Iconoclasts

Donald Barthelme

It was never clear why Donald Barthelme chose to re-publish his stories in collected, compendium editions, first in Sixty Stories and then in Forty Stories. The very titles of these books obscured the playful and distinctive signposts provided by the original volumes in which these stories appeared, bearing as they did such colorful, and ultimately revealing, titles as Come Back, Dr. Caligari and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts. (Some of the later titles—City Life, Sadness—were more elegantly succinct, but they also signified a thematic association among the included stories that is lost, and to some degree impoverishes the reader’s response, when the stories are reprinted in an omnibus form.) More importantly, what encountering Barthelme’s fiction in these collected volumes, the latest of which, Flying to America, includes all of the stories not found in the first two, really threatens to de-emphasize—or even eliminate—is the more carefully calibrated iconoclasm, the redoubled assault on convention, that one experiences when reading Barthelme’s stories in their original book-bound form.

Presumably, Barthelme reprinted in Sixty Stories the stories he most wanted to highlight. To this extent, these must have been what Barthelme (or Barthelme and his editor) considered the “best” of what is now apparently his 145 short stories (forty-five are included in Flying to America). Likewise, it must be presumed that the 40 stories of the second volume were second-tier stories of a sort, while the remainder as collected in this new volume unfortunately must be counted as Barthelme’s least essential efforts. If this is not the impression that Barthelme, and now the editor of Flying to America, Kim Herzinger, wanted to convey, it nevertheless does seem an unavoidable consequence of these publishing decisions. As I read the stories in Flying to America, some of them are indeed failed experiments, others simply not fully realized (always a potential hazard with short fiction as inveterately risk-taking as Barthelme’s). But others are Barthelme stories I would not want to be without—”Edward and Pia,” “The Big Broadcast of 1938″—and it seems to me a very unhappy fate for these stories that they in effect remain buried in a volume that is likely to be regarded, should these omnibus collections become the only point of access to his work, as containing Barthelme’s least substantial pieces.

Certainly not all of the stories to be found in either Sixty Stories or Forty Stories are gems either, although this is more a function of Barthelme’s relentlessly experimental approach than it is a judgment on his skills as a writer. Though there is something identifiably Barthelmean in all of his stories—a voice, a familiarity with many different cultural domains, a comedian’s sense of timing and effect—what characterizes his body of work as a whole is an always adventurous determination to reconceive the form and the discursive assumptions of the short story as inherited by mid 20th-century writers. Rarely does Barthelme stick to a previously employed method or device (with the possible exception of the “dialogue” stories—stories written entirely in dialogue—that Barthelme wrote throughout his career but especially in the mid-to-late ’70s). One of the pleasures of reading Barthelme’s stories as they appeared, both in The New Yorker and in the subsequent books, was anticipating what new challenge to our assumptions about the nature of the short story Barthelme would offer. Many of these stories were indeed among the most innovative works of fiction in a period marked by a renewal of innovation by American fiction writers, but inevitably Barthelme’s insistent experimentalism would provide hits and misses, failed experiments as well as transformative triumphs.

The opportunity to witness this process of experimentation with the conventions of fiction, however, may be lost to future Barthelme readers (except for those intrepid few who resolve to recreate the process as adequately as possible by tracing it through the collected volumes, reading each story in order of publication). These readers will encounter stories from every period in Barthelme’s writing career indiscriminately mixed together, many of them no doubt still provoking the surprise and wonder that their original readers experienced, but others inevitably more disappointing, their strangeness less well-tempered absent the context provided both by the original volumes and by the ongoing course of his development as a writer. For some, no doubt, focusing attention on an author’s most successful work would seem only the most sensible way to sample that author, but in Barthelme’s case it is arguably at least as important to gain a broader perspective on the direction in which his fiction sought out its own possibilities.

