Pineapple Expressionism

Inherent Vice

by Thomas Pynchon

2009, Penguin Press

For an author I have never heretofore successfully read, Thomas Pynchon and I have an incredibly long relationship. The first time Thomas Pynchon and I crossed paths was during college. I had been going through a phase where things like the Pulitzer Prize called me like a siren to certain ruin.

This impulse I have towards awards and lists and bests of is one I have never been able to successfully shake; every year, I still compulsively load and re-load the Pulitzer website waiting to see what book has won the award so I can be the first to request it from the library. Part of this fascination comes from, I think, an anthropological/cultural bent I have. That is, I find it interesting why books are successful when they are and what the laudatory results have to say about the culture from where they come. Awards are a historical record of not so much taste as an idea of taste. The books chosen for these awards seem to present as evidence of the zeitgeist, if nothing else.

A perfect example of this concept is Thomas Pynchon's breakthrough novel Gravity's Rainbow. When the book was published in 1974, the jury that recommends novels to the Pulitzer board unanimously recommended Pynchon's 800-some-odd-page postmodern opus as the winner of that year's award for fiction.

The jury, which is typically small, merely recommends titles for the award, it does not bestow the award itself; this is the board's job. The board, in this case, rejected the jury's recommendation, accusing Pynchon's writing of density and obscenity. That year, no award was given.

Naturally curious about this book, I took it out from the library and labored (and I mean labored) through about a hundred of its pages of the course of several weeks. The writing was not bad, just difficult to navigate. As I have a tendency to do with significantly long works of fiction (like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest), I simply ran out of library renewals and returned it unfinished and unmotivated to check it out again.

A year or two later, Pynchon published the equally long Against the Day, which I took out from the library with the intent of doing penance for my aborted Gravity's Rainbow adventure. I took it with me to jury duty with no alternate reading material (I usually bring two books and a magazine to ensure a wealth of options) as though to force myself through its pages. After about two hundred of them, I was dismissed and long story short returned the book again unread (though my memory of those two hundred pages is not unpleasant).

Finally I discovered The Crying of Lot 49, which was significantly more manageable in size. Scared of by the alarmingly dense prose, I abandoned that too.

So it was with considerable determination to make up for past wrongs that I set down to begin and to actually finish Pynchon's new novel, which I had read in a review was "accessible".

Imagine my surprise that Pynchon, whose elliptically plotted novels I abandoned as one might a strangely antagonistic first course at a restaurant you had heard raves about, has written a funny, somewhat simple and, yes, accessible novel that is funnier, and loopier, than I thought it would (have any right to) be.

Inherent Vice is billed as a noir and it is, of sorts. The protagonist is a small-time private eye named Doc Sportello who lives a hippie's life in the fictional Gordita Beach, California in the 1970s.

The narrative revolves around, as most noirs do, a woman (in this case Doc's former flame, Shasta) who presents Doc with a case and then promptly disappears. What follows is a paranoid spiral of organized crime, crooked cops, mysterious disappearances and unlikely reappearances presented through the drug-addled filter of Doc's joint-per-page self medication.

Much of the book veers, as Doc does, off the task at hand and delves into the lives of various colorful characters (neo-Nazi Ethel Mermanites, promiscuous stewardii, various stoners) that have no real relevance to the narrative.

Pages are devoted to these characters and their charmingly inane ramblings but none of these digressions bear relevance on the plot and as such linger ambiguously in one's mind in a manner not unlike Doc's copious drug trips. One is left wondering Did that page-long summary of the Godzilla-meets-Gilligan's-Island television movie actually happen, or was that something I dreamed? for example.

I've heard the book referred to as a "psychedelic noir", which might seem to be an unfortunate pairing considering that noir plots are typically prone to digressions devoted to many topics - sex, red herrings, back story. Doc and his gang's stoner shenanigans (at one point they stare at a package of heroin because it came in a box labeled TV) distract the reader from the narrative, but fortunately provide it a great deal of its punny charm.

