But for Pynchonites, like myself, the release of Inherent Vice marked something else—a new addition to Pynchon lore.  To be a Pynchon fan is to be familiar with the mythology surrounding the reclusive author. You trade stories, like baseball cards, with other fans.  “Have you heard that he wrote a bunch of ‘letters-to-the editor’ at some Northern California newspaper as an old Russian woman?” Someone might ask you. To which you say, “Yeah.  Did you know he once jumped out a window in Mexico City to get away from a photographer?”  You also hunt and search for tidbits and stories that add to the mystique of a man, who’s only out matched by J.D. Salinger as a literary recluse (and according to some theorists, the same person).

So when a trailer for the novel was uploaded to Penguin’s YouTube channel on the same day the book hit the shelves—many in the community began to speculate that maybe it was Pynchon himself doing the narration in the voice of Inherent Vice’s main character, Doc Sportello.  It sounded a lot like this infamous Pynchon cameo in an episode of “The Simpsons.”

Then, the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog, which covers arts and entertainment, launched an investigation to determine if in fact the voices match and hired an expert to compare the samples. According to them, their expert confirms that the “‘voices were delivered by the same person,’” which they used to leverage a confirmation from a Penguin spokesperson that the voice on the trailer is indeed Pynchon’s.

Now before you go thinking that you’ve heard  the man who wrote V., Gravity’s Rainbow, and the Crying of Lot 49 speak, I’d like to point out that just the voice from the trailer matches the one we (and “The Simpsons” producers) are told is that of Thomas Pynchon.  It could easily just be an actor—hired both times to step in for the author.  This is, in fact, a man whose editor hired this guy to be “Thomas Pynchon” and accept the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1974.

If this whole thing strikes you as slightly familiar—you’re right.  Back in 2006, a detailed summary of Pynchon’s previous novel, Against the Day, was posted on its Amazon.com page just before the release date, signed (if you can claim such a thing in the digital world) by the author and then quickly taken down.  After many write ups and message board arguments, it was confirmed that Pynchon did indeed write and post the summary.

So, if he didn’t know before the Amazon incident, Pynchon (or at least who ever manages his PR) would most certainly be aware that any online presence would create some sort of publicity.  I have to wonder: could Thomas Pynchon be an Internet marketer?  Could he have orchestrated this entire incident to attract attention for his new book?   Could he be playing us all for rubes?

The truth is that a writer with Pynchon’s public persona of mystery and purposeful coyness arising today is inconceivable and unlikely.  Can you imagine a bestselling literary author in this day and age refusing to make ANY public appearances?  And for the most part, Pynchon’s air of secrecy makes the experience of reading his work a little bit more enjoyable.   It also forces you to question and hypothesize what is real and what isn’t (just like many of his characters ).  And maybe that’s the whole point of Thomas Pynchon.

[Writer's note: I would love to have embedded the videos so you could watch them withouth leaving the site, but apparently wordpress will not let me do that anymore.  If you know how to do that (and yes, I did try dropping the embedded code from YouTube directly into the HTML), please let me know via comments and I will update the post.  Thanks]

I have a secret to share with you: I’m an Ann Radcliffe fan.

Okay, okay, so I’ve only read The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, but I read the former twice and it is officially “my favorite novel,” and anyway, once you pass the 1000 page mark with any author, I think you’re entitled to call yourself a fan. I’ve got The Italian, and I’m looking for copies of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and A Sicilian Romance. For those not in the know, Ann Radcliffe was one of the second generation of English gothic writers; she was all about the stuff of haunted castles, secret passages, damsels in distress, and evil aristocrats.

It’s a lonely world, being an Ann Radcliffe fan. Not that many people have read her work, partly because she was famously dissed by Jane Austen, and partly because her most celebrated work is over 700 pages long and accelerates like a Kia on an incline. As with many books, one of the most exciting things after a read is the opportunity to discuss them with fellow readers. So if you’re a fellow Radcliffean, please come forward.

More to the point of this post, Radcliffe is one of those almost inexplicably compelling writers, and trying to explain to friends why they should check her out is one of the most persistent problems I run across in conversations about books. Many contemporary critics either dismiss Radcliffe entirely, or give her incidental consideration as a minor writer. It would seem that there’s some interest in feminist readings of her work, but in her personal life she was staunchly conservative, so this, itself, is problematic. The most compelling treatments discuss Radcliffe’s works as flawed but compelling. In his Introduction to Udolpho, Terry Castle points out that one character recognizes another by the handwriting of a poem etched in stone: “Perhaps in a Cocteau film (Beauty and the Beast?) one can imagine letters carved in stone that resemble someone’s handwriting, but here one can only commiserate with [the character] over what must have been an agonizing case of writer’s cramp.” He goes on to note, however, that “she is a meticulous stylist.”