Regrettably, a book like Flying to America allows neither for the presentation of Barthelme’s lasting work nor for a survey of his experimental evolution. The 45 stories are, as far as I can tell, arranged according to no particular view of the trajectory of his career; nor is any particular sense of thematic or formal progression evident. (Herzinger’s preface provides a few brief and very general remarks about the “aesthetic and cultural issues that engaged Barthelme throughout his writing career,” but otherwise does not explain why we are reading the stories in the order in which they’re re-presented.) Indeed, the very first story in Barthelme’s very first book, “Florence Green Is 81,” appears as the next-to-last selection in Flying to America, immediately prior to “Tickets,” the last of his stories to be published in The New Yorker (in 1989), a choice that does not seem to reflect much concern for an informed consideration of Barthelme’s work. “Florence Green” is not one of Barthelme’s very best stories, but anyone who really wants to understand where Barthelme started as a published writer should in fact begin with this story. Given “Florence Green’s” place as the first story of Barthelme’s first collection, readers ought to be able to evaluate its influences and preoccupations as the keynote among Barthelme’s stories it actually is, not as a disassociated story hidden at the end of a third-string collected volume.

And “Florence Green is 81″ does provide significant insight into Barthelme’s clearly unconventional brand of fiction. In a book (Come Back, Dr. Caligari) that conspicuously heralds an approach to fiction radically different from that which had dominated American fiction in the 1950s, “Florence Green Is 81″ offers us a writer uninterested in the usual methods of short story composition—methods emphasizing narrative continuity, consistency of character, thematic coherence, etc.—and much interested in alternatives to those methods. In its refusal to “develop,” to create characters whose actions make “sense” according to ordinary protocols of logic, it might be said that the story simply subverts inherited story conventions, settling for a kind of reflexive surrealism. But the story has its own logic, its own set of compositional principles that make it something other than a mashup of existing storytelling strategies: repetition of phrases, names, and images in constantly revised contexts, the juxtaposition of such images and phrases in startling ways, often producing wildly funny effects. “Florence Green Is 81″ introduces us to a writer who wants to challenge our complacent reading habits, but whose work will also continue to be “entertaining” in its own way, even if as readers we must always allow for an aesthetics of surprise and reinvention.

Above all, perhaps, “Florence Green” introduces us to a narrative voice that will remain identifiable across Barthelme’s stories, even as it is employed to fragment narrative and convey a world often held together only by the narrator’s conviction that its various elements actually do belong together.

    Dinner with Florence Green. The old babe is on a kick tonight: I want to go to some other country, she announces. Everyone wonders what this can mean. But Florence says nothing more: no explanation, no elaboration, after a satisfied look around the table bang! she is asleep again. The girl at Florence’s right is new here and does not understand. I give her an ingratiating look (a look that says, “There is nothing to worry about, I will explain everything in the privacy of my quarters Kathleen”). Lentils vegetate in the depths of the fourth principal river of the world, the Ob, in Siberia, 3200 miles. We are talking about Quemoy and Matsu. “It’s a matter of leading from strength. What is the strongest possible move on our part? To deny them the islands even though the islands are worthless in themselves.” Baskerville, a sophomore at the Famous Writers School in Westport, Connecticut, which he attends with the object of becoming a famous writer, is making his excited notes. The new girl’s boobies are like my secretary’s knees, very prominent and irritating. Florence began the evening by saying, grandly, “the upstairs bathroom leaks you know.” What does Herman Kahn think about Quemoy and Matsu? I can’t remember, I can’t remember . . .

Not only does Flying to America contribute to a distortion of Barthelme’s body of work by obscuring the significance of a story like “Florence Green Is 81″; it further works to erase Barthelme’s achievement as it was embodied in his original books by gathering so many of the stories published in the earliest of those books (by my count, nine from Caligari alone). Of course, this was not per se an editorial decision on Herzinger’s part, bequeathed as she was with all of the leftovers not already included in the first two omnibus volumes. Nevertheless, the effect is the same. Readers curious enough about the provenance of the stories in this book to scan the “Notes” section can’t help but wonder whether Caligari or Unspeakable Practices might just have been apprentice work, interesting in an archival sense but finally dispensable, when in fact each still provides a bracing reading experience over 40 years after they first appeared and contains such classic Barthelme stories as “Me and Miss Mandible,” “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph,” “A Shower of Gold,” “The Indian Uprising,” “The Balloon,” and “Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning.” The man who wrote these stories was already in full possession of his literary powers, but future readers of Barthelme will have a much diminished appreciation of this fact if Caligari, Unspeakable Practices, and City Life are not available, or at least if some future collected edition of Barthelme’s fiction does not maintain these books’ complete contents as its organizing principle.