The action becomes cartoonishly convoluted to the point where suspension of disbelief (which was never really the point) becomes difficult, much like the similarly structured Pineapple Express or the conclusion of Spike Jonze's Adaptation. The characters grow more and more exaggerated and the action more incredible by the page until the narrative seemingly owes more to the countless noirs and cop dramas it borrows from - and their conventions - than it does any semblance of realism.

One of the more interesting passages in the book reflects on this disconnect between the simultaneously contrived and convoluted narrative and our expectations for narrative sensibility. One of Doc's friend is a regular viewer of a soap opera and summarizes the week's drama as such:

This week – as he updated Doc during lulls – Heather has just confided to Iris her suspicions about the meat loaf, including Julian’s role in switching the contents of the Tabasco bottle. Iris wasn't too surprised, of course, having for the duration of her own marriage to Julian taken turns in the kitchen, so that there remain between these bickering exes literally hundreds of culinary scores yet to be settled. Meanwhile, Vicki and Stephen are still discussing who still owes who five dollars from a pizza delivery weeks ago, in which the dog, Eugene, somehow figures as a key element.

Our expectations of the soap opera are inverted (through either the prism of Doc's stoner haze or the deus-ex-machinations of Pynchon) to present an overwrought portrait of mundane realism.

This passage is, of course, quite funny, but it gets at what I suspect one of Pynchon's motivations is. Inherent Vice seems to poke fun at narrativity and at our desire for fiction to be realistic. By playing with our structural expectations (of plotting, of coherence), Pynchon seems to be emphasizing their relative pointlessness.

Much later in the novel, there is another reference to soap operas as Doc's parents try marijuana for the first time and relate their experience back to their son:

“Well," [his mother says,] "there’s this soap we watch, Another World? but somehow we couldn’t recognize any of the characters, even though we’ve been following them every day, I mean it was still Alice and Rachel and that Ada whom I haven’t trusted since A Summer Place [1959] and everybody, their faces were the same, but the tings they were talking about all meant something different somehow, and meantime I was also having trouble with the colors on the set, and then Oriole brought in chocolate chip cookies and we started eating and couldn’t stop with those...”

It seems to me that Pynchon's fiction acts in much the same way that marijuana does for Doc's parents. That is, Pynchon twists traditional fictional conventions through the carnivalesque funhouse-mirror of his narrative so that characters and themes and setting mean something different, show something different, than they did when we began.

Pynchon's narrative serves, much like expressionistic painting, to distort forms, flatten realistic perspectives and paint the world in, figuratively speaking, broad strokes and bold colors. Expressionism celebrates the drunken, chaotic, ecstatic capabilities of art, as opposed to the fastidiously and fussily ordered, composed, and realistic modes of art.

In stripping his reader of his narrative crutches and thoroughly subverting expectations of character and plot, Pynchon leaves his reader with nothing but the purest enjoyment of a pulpy plot and his alternately zany and dry wit. A wit that casts its gleeful and caustic gaze on the things that drive our everyday activities, whether they be the vicarious dramas of daytime television or the pleasant lulls of afternoons spent on the beach.

Wordless World

In the Valley of Kings: Stories
by Terrence Holt
2009, W.W. Norton & Company



Terrence Holt is a doctor as well as a writer. Additionally, he has apparently taught literature (one of his students was last year's Pulitzer winner, Junot Diaz whose Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a really great book).

I'm not sure what it is that I find so appealing about the mixture of medicine and fiction, but after reading the above facts in the Sunday New York Times Book Review I was compelled to check this book out.

In the Valley of Kings is comprised of eight curiously powerful short stories, only one of which is concerned with the practice of medicine (unlike Chris Adrian, another writer/doctor whose work is stronger tied to the emergency rooms and pediatric wards that doubtlessly fill his day). The stories, instead focus in most cases on science fiction which was a surprising discovery as the book progressed.

Holt's stories are stripped down to the barest elements of fiction: there is a rudimentary plot, at least (and in some cases no more than) one character and a bewitchingly mysterious and often times transformative setting.

The one story that centers around medicine is the story of a plague that strikes the world in which to gaze upon or utter a particular word is doom oneself to die (bringing to mind The Ring with its killer videotape plotline). This story, which appears first in the collection, sets appropriately the primary theme that seems to course throughout the book: the conflict between existence and literature.

