high-IQ wing" of younger American novelists. The brainy, cyber-savvy Richard Powers has learned from Pynchon the art of structuring his novels along metaphorical pathways drawn from the realms of science, mathematics, genetics, and music. William T. Vollmann, with his ambitious and polymathic reach, is the most Pynchon-like of his generation, but he has yet to solve the problem of form. David Foster Wallace may be the only certifiable genius in American fiction besides Pynchon, and his massive Infinite Jest was published as if it were the second coming of Gravity's Rainbow, with some justification. But where Gravity's Rainbow looks outward and seeks an escape from the tragic neuroses of Western history, Infinite Jest burrows inward, its antennae tuned to the psychic frailities we all harbor and our culture's tendency to mesmerize itself into a fugue state. Finally there is Jonathan Franzen, who married a Pynchonian sensibility to the family novel to explosive effect in The Corrections, but who should have done a Pynchon in another sense when Oprah came calling.

I do worry, though, that Gravity's Rainbow may be turning into an undervisited monument. In a poll of sixteen assistants and assistant editors under the age of thirty at my publishing company, a marvelously well-read group, I discovered that only two of them had read the book and only five had read any books at all by Pynchon. The comments from those who had read Pynchon suggested that they found him slow going stylistically and that his concerns were in general alien and irrelevant to them. This makes sense. Pynchon is a pure product of the cold war and the arms race and the adversary culture that opposed them, whereas these young people came of age after the fall of communism, in a time when technology is viewed as the royal road to imaginative and personal freedom. In a very real sense, then, Gravity's Rainbow is turning historical--an inevitable fate. Three decades on, it has acquired something of the "aura" that Walter Benjamin ascribed to works of art produced before the advent of mechanical reproduction. The question that remains is whether the book will come to seem dated in the years to come, or if it will pass the Poundian test of being news that stays news. Who can tell? What I do know about Gravity's Rainbow for absolute certain is this: There is nothing to compare to it now.

Life is a haunting thing. In preparation for this piece, I made a lunch date with Cork Smith for October 14, 2004, to catch up and to interview him. Two days before, his wife, Sheila Smith, called to say that Cork was in the hospital for observation with what looked to be a case of congestive heart failure. He had not been well the past couple of years; he'd had successful open-heart surgery but suffered from an emphysema that was getting worse. Still, three weeks later Cork called to say that he was feeling "okay" (translation: not well at all, but what the hell can you do?), and we rescheduled lunch for the Monday after Thanksgiving. Two days before the holiday, I opened up my e-mail to find a message with the subject heading "Cork died last night." Now I would never have the chance to talk to him about the triumphant publication of Gravity's Rainbow, or about anything else.

Cork ...

RELATED ARTICLE

Don DeLillo

It was as though, in some odd quantum stroke, Hemingway died one day and Pynchon was born the next. One literature bends into another. Pynchon has made American writing a broader and stronger force. He found 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. in paperback. I read it and thought, Where did this come from?

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 imagination and collective dreams.

Don DeLillo's most recent novel is Cosmopolis (Scribner, 2003).

George Saunders

I don't think anyone has gotten closer than Thomas Pynchon 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 pleasure I got at finally seeing the America I knew--strange shops and boulevards, built over former strange shops and former boulevards, all laid out there in valleys and dead-end forests, heaped on top of Indian cemeteries, peopled with nut jobs and hustlers and moral purists--actually present in a novel, and present not only in substance but in structure and language that both used and evoked the unruly, muscular complexity of the world itself.

In Pynchon, anything is fair game--if it is in the world, it can go in the book. To me there is something Buddhist about this approach, which seems to say that since the world is capable of producing an infinity of forms, the novel must be capable of accommodating an infinite number of forms. 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 overused word inclusiveness: No dogma or tidy aesthetic rule or literary fashion is allowed to prefilter the beautiful data streaming in. Everything is included. No inclination of the mind is too small or large or frightening. The result is gorgeous madness, which does what great literature has always done--reminds us that there is a world out there that is bigger than us and worthy of our utmost humility and attention.

I have often felt that we read to gain some idea of what God would say about us if someone were to ask Him what we're like. Pynchon says, through the vast loving catalogue he has made, that we are Excellent but need to be watched closely. He says there is no higher form of worship than the loving (i.e., madly attentive) observation of that-which-is, a form of prayer of which Pynchon's work is our highest example.

George Saunders is the author of the novella-length fable The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, forthcoming from Riverhead Books.

Joanna Scott

In an attempt to be concise, I'll ignore the ambiguities of Pynchon's V., the diverging convergences of mystery and meaning, the tangled intricacies, and instead suggest that in his vast first novel. Pynchon is making a simple point about the stupidity of common sense. With any one of the many characters who populate V.'s varied landscapes, the effort of interpretation and the decision to take action are doomed by contingency. What we call common sense is in fact no more than a dim guess.