Flying to America does, on the other hand, collect a few of Barthelme’s stories that have never before appeared in book form (in some cases, never before published), and to that extent does perform a useful service to Barthelme’s readers. It allows us to read both what the editor identifies as Barthelme’s first published story, “Pages from the Annual Report,” and what may be his final story, “Pandemonium.” (Although, again the reasons for their placement in the book, as nos. 24 and 33, respectively, are not in any way clear.) If anything, “Pages” demonstrates that Barthelme’s peculiarly angled vision was fully focused when he began publishing short fiction, as it is a recognizably Barthelmean portrayal of the essential absurdity of post-World War II American life that could easily have been included in Come Back, Dr. Caligari. “Pandemonium” shares the earlier story’s setting in a white collar workplace, but unfortunately this story doesn’t really seem much of an advance beyond the kind of skewed satire at which “Pages” already shows Barthelme to be especially adept. Perhaps if “Pandemonium,” as the editor suggests, was left incomplete, Barthelme might still have made something more distinctive of it; as it is, the story testifies to a continuity in Barthelme’s career that needs to be acknowledged, although ultimately Flying to America provides little or no context or critical framework within which to profitably consider the interplay of continuity and innovation in Barthelme’s work.

The packaging of the fiction of a writer like Donald Barthelme in such an assortment as Flying to America raises important questions, not just about perceptions of Barthelme’s career as a short story writer but also perceptions of the status of short stories in general. Because Barthelme’s achievement as a writer of fiction is primarily as an author of short stories, his example is particularly resonant, but the problem of wrenching the work out of meaningful context, of isolating individual stories without reference to other work, or to the enabling assumptions the author brings to the work, is almost always present in the way our literary culture regards the short story. Stories are published in an essentially haphazard fashion, depending entirely on what a particular publication (generally disconnected from all other such publications) find “suitable” to its own editorial tastes. By and large, the publication of short stories is considered a preliminary step some writers must take to become a credentialed author, usually prior to going on to write a novel (when real recognition will occur) or as something established writers do as a kind of respite from or supplement to writing novels. Thus writers whose most representative work is in short fiction have an inherently more difficult time getting their work judged appropriately. It would seem that even as important a postwar American writer as Donald Barthelme ultimately might not be read in the way—with the right kind of attention—his fiction deserves.

In his introduction to Not-Knowing, a previous collection of Barthelme’s nonfiction (also edited by Kim Herzinger), John Barth refers to that book, as well as the “story-volume” that will become Flying to America, as a “booksworth of encores,” suggesting these volumes are simply intermediary repackagings that will in turn lead readers “back and back again to the feast whereof these are end-courses: back to Come Back, Dr Caligari, to Unspeakable Practices, to Snow White and City Life, and the rest.” If the collected versions of Barthelme’s stories do indeed act merely as “end-courses” that for now keep his work in the literary public’s awareness in the years following his death, yielding eventually back to the books both Barth and I think are the core of Barthelme’s accomplishment, then the publication of Flying to America will have done little harm and arguably some good. But I fear, given the economics of American publishing, that the original books will not be readily available and that Barthelme will be known to future readers mostly through the assembled miscellanies—perhaps only by Sixty Stories. This will be a sad (and avoidable) injustice to a great writer.

 

Although Donald Barthelme is not finally a “difficult” writer–”strange” or “disorienting”  might be words that would apply–his fiction does surely pose some challenges to a novice  reader. Fabular without quite becoming fables, satirical without really being definable as satire, presenting a skewed and inside-out view of reality without exactly qualifying as surrealism, his  stories are on the one hand disarmingly entertaining, but on the other the source of their appeal  must seem obscure at first.