Or, to put it more accurately, the inability of language to truly capture the essential quandary of existence. To what extent does a word, such as the deadly word of the initial story, bear any relation to the object it represents? At one point does the signifier become the signified? Holt's inquiries into this matter do not take the form of dense semiotic exploration but rather delicately present men who are variously deprived of and dependent on language to make sense of their lives.


Each of these stories is written in 1st person perspective and, with perhaps only one exception, the narrators are specifically the scribes of their stories and make mention of the tools with and method by which they record their tales. "Eurydike", for example, is narrated on a spaceship computer by a crazed astronaut who updates his story as it progresses. Another, "In the Valley of Kings", is written on parchment in blood.

Most of the characters in these stories are men removed to some extent from society. One story features a couple in an apocalyptic landscape populated more by the bodies of suicides than living people. One features an archaeologist making his way alone through a tomb. Two stories take place on a spaceship where the narrator is the sole occupant.

This element of isolation is key in bringing the theme of language in contrast to existence to life. The characters must be alone so as to more fully ponder their existence. Language as a means to communicate (i.e. with other people) is not of concern here; Holt writes about language as a means to express (in this case, to express the fundamentals of consciousness and to justify ourselves with the natural world).

In the aforementioned story "Eurydike", a character is recovering throughout the narrative from some sort of accident which has deprived him of the ability to attach words to the objects around him. He flounders for the correct vocabulary and is amazed how each new word he recovers demystifies the object for which the word was sought.

The character struggles to make sense of his environment despite his inadequate vocabulary. And yet the world continues to exist around him. His failure to attach a verbalized sign for objects does not preclude their existence.

In "In the Valley of Kings" an academic struggles to make sense of hieroglyphics, attempting to intuit meaning from symbols fruitlessly. Holt's narrator describes his inability to read a scroll.

"There are many terms I don't recognize. This is not uncommon in hieroglyphics: many signs were invented as needed. But in this scroll the normal alphabet is gone - the abstract determinative is entirely absent, and I am not certain if what I read is code or gibberish."

Clearly, the glyphs do mean something, and the narrator is intrigued by their ambiguity. He wonders if it is possible that some mystical process is invoked by the words; the power of the words is unknown because their meaning is. He is obsessed by this possibility and he forges through the tomb waiting to discover the power of the glyphs and what otherworldly concepts they might give name to.

Later in the novella, it is suggested that our relationship with language is one defined by a similar madness to categorize and explain the world. The academic is told by an expert in hieroglyphics,

"They never stopped, you see. You must know something of that yourself. They never stopped adding in. Any time they thought of anything new, they simply reached into the air and added on another glyph. It's worse than chaos... It's infinity."

Holt's subject, then, is the relation between the world we live in and the fervor with which we create language we use to define the world, to make sense of it. The way we depend on language for that definition.

Ultimately, though, we are no better than his astronaut characters, left without the luxury of language or familiar, easy meanings, to contemplate the vastness of the universe outside our space shuttles (for which, appropriately, there are few adequate words) and within our souls (for which, like the Egyptians, there are perhaps too many).

It is fitting that the collection ends with a story called "Apocalypse" and a character whose living is made as an editor of a science magazine. The editor fails to establish a connection between the written word, in this case the journalism regarding climate change, with the physical world he inhabits, the climate itself. He tries to express this disjunction with, ironically, the written word. He writes:

"[P]art of me always believed that the world written up in journals was imaginary...This world - the one we live in - was real, and there could be no connection"

And later he remarks,

"[As I write] this paragraph[,] the words clatter emptily about the page."

The natural world exists despite the terms we call it by. We ourselves exist, as Dan Chaon wrote in Await Your Reply, despite the names we call ourselves by.

Humans struggle to amass the vocabulary required to capture the complexity of existence, to formulate the questions that nag our souls, to name the world around us and make it more finite. But the world perseveres despite our floundering attempts to do so, as do our souls.

Language, it would turn out, is a pale facsimile of existence. Or so it would seem, anyway, until Terrence Holt so eloquently, painstakingly explores that quandary through (what else?) the written word.