In V., nothing makes absolute sense--not Sidney Stencil's "dreamscape of the future," not Benny Profane's dream street of his awkward present, and not the nightmare that constitutes history. After sixteen chapters and an epilogue, with journeys around the world, underground, out to sea, and through time, Herbert Stencil hasn't found what he's looking for, and Benny Profane has nothing to show for his fabulous experiences. "Offhand," says Profane near the end of the novel. "I'd say I haven't learned a goddamn thing." V. remains, in its essential form, no more--and, paradoxically, no less--than an initial.

But when impenetrable mystery becomes a generating force, then we can understand actions as reactions. And if there's one presiding consistency in V., it can be found in the pattern of (stupid) reactions. Whether it's Dr. Schoenmaker piecing together a nose, Porpentine falling from a window, or Benny Profane shooting an alligator, every attempt to control experience can be seen as a reaction to an encounter that is only partially perceived. The problem is, these characters keep forgetting that perception is partial. They're stupid. We're all stupid. Pynchon arrived on the scene in 1963 to illuminate the mess that is civilization and to remind us that even though we can't see clearly enough ever to completely justify action, even though common sense is neither common nor sensible, we can at least learn to be more cautious. When a deliberate effort is called for, we can follow Profane's example as he faces the alligator in Fairing's Parish: In a moment that might not last very long but extends over a page, he hesitates, filling time with reflective thought.

Yet this is only a new beginning of the story, for caution proves an inadequate antidote to stupidity. There is no adequate antidote. Benny Profane shoots the alligator, and his flashlight goes out. In the novel--as in life, which along with most everything else in the universe seems to be within the scope of this novel's implications--we plunge into darkness, where we find, reading on, that paranola is irresistible to those who miss the productive significance of the simple point embedded in the complex Pynchon formula. Imaginative invention begins in darkness. If in fact we keep making mistakes, no matter how careful we are, then we have good reason to laugh in despair, and the grand project of fiction can continue.

Joanna Scott's novel Liberation will be published by Little, Brown in the fall.

Percival Everett

Thomas Pynchon used to be a client of my now deceased agent. He's a recluse, I'm told, but not invisible, and therein lies the problem. Tom is eight feet tall. Well, he's seven feet eight inches tall, which is the same as eight feet to me. Tom is terribly self-conscious about his height, having actually been born that length. His birth lasted some four days. I feel bad revealing the truth of Tom's height, because now he might find it difficult to hide. As it is, he can walk around without anyone noticing. He did this all through grade school, junior high, and high school as well. When the teacher called roll, he simply would not answer. No one put a name to the face and so he became "unseen." And no one therefore knew where he was, but still the teacher called his name every day, and still the assignments and test papers bearing his name showed up. Tom believed he had achieved a kind of sympathy with the world at the molecular level and that was why he was unseen. In fact, that might well be the case, as I have walked with him down the street and observed that he is in fact not seen. At times, all seven feet eight inches of him becomes unavailable even to me, and I have a face to go with his name. Tom tells me that he cannot control his slipping into an entropic state here and there. He calls it the curse of James Clerk Maxwell, but he doesn't seem to mind it much. It's the curse of Heisenberg that seems to annoy him. Tom can never quite know where he is. Oh, he can guess with some statistical accuracy where he's likely to be at any given moment, but what good is that when you're doing your laundry or trying to eat an egg salad sandwich?

All this serves as a kind of metaphor for Tom's place in the literary landscape. Who cares if he's a recluse? That's his business. Small minds become fascinated with that kind of detail. But the work ... the work is wonderful and sheer play, making sense when we want it to and then not. Reading Pynchon is like caving. You might get lost, you will get wet, you will need to bring your own light, and you will have to find your own way out. What more can we ask of art? Just so you know, Thomas Pynchon is actually the pen name of ... well, you wouldn't want to know.

Percival Everett's novel Wounded will be published by Graywolf Press in September.

Tom Robbins

Although I'm hypnotized by the colored lights he plays upon the disco ball of history--by the way he illuminates a shadowy panoply of conspiracies, atrocities, buffooneries, and arcana, causing it to sparkle in every direction--what I ultimately find thrilling and inspiring about Thomas Pynchon is an ostensibly far simpler thing: his choice of nouns.