Their verbal humor is palpable enough, but since the context of situation, character, or plot often remains elusive, even deliberately ambiguous and distorted, it is finally not always clear why a given story should be so satisfying.  If only for this reason, readers would be well-advised to begin reading Barthelme not through one of the omnibus anthologies but by beginning literally with his first book, Come Back, Dr. Caligari. This book contains fewer of Barthelme’s  best-known, most anthologized stories (although “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph” and “A Shower  of Gold” have to rank with his best), but taken together they introduce his signature techniques  and effects and form a well-integrated, if off-kilter, whole. Indeed, almost all of Barthelme’s books formed such integrated contexts, and almost all of Barthelme’s stories provide the most resonant reading experience when considered in their original context.

Among the more sheerly amusing stories in Caligari has to be “Me and Miss Mandible,” but this story also warrants closer attention to those qualities that inform most of Barthelme’s fiction, however much his later stories become more intricate and even more removed from the conventions of character development and narrative logic, as well as most of the other elements traditionally associated with the short story as a form.  “Me and Miss Mandible” is likely to attract most readers’ attention immediately, given its outrageous premise. A 35-year-old man has been sent back to grade school for “reeducation” due to his failure to adapt himself satisfactorily to adult life: “a ruined marriage, a ruined adjusting career, a grim interlude in the Army when I was almost not a person,” as the man, who narrates his own story, diary-form, eventually sums up his failures. The man begins the story by noting that “Miss Mandible wants to make love to me but she hesitates because I am officially a child; I am, according to the records, according to the gradebook on her desk, according to the card index in the principal’s office, eleven years old.”

If we suspect that Miss Mandible and her student will act on their adult attraction (“I know very well what to do with Miss Mandible if she ever makes up her mind,” the man tells us), our suspicions prove correct, and the story holds our attention in part through the rather basic device of encouraging us to wonder, “what will happen next?”.  But the story also works through the incongruities implicit in the situation and in the characters’ response to it. The narrator seems aware of the peculiarity of his situation, although not enough to declare it to anyone. Miss Mandible and the children, however, treat the narrator as if he is indeed an eleven-year-old boy (Miss Mandible nevertheless obviously sensing something is wrong). The effect is humorous but also potentially disturbing–does Miss Mandible really know this student is a grown man, or is she having inappropriate feelings for a student?

Perhaps we could say that in this story Barthelme is working in a vein of American absurdism, but it is an absurdism in which the characters proceed as if the absurd was normal, or  perhaps as if adherence to “normal” routines prevents the perception of a lurking absurdity.  Although to an extent the absurdism of a story like “Me and Miss Mandible” might be analogous  to that of, say, Catch-22 (published at about the same time), it and Barthelme’s subsequent work  is less reliant on the joke as a structural principle and is closer to a variety of  what John Barth called “irrealism,” an approach that, in Barthelme’s case, simply  disregards “realism,” as well as the notion there is some stable version of “reality” it is the fiction  writer’s job to capture.

What most truly unifies “Me and Miss Mandible” is finally the dazed but intrepid voice  of the narrator surreptitiously recording his experience. While the ironies and absurdities ongoing around him are obvious enough, he himself does not view what is happening to him from an ironic perspective. Such is also typically the case in Barthelme’s later short fiction: “voice” dominates, and although the stories are replete with what has been called postmodern irony (they are perhaps in some ways the very definition of postmodern irony), the narrative voice is not itself the source of such irony. (Everything the narrator of “The Balloon” says, for example, could and should be taken as utterly sincere, even if the situation, the “plot,” is manifestly irreal.) The resulting tension between voice and event helps produce the “postmodern” comedy of Barthelme’s fiction, and, among its other virtues, “Me and Miss Mandible” presents us with an initial instance of his characteristic manner.

John Hawkes

In a recent interview, Ben Marcus resisted being called an "experimental writer," asking rather impatiently, "Does anyone self-identify as experimental? Anyone?" Apparently Marcus is not much aware of his predecessor, John Hawkes, who once told an interviewer, "Of course I think of myself as an experimental writer," regretting only that "the term 'experimental' has been used so often by reviewers as a pejorative label intended to dismiss as eccentric or private or excessively difficult the work in question." Marcus seemed to be decrying the expectation that he should always be sufficiently experimental, but Hawkes never wavered in his determination to challenge entrenched habits and complacent practices in both the writing and reading of fiction. In the same interview, he asserted that "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained." Hawkes endeavored throughout his career as a writer to validate this assumption, producing a series of novels that do indeed discard the "familiar ways of thinking" and attempt to substitute for them a "totality of vision or structure."