From a historical standpoint, Radcliffe was helping to prepare the ground for Jane Austen (on the one hand) and Mary Shelley (on the other). While those two writers may be as different as night and day, one thing they share is that they both far outshine Radcliffe in their conscious control of their work and their ability to mine the English to tell supple, elegant, and multilayered stories. So why should someone read Radcliffe?

I think there’s something powerful and electric about those first flirtations with new forms. The full potential for psychological rumination and gothic stylings may have only come about with later, more “sophisticated” writers, but Radcliffe’s writing has the benefit of truly being on the edge of a movement at its inception. Her vision of the supernatural, which implicitly posits that magic happens not in the external world, but only in the human mind, participates in and predicts the two centuries of neurological advancement that followed. Among the cliches and anachronisms there is a story so rich in insight and possibility that it has a certain wildness to it. Her castles and landscapes are monstrous and otherwordly, not in a Lovecraftian paucity of detail, but with a lush vividness that is delicious to sink your mind into.

Like most writers of depth, length, and intensity (could we go so far as to call her the 18th century Thomas Pynchon?) there’s a sense of exclusivity to an experience of her work, like a reader belongs to a special club. My recommendation? Start with the best of Radcliffe from the start. Read The Mysteries of Udolpho. This club is still small and fairly exclusive.

The publishing elite generally regard print publishing as the only authoritative medium and web publishing as pure vanity. It’s true that anybody can publish on the internet because it costs nothing. Publishing in a journal, however, feels more meaningful because printing costs real money and therefore those who create the journal must be very critical of what they do and do not publish. It makes sense. But if an online journal were to gain a wide readership and provide only quality content, who’s to say it couldn’t be more authoritative than the classical journal? More readers troll the internet and read blogs than subscribe to journals. No, I don’t have facts or statistics to back this up. But honestly, could you argue differently? The internet is a beast and it’s not quieting down any time soon.

So I’ve decided to throw some of my own work up at the request of a friend. This is a piece that I usually read when I do readings; I recently read it at my friend Connor’s reading series Tuesday Funk. It is a short excerpt from my novel, A Fence We Can Climb, a story that I classify as midwestern gothic. My friend and editor, Tom, has told me I should remove this story from the novel but I’m so partial to it and always get such a warm reception with it, it’s very hard for me to kill this darling. I’m beginning to question whether or not this novel will ever see the light of day; it’s a very classical story, almost Biblical and definitely Shakespearean, but I wonder if it offers anything new. The more I construct my second novel, the more I see I’m inspired by Melville and Pynchon and since rereading some Donald Barthelme, I wonder if I should be thinking in a more post-modernist and humorist milieu. After all, I feel my humor is something that classifies me as a person and my writing really hasn’t reflected that.

Regardless, I hope you enjoy this piece. What I really like about this particular excerpt is its question/answer, back and forth storytelling cadence; it is very much indicative of a kid, any kid, telling a story. If you’d like to read more of my unpublished novel, you could always go to the New School MFA library and dig out my thesis (which is nowhere near as good as it has since become). Or you could just offer to publish it. I prefer the latter option.

Also, the crux of this story is true. Thanks to Michael McKeogh for the inspiration.

—————————————————————————

Excerpt from A Fence We Can Climb, or The Dog Story.

After shoving the pump nozzle into the mouth of his tank, Gentry lifted the cradle and pushed a large yellow button on the machine. He squeezed the handle on the nozzle and using his forefinger locked it in place with the small length of steel just below the trigger. Hearing the fuel begin to course through the hose and into his pickup, he leaned back against the side of the truck bed and waited.

A young man stepped out of the station and called Gentry’s name. Looking up, Gentry waved and the man approached him.

“Hey there Gentry.”

“Heya Lou.” The two shook hands and smiled. Lou looked just a year or two younger than Gentry, still in school, and he barely had any hair on his face save for a thin strip on his upper lip.

“I’m glad you stopped in Gentry ‘cause I got a fucked up story to tell you.”

“Let’s hear it.” Gentry leaned harder against his truck and put his hands behind his head.

“So you been to my house and you know up behind it there’s that house on the hill, that big white bastard. This old jackoff Smokey lives there; well, he ain’t that much of a jackoff really except for in this story. He’s usually a pretty good guy.”