His verbs, adverbs, and adjectives are engaging as well, but Pynchon is most impressive when he reaches into the vast bin of squirming language and somehow plucks out a noun that is fresh and unexpected, yet totally appropriate. For example, in Mason & Dixon he has the Reverend Cherrycoke (a splendid appellation!) wipe his bum with "a handful of Clover." A lesser writer might have settled for grass or leaves or straw, none of which could have lit up the scene the way that clover does. Small choices such as that one, choices to which, except subliminally, the general reader is oblivious, tote the freight of genius.

Mark Twain opined that the difference between the perfect word and one that is merely adequate is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Well, move over, Zeus! Take to the storm cellar, ye firefly farmers! Pynchon has got his trigger finger glued to the thunderbolt machine.

Tom Robbins's collection of fiction and essays Wild Ducks Flying Backward will be published by Bantam this fail.

Jeffrey Eugenides

I have a coffee cup in storage in Berlin. It bears a fetching image of a V-2 rocket and the name of the touristic locale in Germany where I bought it: Peenemunde.

The most brilliant epigraph in the history of literature (I'm making a sweeping claim not out of omniscience but wild enthusiasm) comes at the beginning of Gravity's Rainbow: "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.--Wernher Von Braun." When I first read those words, as a college freshman, I took them at face value--as scientific proof (very much in vogue at the time) of the reality of the spiritual realm. I had no idea that Von Braun, developer of the V-2, was Hitler's chief rocket scientist. Still less did I know of his salvation at the hands of American troops, as Berlin fell, or of his subsequent rehabilitation in the United States, where he became Nixon's chief rocket scientist and a member of the NASA team that put the first man on the moon (no wonder Von Braun believed in life after death).

Let's appreciate everything this epigraph accomplishes: It stems from, and summons, the historical period Pynchon writes about; it simultaneously inspires and lampoons religious sentiment; and, with savage irony, it comes out of the mouth of someone personifying the novel's central theme--that the Powers That Be operate behind the scenes, owing allegiance to no nation or ideology.

Twenty years after first reading Gravity's Rainbow, I rented a car and drove 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 the beach resort of Heringsdorf when I saw the sign pointing to Peenemunde.

Immediately, I made the detour. But I wasn't desperate to see Peenemunde 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 visit 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, probably 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 you wanted to write, you had to know everything: everything about history, science, politics, even calculus; you had to know everything while being funny at the same time, and lyrical, bringing into the novel a freewheeling, present-tense, colloquial-poetic American voice. In books that were 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 great writers don't only describe the past or the present; they predict the future. Pynchon's estimate, back in 1973, of the path the postwar American 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 Pynchon. He isn't as hard to find now as in the old days. I could probably get it to him. But I ended up keeping it. Every summer, when I go back to Berlin, my Peenemunde cup comes out of its box and back onto the kitchen shelf. I never use it. I keep it there, untouched. It's a sacramental object for me, the tiny V-2 rocket on its side, like Shiva, no longer a destroyer of worlds, but a creator, too.

Jeffrey Eugenides's most recent novel is Middlesex (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002).

Lorrie Moore

Pynchon's mind is the steel trap of American literature: Nothing, 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 sticker--is built detail upon 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 wandering energies enticed and held captive there, though rarely without mercy. Delicious peanuts are tossed in to amuse and feed; for in art, even a mirror is a living creature.

Pynchon has a historian's sense of story (front and back), a musician's sense 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 language in which we think and speak of it--or might think and speak of it, or will soon think and speak of it. His novels leap and trespass; they even violate the oft-repeated advice not to begin a story with a character waking up (Gravity's Rainbow; Vineland) and can be found to have applicable political currency when quoted virtually at random: "It is a universal sin among the false-animate or unimaginative to refuse to let well enough alone" (V.). Or, "'Why fire at Sideling Hill?' Dixon all innocence. 'Not at the Hill,' chuckles Capt. Shelby, '--at what's coming over the Hill'" (Mason & Dixon).

Pynchon's work is feariess, funny, questing, teeming with all manner of originality 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).

Andrew Hultkrans

Sometimes a book finds you at just the right moment, neatly dovetailing with events in your own life and seemingly answering questions you were about to ask, if only you had the words. The Crying of Lot 49 was such a book for me, and it still shades my entire worldview. In college it was the focus of my senior English thesis, an earnest, scholarly work that, despite its criminally pretentious title--"Toward an Entropic Multiverse: Subjective Order Systems in The Crying of Lot 49"--earned me good marks from my readers. During that same year, my mother was dying of cancer. I had already lost my father to the disease when I was twelve. He had left to my mother's care an impossibly tangled and not very valuable estate of oil and gas holdings, ensnared by lawsuits and technicalities--an objective correlative for a lost era of wildcat exploration and frontier business, a maddening metaphor for an American life. When my mother died, in April, I had just completed my thesis, and the estate, in all its labyrinthine inscrutability, became my charge.