By both articulating a commitment to "experimental fiction" and putting into practice a coherent conception of what such fiction should do, John Hawkes established himself as perhaps the most essential experimental writer in the postwar period, perhaps in all of American literature. Furthermore, his novels remain as thematically provocative and aesthetically fresh as they were when published — Hawkes's first novel, The Cannibal, was published in 1949, while his final novel, Sweet William, was published in 1993, five years before his death at the age of 72. Unfortunately, these novels have largely faded from literary-cultural consciousness, as has Hawkes himself, perhaps precisely because he did make such an effort to create radically varied works, each novel taking experimental fiction in a somewhat different direction (in some cases even critiquing the previous novel) so that no one work can really be identified as a "typical" Hawkes novel — all of them are typical. While any one of the novels provides its own rich and unique experience, to "get" Hawkes might require reading all of them, and perhaps that is more effort than most readers want to make.

However, those readers who are willing to devote some time to Hawkes's work, and to judge the novels on their own terms — since Hawkes himself devoted much effort to establishing those terms — would surely find it a rewarding, if at times also rather disquieting, experience. And although appreciation of Hawkes's achievement can't finally rest in singling out his "best" or most "representative" novel, it is possible to focus first on a particularly dynamic period in Hawkes's career, a period in which Hawkes produced several novels that both illustrate his inveterate experimentation and stand on their own as satisfying works of literary art. The set of novels beginning with The Lime Twig (1961) and including Second Skin (1964), The Blood Oranges (1971), and Travesty (1976) could serve as the foundation of a revival of interest in Hawkes's fiction. Each of them succeeds in redeeming the ambitions of experimental fiction, while, together, they are as impressive a group of books as any written by a postwar writer.

Not only is The Lime Twig the first in this succession of novels, it is also probably the first more or less "accessible" novel Hawkes published. His previous books were surrealistic parables that, like all of Hawkes's fictions, feature a sharp, evocative prose emphasizing focused, vivid, visual imagery and employ an essentially poetic structure to embody the "totality of vision." These early novels, however, are especially unconcerned to resolve their images and events into a rationally linear narrative. The surrealism is startling, suggestive, and ultimately coherent to the vision presented, but readers who want this vision translated into aesthetically familiar terms will likely be (and were) disappointed by Charivari, The Cannibal, The Goose on the Grave, and The Owl. The Beetle Leg (1952), on the other hand, more directly anticipates The Lime Twig by using as its narrative scaffolding a parody of genre fiction — in this case, the Western — and by focusing on somewhat more "lifelike" characters and setting, however much both are distorted by the "vision" controlling the parody. The Beetle Leg teases us with the prospect of narrative transparency, with the possibility the novel's scenes and images will come together as part of a conventionally intelligible formal structure, but while it by no means lacks structure, it finally won't be revealed through passive reading, the expectation on the reader's part that "meaning" will be communicated by already established literary strategies.

The Lime Twig calls more on "established" strategies than The Beetle Leg, although it would still be a mistake to expect that the effect of those strategies is a reassuring return to a familiar aesthetic order. In this novel, Hawkes once again employs genre parody, this time of the crime thriller, but The Lime Twig reinforces few if any of the formal or thematic assumptions of the genre. Instead, it explodes those assumptions, turning them back on the reader. As Donald Greiner, who has perhaps offered the most insightful consideration of Hawkes's work in his book Comic Terror, puts it, "All of the violence, sadism, and general sordidness which we associate with the world of detective fiction are used and mocked" even as Hawkes further "suggests that while outwardly repelled, we subconsciously long for the thrills of violence and possible death which we normally experience vicariously while reading a detective novel." The Lime Twig offers the reader enough of the recognizable elements of character and plot associated with crime fiction to sustain the possibility it might resolve itself into a conventional "good read," but along the way it presents an even more violent and disturbing account of the criminal milieu it portrays than the typical crime novel, and ultimately provokes a kind of disgust with the notion that stories of murder and brutality would be the basis of a "good" read in the first place.