“I know him.”

“Yeah so this old jackoff’s got this mutt of a dog, real inbred sonnuva bitch, all spotted and lean and kinda nasty. And he lets this thing loose on his property and sometimes it comes down to our property and gets in our garage and tears our trash up out of the bags. Real fucking messy man. And my Dad makes me clean it up so I already hate this dog, you know?”

“We got raccoons that do the same thing,” said Gentry.

“So the other day, a week ago maybe, this dog comes on down to our property and my little brother Michael is out playing in the yard and he sees this dog and wants to pet it, you know? He squares up to pet this dog and the dog squares up to inspect this little kid and Michael reaches his hand out to pet it and this old mutt bites at his fucking wrist. The dog almost bites my little brother’s hand off.”

“Well shit.”

“Tell me about it. So my Dad calls up Smokey and he calls up the cops while my Mom cleans Mikey up. She’s a nurse, you know? And Smokey tells these cops that come on by that Michael provoked it. He says this little five year old kid musta pissed his dumb old dog off because he ain’t never done anything like that before. He’s a good dog, Smokey says. And these fucking pigs buy every bit of it. I mean, course they do. Smokey’s all VFW and he gives money to the sheriff and he’s got one of those support your cops stickers on his bumper.”

“Yeah I know him.”

“Right. So my Dad’s pissed but he’s a reasonable man. After the cops leave he tells Smokey he wants him to put that dog down. Says he’s caused us too much trouble, he fucks with our garbage and now he’s fucking with our family. Know what Smokey says? He says Fuck You. He ain’t putting that dog down. Okay, my Dad says. Keep him on your property. Put up a fence and don’t ever let that bastard come near our property ever again. Smokey says nope. He ain’t doing it.” Lou looked over his shoulder at the station and then looked back to Gentry and scratched his upper lip. “He ain’t fucking doing it.”

“Your dad beat his ass right there?”

“Nope. My Dad’s crazier than that. The next day after work my Dad fries up a pound of bacon for dinner, makes it with lots of butter and oil, real greasy. While we’re eating this bacon and some eggs my Dad is over at the sink with all that left over grease and he’s got himself one of those sponges for washing your car. You know what I mean? Those sponges that’re as big as your foot. Bigger even. You know ‘em?”

“Yep.”

“So he soaks up as much grease as he can into that sponge. This thing is all dripping and brown and it smells great. Over at the sink he’s squeezing it hard and letting all that bacon water drip back into the skillet and then he starts wrapping rubber bands around it. He’s got about a hundred rubber bands in a pile on the counter and he’s just wrapping them around this squeezed sponge so that when he’s done with it the sponge is the size of a hotdog. Then he’s rolling it around in the grease again so that the sponge is soaking up even more of it and when he’s finally done with it he tosses the sponge on a paper plate and sticks it in the freezer.”

“The fuck man?”

“I know I know; just listen. So later that night my Dad sees Smokey let that old mutt out to take a shit or whatever and he goes into the freezer and takes the sponge out and unwraps the rubber bands off it and I’m telling you this thing looks just like a little hotdog. Little and brown and frozen and smelling like bacon. And we go outside and walk up the hill a little and soon as we’re close enough my Dad throws this thing over by where the dog is and we take off back down the hill. And once we’re home my Dad tells me, Lou, set your alarm for sunrise and I do it. Next morning real early we climb up that hill again and laid out there on the grass is that dog and its stomach is huge and right down the middle of its belly the skin is split and dark red and black and dried over and there’s already maggots and worms eating its guts and on the grass by its mouth is a bunch of dried puke with blood and hair in it and it’s obvious this thing was in pain when it died and I could hardly look at it. And you know what my Dad said to me?”

The nozzle clicked off and stopped pumping gas on its own but Gentry didn’t make a move for it. He listened to Lou with his head turned to the side.

“What’d he say?” said Gentry.

“He said Louis, this dog coulda killed your brother and we did the right thing by getting him first. It was painful, yeah, but how do you think your brother feels?”

“That story is pretty fucked up.”

“What’d I tell you?” He grinned. “Oh shit,” said Lou looking back to the station and noticing a customer waiting at the counter. “I gotta go man. Don’t worry about the gas Gentry. I’ll just tell my boss it was a drive-off and I didn’t catch the plates.” Lou reached out and shook Gentry’s hand and ran back to the station pulling his jeans up as he went.

Related posts:

1. Shake Rattle & Read and the Uptown Story