This is, of course, how The Crying of Lot 49 begins, with its heroine, Oedipa Maas, named coexecutor of a staggeringly complex estate of far-flung business interests, the totality of which seems to contain all the mysteries and existential conundrums of a post-God, post-Bomb, post-Meaning America. The novel's central question is, How does one make sense of decay and death in the absence of God, the life-giving force that brings order to an apparently chaotic world-system? Various characters in the book adopt secular order systems to replace the lost Organizer--physics, Freud, technology, LSD, recovery groups--while Oedipa finds herself on the threshold of uncovering an underground postal system that, if real, would reveal both a shadow America and something akin to what Gnostics called the demiurge, a corrupt anti-God who created the entropic, disintegrated physical world in his own flawed image. Despite its grim implications, the existence of the Tristero postal system would be more comforting to Oedipa than the absence of any system whatsoever: "For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America, and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia." For perhaps obvious reasons, the essence of Oedipa's quandary is my own, and has been since I graduated college--hungry for explanations, seeking transcendent meaning, riddling about America, wanting to believe, unsure if I can.

To date, my father's estate has not been closed; Its lots have not been cried. I remain unfurrowed, still on the case.

Andrew Hultkrans is at work on a book about surveillance in America.

Kathryn Kramer

There's Pynchon the writer and then there's Pynchon the phenomenon. As phenomenon he's a mnemonic, like certain Beatles songs or the Kennedy assassination. I first heard the name early one morning in the '70s--a visitor stopped by as if to bring the news: "Everything's seen through the eyes of a paranoiac," this friend said admiringly. An odd virtue to celebrate, it seemed at the time.

In graduate school, there was a look in a classmate's eyes as they fixed on the backs of strangers in diners hunched over coffee. That's him! So it could have been--and the next time and the next. Pynchon was like Santa Claus: Whatever you believed, he was. Then, later, someone who claimed to know (though he was constrained from saying how) told me Pynchon had spent a year in New Hampshire, not far from Hanover. Salinger, I'd heard, once worked in the typing room at the Dartmouth College library; I imagined the two most secretive writers in America face to face across a library table, typing their respective novels, exchanging an incognito wink.

The phenomenon of Pynchon preceded and, in a way, impeded my reading. I'd read knockoffs in my graduate fiction workshop before I read the original--obscure, mediated quests leavened by goofy poems. When I sat down to read the novels, they were somewhat vitiated for me by the awe in which I'd learned to hold them. It was hard just to like what I liked. The lyrical authority of lines like "A screaming comes across the sky. The evacuation still proceeds ... but it's all theatre"; the combination of vigor and eloquence in the prose, responding to the pressure of what can only be belief; the trademark eerie aura, updating and Americanizing the Kafkaesque; the complicity and deference with which Pynchon treats his characters, strangely enough not altogether unlike Salinger's--all this then meant more to me then Pynchon's dazzling range of scientific knowledge and teasing anonymity, the heralding banner waved around his reputation that had nearly daunted me into not reading him.

But the one single phrase that most frequently recurs to me is from The Crying of Lot 49. During the performance of the play The Courier's Tragedy, "a gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep in among the words. Heretofore the naming of names has gone on either literally or as metaphor. But now ... a new mode of expression takes over. It can only be called a kind of ritual reluctance."

Ritual reluctance. In context it means information known but not articulated; too dangerous to be articulated; evidence of (overall) the "secret richness and concealed density of dream ... a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating." Wouldn't it be pretty to think so. Romanticism's the flip side of paranoia--the reason, no doubt, we've been treated to so many repackaged, low-octane versions of Pynchon's vision (which always make it a profound relief to return to the real thing). I have to confess that for me, over time, the phrase has come to stand for a general (because "ritual," somehow authorized and approved) reluctance about nearly everything. Perhaps I've used it unfairly to dignify a personal recalcitrance, though if you don't learn ritual reluctance from reading Pynchon, it's hard to know what you would learn.

Kathryn Kramer's most recent novel is Sweet Water (Knopf, 1998).

Lydia Davis

A rather appealing specimen of early Pynchon is the last story in his collection Slow Learner. The story, "The Secret Integration"--first published in the Saturday Evening Post more than forty years ago (three years after V. appeared)--involves a gang of young practical jokers and a rich childhood setting of an old town with a new development, a sprawling estate with a derelict mansion, and a downtown, complete with seedy hotel. In one deftly described scene, the boys coast on their bikes down a long hill in the early evening toward the hotel, "leaving behind two pages of arithmetic homework and a chapter of science" and, on the TV, "a lousy movie, some romantic comedy." Because all the televisions in town receive only one channel, the boys, as they fly by, are able to follow the movie's progress from house to house, through doors and windows "still open for the dark's first coolness."