This novel prominently portrays the interaction between innocence and corruption that will also animate the series of novels to follow. It focuses on an ordinary, bored English couple who become involved with gangsters planning to steal a prize-winning racehorse. By the end of the novel, two of the main characters have been murdered, including the wife, who is savagely beaten first. Hawkes does not merely incorporate these events as plot points advancing a crime narrative, however, but dwells on them, in effect slows down the narrative to render them more starkly. The beating of Margaret Banks is particularly discomfiting:

    His arm went up quivering, over his head with the truncheon falling back, and came down hard and solid as a length of cold fat stripped from a pig, and the truncheon beat into her just above the knee; then into the flesh of her mid-thigh; then on her hips; and on the tops of her legs. And each bow quicker and harder than the last, until the strokes went wild and he was aiming randomly at abdomen and loins, the thin fat and the flesh that was deeper, each time letting the rubber lie where it landed then drawing the length of it across stomach or pit of stomach or hip before raising it to the air once more and swinging it down. It made a sound like a dead bird falling to empty field. Once he stopped to increase the volume of the radio, but returned to the bedside, shuffling, squinting down at her, his mouth a separate organ paralyzed in the lower part of his face, and paused deceptively and then made a rapid swing at her, a feint and then the loudest blow of all so swiftly that she could not gasp. When he finally stopped for good she was bleeding, but not from any wound she could see.

The aftermath of the beating is prolonged over several more pages, before Margaret is finally killed by her assailant, Thick, an underling who has been assigned the task in response to her husband Michael's dalliance with the top gangster's moll, Sybilline. It is a scene like this, no doubt, that gained Hawkes some notoriety as a writer focused on sex and violence, but Hawkes's preoccupation with violence is not merely sensational. As Leslie Fiedler put it in his introduction to The Lime Twig, Hawkes "finally avoids the treacherous lucidity of the ordinary shocker, the kind of clarity intended to assure a reader that the violence he relives destroys only certain characters in a book, not the fabric of the world he inhabits. In a culture where even terror has been so vulgarized by mass entertainers that we can scarcely believe in it any longer, we hunger to be persuaded that, after all, it really counts. For unless the horror we live is real, there is no point to our lives; and it is to writers like Hawkes that we turn from the wholesale slaughter on T.V. to be convinced of the reality of what we most fear."

The innocence that Michael and Margaret Banks must lose is an innocence of the consequences of their drive for a more exciting life, consequences toward which they are perhaps willfully innocent and the reality of which they are subsequently made horribly aware. As readers, we too are deprived of our innocence in reading The Lime Twig, our own willful innocence about the reality of violence and about the implications of our fascination with it as portrayed in fictionalized forms. The death of Margaret Banks shocks us into reflecting on the attraction of violence-driven narratives — if we don't simply turn away from it as intolerably threatening to that assurance that the violence we confront "destroys only certain characters in a book, not the fabric of the world" to which we must return.

The Lime Twig features two additional structural devices that mark this novel as a significant development in Hawkes's career and specifically in his ongoing effort to overturn the "familiar ways of thinking about fiction." The novel begins with an excerpt from the racing column of "Sydney Slyter," who similarly introduces each chapter with his observations on the racing scene. In some ways his presence in the novel acts as a kind of chorus commenting on the events, while in others he seems a stand-in of sorts for the author, adding a metafictional level to the narrative design (really the only time in Hawkes's fiction that such an effect is created explicitly — Hawkes could be called "postmodern" in his assumptions about form, especially in his use of parody and other essentially comic aesthetic strategies, however mixed with horror, but he is not a metafictionist). But really the most noteworthy role Sydney Slyter plays is as a "voice" separate from the predominant third-person voice relating most of the rest of the narrative. However, immediately following this initial installment of "Sydney Slyter Says," another first-person account is presented to us, in this case the narrative of his life by William Hencher, a gangster ultimately responsible for tempting Michael and Margaret Banks into the horse theft scheme, who tells us how he found himself at the Banks's home, which happens to be the home Hencher once shared with his mother. Along with the interludes by Sydney Slyter, Hencher's introductory narrative represents Hawkes's first use of the first-person point of view, his first attempt to present character by employing the character's own narrative voice.

