Thomas Pynchon’s newest hit the bookstores a week ago. Penguin Press’s description:
Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon — private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog
It’s been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.
In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there… or… if you were there, then you… or, wait, is it…
Here’s the trailer — narrated by Pynchon himself (but don’t expect to see him!):
(“Twenty-seven ninety-fi— Twenty-seven ninety-five? That used to be, like, three weeks of groceries, man. What year is this again?” Ha!)
There’s even a Wiki set up — and active! — for the new book already.
At Amazon, they’ve got a listing (“Exclusive!”) of the soundtrack Pynchon himself supposedly chose for the book, including:
- “Bang Bang” by The Bonzo Dog Band
- “Can’t Buy Me Love” by The Beatles
- “Desafinado” by Stan Getz & Astrud Gilberto, with Charlie Byrd
- Elusive Butterfly by Bob Lind
- “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra
- “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys
- The Greatest Hits of Tommy James and The Shondells
- “Happy Trails to You” by Roy Rogers
- “Help Me, Rhonda” by The Beach Boys
- “Interstellar Overdrive” by Pink Floyd
- “It Never Entered My Mind” by Andrea Marcovicci
- “Motion by the Ocean” by The Boards
- “People Are Strange (When You’re a Stranger)” by The Doors
- “Quentin’s Theme” (Theme Song from “Dark Shadows”) performed by Charles Randolph Grean Sounde
- “Something Happened to Me Yesterday” by The Rolling Stones
- “Sugar Sugar” by The Archies
- “Surfin’ Bird” by The Trashmen
- “Telstar” by The Tornados
- “Tequila” by The Champs
- “There’s No Business Like Show Business” by Ethel Merman
- “Volare” by Domenico Modugno
- “Wabash Cannonball” by Roy Acuff & His Crazy Tennesseans
“Wipeout” by The Surfaris - “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by The Beach Boys
- “Yummy Yummy Yummy” performed by Ohio Express
Amazon provides links from most of these songs to MP3 previews/downloads and/or pages of information about the artists or songs. But there are also a number of unlinked ringers in the list — tunes which I would be very surprised to find on any real playlist. Tunes like:
- “Just the Lasagna (Semi-Bossa Nova)” by Carmine & the Cal-Zones
- “Skyful of Hearts” performed by Larry “Doc” Sportello
- “Soul Gidget” by Meatball Flag
Pynchon’s in his 70s now; I wonder how long he can keep this up? In any case –for its length, fewer than 400 pages (versus hundreds more for nearly all his other titles) if for no other reason — if you’ve postponed reading anything by the guy, this might be the one to start you off. It’s not likely to be dull.
Update: A couple more items (for now; wouldn’t be surprised to find more later)…
First, Wired has put up an interactive Google Map of Los Angeles-area sites which figure in Pynchon’s work — Inherent Vice and others. And by “interactive” I don’t mean just the usual zoom-and-slide Google Maps controls: you can actually make additions yourself, if you’re suitably well-informed and/or obsessive. (Wired‘s capsule summary of the book, by the way: “The Big Lebowski meets The Big Sleep.”)
Second, the Wall Street Journal‘s “Speakeasy” blog has confirmed that it is indeed Pynchon himself doing the voiceover. They hired a voice-recognition expert, and armed with his affirmative response managed to wrench a confession out of the Penguin Press PR folks. Ah, but is it possible their “expert” is maybe a wishful-thinking Pynchon fan? Nah:
We should point out [voice-recognition guy] Primeau is an unbiased witness, having never read Pynchon (“I don’t know this guy but it looks like he has some history as an author,” he said). Nevertheless, if he hasn’t been taken by the man’s work, Primeau is intrigued by his voice, which he describes as “a tobacco-driven soft rasp.”
It sounds really cool!
Remember when all writers had to do was write a book? And you could find out about new books from the newspaper, or sometimes TV, and mostly from friends and family who read them or heard of them from their friends and families? OR, you found out about books by wandering the book aisles in grocery stores, drug stores or just plain ol’ bookstores?
Now writers have soundtracks and Amazon tricks and Twitter tweets and MySpace and Facebook pages and do a lot of their own publicizing and … wait, I’m off topic.
Yeah, those were the days.
Sounds like a great book though. I LOVE noir!
Will you still speak to me if I say I’ve never read a Thomas Pynchon novel? Not for any particular reason. Just haven’t yet.
Haven’t read Pynchon here either. Bad reader! Bad!
I like this recaptcha: night gables
DarcKnyt: I love noir, too. (The Missus has been gracious enough to get me two boxed sets of noir films. Nothing gets the blood racing like starkly contrasting Gothic shadows in black-and-white, eh?)
That said, and without having read any of this book yet, I’d probably advise that you not take the “noir” shorthand too literally. Pynchon is a prankster by nature (he’s “appeared” twice on The Simpsons), but he also resists classification. The son of a gun is a thinker, and when people characterize his work with words like “dense” they’re not generally referring to the typeface. A typical Pynchon book is built on a framework of comedy, but there are broad patches of deadly-serious thought-in-words about characters’ natures and histories. I’m real curious to see how straight he plays this “noir” thing.
Jules, marta: I know — in the first-hand sense of “am related to,” “have shared much time with,” etc. — a lot of voracious readers. But I have to say, I don’t think a single one of them has read anything by Pynchon. So, not to worry.
It may not be accurate to describe him as an acquired taste. It’s more (I think) that you’ve got to have a taste for him the first time you encounter him. Maybe I’ll do a general Pynchon post one of these days.
Yee-Ha! A new Pynchon and it’s under 600 pages, and it’s Noir. I can’t wait.
Gravity’s Rainbow was a literary paradigm shift for me. But it wasn’t an easy ride. I tried three times to get past the 50 page mark without any success. The damn thing just wasn’t making any sense. It was only when I tried to stop making sense out of it that I finally fell into it’s clutches.
I was lucky enough to work together with a translator friend of mine on the Norwegian version of ‘V’. She would send me these long e-mails with lists of things she didn’t understand; all the allusions that only an American would get. I ended up re-reading the book about forty times while working with her. Apparently she did a really good job of it but, even though she sent me a copy of the finished work, I couldn’t read the damn thing another time. Not in Norwegian. Sorry, Linn. One day.
I have to admit I fell out of touch with Mr. Pynchon around the time of Vineland. Don’t know if it was him or me, but that’s the way it went. When his last brick came into the library here in Oslo I picked up, weighed it in my hand and said out loud, ‘No way.’
So, it I’m most defiantly looking forward to this one.
Brian: Cracked the spine on my copy last night. :)
LOVE that story about the V translation. That was the title which introduced me to TP (in particular, I never forgot the chapter called “In Which Esther Gets a Nose Job”). Like you, I had to go after Gravity’s Rainbow several times until hitting the breakthrough moment. Read Vineland, which was okay, but Mason and Dixon has been circling in the same holding pattern that GR did.
I really should do a Pynchon post.