In his introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon, who somewhat preempts our reactions to the story, remarks that he likes it more than he dislikes it. In fact it is so likable that one envies the boys their comfortable society and the fields, streams, and town of their games. Their collaboration and apportioning of assignments is charming (to develop an arsenal for sabotaging the rallroad; to enlist malcontent first-graders to destroy the boys' latrine; to infiltrate PTA meetings); the elaborateness of their schemes, and the number that succeed, is impressive; and the animation of the central character, Grover the boy genius--with his enormous vocabulary, fund of information, and flights of hilarity--is particularly savory. The pranks the boys plan are potentially devastating to the community, yet, as Pynchon says in a lovely bit of writing, the boys would never actually take "any clear or irreversible step," because "everybody on the school board, and the railroad, and the PTA and paper mill had to be somebody's mother or father, whether really or as a member of a category; and there was a point at which the reflex to their covering warmth, protection, effectiveness against bad dreams, bruised heads and simple loneliness took over and made worthwhile anger with them impossible."

There is a lyrical humanity in this story, an almost unapologetic gentleness, inviting and inclusive, that contrasts with the weightier, complex pessimism and bravura of Pynchon's later works, in which perhaps it is more difficult for the characters to go home and be comforted at the end of the day.

Lydia Davis's collection of stories Samuel Johnson is Indignant was published by McSweeney's in 2001.

Carter Scholz

In 1973, Gravity's Rainbow was, improbably, a nominee for the Nebula award, given each year by the Science Fiction Writers of America (it lost to Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke, at that time not yet Sir Arthur). This was of note to me because that year I attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop. I was looking for ways to narrate a world so constrained and impelled by technology that no honest account, I thought, could omit it. Yet most fiction I read did in fact omit it. Science fiction didn't, but tended to exclude even more. So reading Gravity's Rainbow gave me a moment of false satori; if this was "science fiction," I was in the game, and furthermore genre was dead--genre meaning any normative practice, whether laid down at Clarion or at the University of Iowa's writing program. After this, no one could write another space opera or suburban angst-fest with a straight face--or so I kidded myself. Pynchon's book had marrow.

Pynchon knew the high-lit conventions, how to sink a putt with aplomb, et cetera, but ... what's this? Byron the Bulb? "Fickt nicht mit dem Raketemensch!"? Imipolex G? Equations, even--a-and ... calculus jokes?! Sir Arthur smiles thinly, taps his foot to the music hall parodies; Asimov chuckles at the limericks; but sooner or later, usually by the time the Herero tribe comes on, the SF guys are out the door. The lowa contingent is lost at the first mention of Poisson distributions. This weird book has put them all somewhat in the position of its character Ensign Morituri, the bemused Anglophile unwilling to join the English: "And find out what you people are really like? Oh my golly. What if phile changes then to phobe?"

On the available evidence, Pynchon is neither a technophile nor a technophobe, neither dystopian nor transcendentalist. He's a believer in possibility, an acute observer of rhetorics. He knows how science and technology embed social and personal histories. His narrative strategy is pretty consistent: He presents the world as an intersection of secret histories, personal and political. A sort of double exposure projects one historical period or sensibility onto another, in recognition that historical "moments" are never momentary, never transparent, never singular, but actually overlays of barely comprehended pasts bound into overdetermined yet uncontrollable futures. If the nineteenth-century novel of public events as practiced by Dickens, Hugo, Tolstoy, or Stendahl aimed to be a master narrative, Pynchon takes it as given that any twentieth-century master narrative is propaganda, and that True History, if it exists at all, can be detected only by its slience, in the interstices of public noise, like some phantasmal melody produced by the different tones between audible oscillators. It's not something that the pursuit of "normal" science, as Thomas Kuhn says, will let you hear. Kekule dreams the Great Serpent ...

I was wrong about genre, of course. Genre endures, which can be a comfort, if brands reassure you. There's even a kind of boutique-lit brand that traffics in the adjective Pynchonesque. But genres, per se, tend to miss the point. If 1973 opened a door labeled Way Out, door number two was opened by George Lucas in 1977, and most of the smart money headed there. But that first door remains open, and it's not a brand, and its true number is something like aleph-null.

Carter Scholz's novel Radiance was published by Picador in 2002.