Trying out the possibilities of first-person narrative is a familiar enough practice among novelists. But in Hawkes's case this common literary experiment opened up avenues to further test the potential for point of view to produce the "totality of vision" he wanted his fiction to achieve. This focus on the radical implications of first-person narration brings immediately fruitful results in his next novel, Second Skin, a remarkably skillful and fully-executed first-person narrative that could be enjoyed simply as such. But the apparent accessibility of this novel is finally only a lure to readers, who, if following the narrative through both its stated and unstated contexts and connections, will find their perceptions of the narrator and his tale complicated in a way that only makes the novel more resonant as a literary creation. At the same time, these reversals of perception call into question the reader's efforts to arrive at a trustworthy interpretation of the story we are told — implicitly, all efforts to find stability of perspective in much of modern fiction.

Second Skin, The Blood Oranges, and Travesty together form perhaps the most thoroughgoing, radical experiment in unreliable narration in the history of fiction. (Another novel, Death, Sleep, and the Traveler, published in 1974 also participates in this collective experiment, but is a less compelling work.) On the one hand, Skipper, the middle-aged narrator of Second Skin, provides this novel, through the consistency of voice he brings, with a more obviously unified "vision" than in Hawkes's previous fiction. On the other, this surface unity is ultimately deceptive, since much of what we need to know about Skipper and the misfortune that assails him must be gathered by reading between and around the words he actually communicates. In an essay on Second Skin, Richard Yarborough contends that "the information the reader receives has been formed by two artistic consciousnesses. There is Hawkes, who ultimately retains control over, and responsibility for, the character 'Skipper' and Skipper's story; however, the events as the reader sees them have also been shaped and colored by the mind of the narrating character. Skipper himself is very much the creative artist, ordering and manipulating his materials" (Critical Essays on John Hawkes). This is, to an extent, undeniable, but the problem with calling Skipper a "creative artist" is that what his creation — his account of himself and his travails — reveals is that his "creativity" amounts to a deliberate strategy of avoiding the truth. The creative artist remains John Hawkes, whose creation of Skipper-as-narrator is "shaped" and "colored" by what he implies and conceals as much as by what he has that narrator express directly in his otherwise admittedly forceful narration.

That forcefulness is evident in the novel's very first paragraph:

    I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim, and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self.

Nothing Skipper tells us is exactly untrue, but his rhetorical exaltation and self-reinforcement mark the source of this exuberance in the profound sadness he must feel about the course his life has taken, especially in regard to the harrowing fates suffered by almost all of his loved ones: his father a suicide, his mother gone from his life very early and her whereabouts afterward mostly unknown, his alcoholic first wife also a suicide, his son-in-law, apparently a gay man, horribly beaten to death, and finally his daughter a suicide as well, an outcome Skipper tries, and fails, to prevent. The details of all of these horrific events remain more or less undisclosed in Skipper's narrative (his daughter's suicide completely so). At most we get glimpses, as in a brief scene describing Skipper's discovery of the son-in-law's bloodied corpse, as if Skipper simply cannot acknowledge the full force of the horror he has endured, only to have the return of the repressed burst into his account nevertheless.

Under these circumstances, it is hard to accept Skipper's subsequent claim he is a "man of courage," although he must feel that indeed his good cheer and his ebullient language are themselves evidence of his bravery, of his ability to not merely survive the traumas his life has inflicted but to dismiss those traumas in triumph. But the more persistent Skipper remains in his denials, the more those denials come to seem a form of willed innocence, a refusal to countenance human violence and depravity, even though his experience has surely demonstrated they are fundamental conditions of existence. This refusal influences Skipper's narrative of ongoing events as well, since he is equally reticent to report fully on what's happening to him, leaving us frequently puzzled about the turns the narrative takes.