Erik Davis

When I first plowed through Pynchon, I was living in a notoriously sleazy Berkeley co-op called Barrington Hall and read things only for the flash: science fiction, esoterica, visionary poetry, '60s and '70s counterculture literature. From where I sat, Pynchon's true peers were not Barthelme or Melville, but Philip K. Dick, the weirdos behind the Principia Discordia, and Robert Anton Wilson, who penned The Illuminatus! Trilogy with Robert Shea before writing the Cosmic Trigger trilogy, which described how Wilson's occult conspiracy fiction leaked into his real life. All these heads tangoed with revelation and absurdity, reveled in pulp, and experimented with forms that pulled readers into the plot. The literary values that separated Pynchon from the rest mattered less to me than the hunches and madcap mysticism they shared. All these writers drew material from the posthuman petri dish of California, whose spiritual peculiarities shaped my sensibility and have lately been a research obsession of mine. Dick barely left the state; Wilson wrote the Cosmic Trigger books in early '70s Berkeley; Principia was birthed after its authors had a vision of the goddess Eris in an all-night bowling alley in Whittier in 1958 or '59 (they can't remember). Pynchon thoroughly grokked the Golden State, as The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and his 1966 essay on the Watts riots all make clear (even the mysterious Wanda Tinasky sent her letters to Mendocino County's Anderson Valley Advertiser). All this makes sense, because California is the visionary crossroads of technology, American prophecy, and trash.

Pynchon remains the classiest of the literary heads, although I do understand why, when hands are periodically wrung over the hollowness of contemporary fiction, he is slammed by many for playing a detached game of postmodern dodgeball. The yucks can grow thin. But the image of Pynchon as David Foster Wallace in bellbottoms misses the oracular import of his fictions, especially those that precede Vineland. Like certain SF authors, Pynchon recognized the engineered character of history--the wiring under the floorboards, the business of technoscience, whose positive feedback loops force us all onto the apocalyptic bus, whether we want to be there or not. Pynchon understood that the site of epiphany--the spiritual core of modernism--had migrated into these thickening networks of information, electronic media, and chemical, even pharmaceutical, control. For Pynchon, the Gnostic glimpse--the blinding flash of the Kirghiz Light--is no joke, even if it is funny. It just no longer has a proper place; its center is everywhere and nowhere, like the networks that entangle us all. Pynchon is not detached--if anything, like Gravity's Rainbow's Byron the Bulb, he is too plugged-in.

Erik Davis's history of California spirituality, The Visionary State, will be published by Chronicle Books next spring.

Trey Ellis

The dizzying cacophony Pynchon never fails to create describes the modern condition so accurately that all other novelists, regardless of our penchant for conspiracy, comedy, or particle physics, owe him our creative lives. At this very moment, my kids are thirty feet from me playing Twister Moves, an amped-up version of the '70s classic, complete with its own driving techno beat (or is it jungle? drum 'n' bass? house?). I've told them that I'm trying to work, but it's wet outside (a rarity in southern California). ("Right foot blue, left hand purple. It's time to get your stomp on!" chirps DJ Somebody from the boom box they took from my room.) Now where was I? Oh yes: Pynchon somehow coordinates the clutter and writes not to show us how clever he is (the most common and unforgivable of writerly sins), but to express his ideas in ways never before done. He's my hero.

Trey Ellis's first novel, Platitudes, was reissued in 2003 by Northeastern University Press.

Robert Polito

Vineland is a romance--romance as in A Midsummer Night's Dream--about fascism. Pynchon casts a sly glance at Orwell via the date in his opening sentence: "Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof." I remember thinking as I finished the novel for the first time and turned back to start rereading: 1984 ... fascism in America ... not BIG BROTHER but instead watching and being watched by television and computers.

That was over the 1989-90 Christmas holidays. Now I think. How did Pynchon see the next fifteen years so clearly? Clearly, decisively, yet without despair or bitterness? For all its tender, plangent marvels, Vineland is the novel as public service announcement. Of course it's a Pynchon PSA, set to a slinky tune:

   THE TUBE

   Oh ... the ... Tube!
   It's poi-soning your brain!
   Oh, yes ...
   It's dri-ving you, insane!
   It's shoot-ing rays, at you,
   Over ev'ry-thing ya do,
   It sees you in your bedroom,
   And--on th' toi-let too!
   Yoo hoo! The
   Tube ...
   It know, your ev'ry thought,
   Hey, Boob, you thought you would-
   T'n get caught--
   While you were sittin' there, strain' at
   "The
   Brady Bunch,"
   Big fat computer jus'
   Had you for lunch, now th'
   Tube--
   It's plugged right in, to you!

Is it widely known that in 2003 Pynchon contributed a foreword to the "centennial edition" of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four? This is one of his infrequent, astonishing essays, shot through with the kind of smart, sometimes wiseguy insights and phrases that no one else would write. But these sentences, toward the middle, sneak up on you:

"What has steadily, insidiously improved since then, of course, making humanist arguments almost Irrelevant, is the technology. We must not be too distracted by the clunkiness of the means of surveillance current in Winston Smith's era. In 'our' 1984, after all, the integrated circuit chip was less than a decade old, and almost embarrassingly primitive next to the wonders of computer technology circa 2003, most notably the Internet, a development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old twentieth-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about."

As Bottom says, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, "I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called 'Bottom's Dream,' because it hath no bottom."

Robert Polito directs the Graduate Writing Program at the New School in New York.

Jim Shepard

It goes without saying that Thomas Pynchon occupies a place in our collective literary imagination so secure he doesn't need praise from the likes of me. But given what he's meant to all of us who attempt any kind of fiction that's vexed, playful, and hybridizes high and low culture--if those categories even still have meaning--who among us wouldn't be eager to contribute to some kind of motley chorus of celebration in his honor?

And then there's the sense of giddy elevation involved in being asked to talk about what Pynchon has meant to us. To our writing.

The writers who've meant the most to me, over the course of my halting and nonlinear and oafish development, have been either enabling (as in. I didn't know that was allowed, or I think maybe I could do a paltrier version of that--i.e., a Salinger or a Hemingway) or awe-inspiring (as in, Oh my God: Is that what you can do with sentences?--i.e., a Joyce or a Nabokov). Pynchon is one of the few writers I've encountered who operates for me in both categories--who reminds me that to write about America you have to write about physics and bop, war and postal systems, absurdity and agony, crushing historical patterns and our own invincibly breezy ahistorical obliviousness, and that when writing about such things, you have the revolutionary duty, to paraphrase Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isaac Babel, to write well. Perhaps no one but Nabokov writes as well about both the necessity and, as Pynchon himself put it when reviewing Garcia Marquez, "the hazards of skepticism and mercy." No one alive works so tirelessly to remind us of the need to be obsessive readers of our world. I return to Pynchon's fiction because it reminds me that at any given moment, someone else may be patterning our lives. It reminds me of our duty to reinvent ourselves. It reminds me of one of Blake's lines: "I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans."

Jim Shepard is the author, most recently, of Project X (Knopf, 2004) and Love and Hydrogen (Vintage, 2004).

Emily Barton

When I was in college, I sang in a band named after the superplastic in Gravity's Rainbow: Imipolex G. The guitarist, who wrote most of our songs, had read and idolized the novel. For my part, I had read only The Crying of Lot 49, little knowing that as an adult I would consult it as the ancients had consulted The Aeneid or that I would so revere Mason & Dixon that I'd schlep my five-pound clothbound copy with me everywhere I went, through two complete readings. The Crying of Lot 49 was unlike any other book I'd read. Pynchon's humor (alternately sly, subversive, and Mel Brooks--broad), manic drive, and intimations of threat and conspiracy troubled and confused me and consistently raised the hair on my arms. Even then, I knew how rare this feeling was; I knew I should cultivate it wherever I found it.

Our songwriter wrote pretty good lyrics, but by far the best piece Imipolex G played was a rendition of "Serge's Song," one of the Paranoids' numbers from The Crying of Lot 49, which we performed as straight-ahead '60s surf rock. In paying homage to Pynchon. I can't do better than to present a portion of that song's lyrics, which remain one of the best, if most twisted, testimonies to teenage love I know:

   What chance has a lonely surfer boy
   For the love of a surfer chick,
   With all these Humbert Humbert cats
   Coming on so big and sick?
   For me, my baby was a woman,
   For him she's just another nymphet:
   Why did they run around, why did she put me down,
   And get me so upset?

Ten years after Imipolex G had graduated and dispersed, I sent Pynchon a tape of the band performing the song, along with a letter thanking him for the blurb he'd written for my first novel and explaining the profound debt I feel to his work. I couldn't write as I do without reckoning with his optimistic cynicism or his perverse understanding of history; and American letters might long ago have shipwrecked on the shoals of commercialism without his unmatched ability to satirize the same topics (war, the military-industrial complex, paranoia, drugs, the Transit of Venus, ketchup) to which he simultaneously pays the deepest and most scholarly respect.

I don't know if he read my letter; true to form, he never wrote back.

Emily Barton's second novel, Brookland, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2006.

Jay Cantor

I'm sure Professor Irwin Corey will take the podium soon to discuss Pynchon's Paranoia (named for its discoverer and first victim), which has served our writer better than Marxism (for example) might have, kind of exploding such Old World clatterings by finding more signs and enemies than just one Ruling Class, and more desiring machines by which it operates than just base and superstructure. Pynchonian Paranoia joyfully takes the Entire Fucking Universe as the field in which the enemy is likely to operate, and places its armies both outside and inside your body, for example, agents busily colonizing your desires. Or maybe, you bastard, you are Your Own Worst Enemy (and mine!) and your sadomasochistic desire gave rise to the Evil Empire in the first place.

Or vice versa.

I'm sure, too, that Professor Corey will elucidate for us the geeky science-fiction aspect of those Pynchonian themes, as if Pynchon had imagined we were all teenage outcasts, protecting ourselves from the sight of our own pathetically small muscles through hyperbolic technofantasies that made us feel connected to powerful machines--until maybe we actually built the apple of our imagining in our garage, only to find it co-opted by the Other and his plans to colonize ... our hyperbolic imaginings. Or maybe--ha!--our little device now actually manipulates the Other and Us, and the computer is in control! You be the judge--if you think you're wise enough. Or leave it up to the tarot cards.

Anyway, that's for the professor. For me, the great and amazing Pynchonian Device[TM] is his sentence, American angular (tubular?) rather than Proustian mellifluous, because, like this country and its fine, fine Empire, the sentence's conjunctions and twists have to take in the most disparate materials, our high ideals and our beloved junk (besides, who says it's junk? Maybe they call it that to shear us away from its significance, the Presence as likely to be hidden in a pop song or a rusty radiator as in a hymn); and then having stopped for that digression, the sentence has to turn right from the radiator and encounter bits of history with its harmonica, a piece or two of disgusting toad-flavored candy, a randy member, and then swallow also a few fragments of our grand(iose) attempts to theorize what's going on in the world and the sentence.

Why such a big ol' sentence (big as Texas, big as my heart)? Because we have to get the whole damn thing in one schematic so we can hold it in our minds and take control of things. (Or maybe our being such control freaks is what got the whole thing going? So let's just say tinker with it instead.) We need one sentence, so we can see the process as it unfolds and connects and disperses, and maybe refolds itself, like DNA.

How does a whole book take shape, then? Does Pynchon fail to write such an utterly complete sentence--paranoia perfected--and have to try again by writing another? Or does he succeed and find he's enjoying himself too much to stop? Or is it his curse to write like this and he can't stop--blessing or bliss, damned or saved, maybe just one more sentence, written or read, and he'll find out ...

Jay Cantor's most recent novel, Great Neck, was issued in paperback by Vintage last year.

Richard Powers

"Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?"

"I thought it was cigarettes."

"You dream." (Gravity's Rainbow)

I remember the thing homing in, soundless, of course, on its parabolic arc, that purified shape latent in the sky. No clue, no advance warning until it hit. I thought I knew how fiction worked, what fiction did, the proper 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 surprise, no second chances, no return. And every time, I'm thrown back on mute, wild surmise. The war is everywhere and real, our terrors threatening to perfect us, the technologies of our desire extending into networks 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 achieved 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 even-song service, set somewhere in Kent--the closest thing I have to a private religious ritual. I do it to remind myself of the size of the made world, of what story 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 myself of our only real medium of exchange.

Richard Powers is the author of eight novels.

Steve Erickson

For American literature in the last half of the twentieth century. Pynchon is the line in the sand that Faulkner was in the first half. In the same way that Faulkner's fiction took into account the ideas of Freud--which isn't to suggest that Faulkner emulated or even cared about Freud, but nonetheless he was informed by a Freudian age--Pynchon's fiction takes into account Einstein's ideas: the circularity of time, the elasticity of space, the way geographic and temporal coordinates are crosswired with emotional and psychic ones; and the way these ideas change the meanings of all our lives and the way we write about them. In Pynchon's novels God is, well, not unlike how we imagine Pynchon himself: a supremely overarching intelligence that could write V. at the age of twenty-five or whatever (around the same age as Welles when he made Citizen Kane, and the same age as Dylan when he recorded Blonde on Blonde), as well as a compassionate clown, not above squirting water in our eye from a flower on his lapel or slipping a whoopee cushion under humanity's ass. Pynchon's universe is a feat of great cosmic slapstick. The one time I met Pynchon he gave me an Amy Fisher comic book, an altogether Pynchonesque (Pynchonian?) act; the only thing more Pynchonesque about him was that if there was ever anyone not taken with the Mystique of Pynchon, it's Pynchon. Other novelists have found they must position themselves in relation to the line he has drawn, on Pynchon's side or the other: DeLillo is on the Pynchon side, Updike is on the other. That's not to say that DeLillo writes like Pynchon; of course DeLillo doesn't write like anyone but DeLillo. It is to say that Pynchon has been in the air for more than forty years and has compelled all of us who write novels to make a stand, in favor of or opposed to a Pynchonesque literature, a Pynchonian future.

Steve Erickson's most recent novel is Our Ecstatic Days (Simon & Schuster, 2004).

Gerald Howard is an executive editor at large for Doubleday Broadway. (See Contributors.)