The narrative itself is literally bifurcated, one strand concerning Skipper's stay on an island off the coast of Maine, the other, actually the true "present" of the novel, relating his life on a tropical island to which he has fled, but the majority of the narrative relates how his experience on the first island led to his retreat to the second, which is where we find him "lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped." The two islands are juxtaposed both climatologically (the first cold and harsh, the second warm and languid) and in circumstance (on the first island more misfortune befalls Skipper, while on the second comfort reigns — or so he reports), but beyond this thematic pairing, the trajectory by which Skipper and his daughter Cassandra find their way to the first island and subsequently by which Skipper becomes a resident of the second is only fitfully traced. The events that take place on the coastal island are also recounted in an elusive sort of way, mostly because to do otherwise would require Skipper to reveal more about the circumstances that have made Cassandra suicidal. It would force him to reveal those of his own weaknesses and evasions that help explain his behavior but that also would make the behavior of other characters toward him more comprehensible as well. Skipper's treatment at the hands of the femme fatale "Miranda," for example, would seem less unmotivated if we had a firmer sense of Skipper's habitual actions toward and behavior around women.

But then, ultimately, Hawkes wants us to find the motivations of the characters obscure if not absent. As in The Lime Twig, the violence and cruelty exhibited is all the more disturbing because motives can't be discerned and thus don't explain the outbreak and intensity of violent behavior. Hawkes's vision is of a world punctuated by violence and cruelty, and Skipper's unreliable, unforthcoming narrative is what gives this vision in Second Skin its disconcerting power. It also provides the novel Hawkes's signature merging of the appalling and the comic. Skipper's withholding of the context of events often makes his actions seem ludicrously funny. We might feel more empathy, for example, when he is enlisted in a belly-bumping contest (and actually wins it) if we could perceive more directly his discomfort with the situation, if we knew more fully why Skipper seems to invite the kind of disrespectful treatment he receives when, shortly after this event, he is pelted with snowballs in the parking lot. But instead we can only laugh at his haplessness in such episodes, a response Skipper appears unable to anticipate.

Yet the reader doesn't finally quite disrespect or dislike Skipper, however unreliable or even unfathomable he sometimes seems. Ultimately his very unreliability can prompt us to reevaluate our response to him as narrator and protagonist. It pushes us to understand his narrative as part sublimation, part wish fulfillment and as itself evidence of the serial horror he has experienced. But if Second Skin leaves us trying to sort through our judgment of Skipper and our conclusions about his story (should we be pleased he has apparently found happiness in the paradise of the Caribbean island, or is this just more denial of reality?), we don't have to resolve our ambivalence about the narrator/protagonist of Hawkes's next novel, The Blood Oranges. Ambivalence is likely to turn to outright disdain for, or even a kind of horror of our own at, the protagonist's actions—although it is possible the narrator's performance seems so adept some readers might take his ultimately deceptive account of himself and the effects of his behavior on others at face value.

This seems to be what happened to one contemporaneous reviewer of The Blood Oranges, Roger Sale, who made the now infamous accusation that "Hawkes has always seemed to me more an unadmitted voyeur of horror than its calm delineator, but in this new novel the pretense that what is being described is horrifying is dropped, and we have only the nightmare version of a narrator unable to see how awful he is." The narrator of The Blood Oranges is Cyril, who, along with his wife, Fiona, has apparently become a semi-permanent resident of the fictional country of "Illyria" (presumably located in southern Europe). Cyril and Fiona meet a vacationing couple, Hugh and Catherine, with whom they form a sexual quadrangle. Both Cyril and Fiona are sexual opportunists who apparently have an "open" marriage in which each is encouraged to take other partners. Cyril is especially aggressive in his celebration of this arrangement, becoming a philosopher of erotic entanglement (or a "sex singer," as he fancies himself). Roger Sale seemed to believe that Hawkes is encouraging identification with Cyril, that because he simply allows Cyril to expound that philosophy without some clear signal we should question it, we are somehow disarmed of a critical response to Cyril and required to passively accept his discourse on love.

But this is surely a constricted view of the purposes of fiction and an ungenerous conclusion about both the author's intentions and the reader's role in the aesthetic exchange that characterizes the reading experience. The Blood Oranges challenges us to discard our habitual, unexamined deference to the perspectival integrity of the fiction we read, our assumption that the story can be accepted as presented. It provokes us to consider Cyril's chronicle of his and Fiona's sexual idyll as at best an exercise in self-deception that unwittingly draws in Hugh and Catherine and ends in tragedy, at worst a deliberately destructive indulgence in human exploitation that leads to an inevitable outcome: Catherine is lured into a sexual affair with Cyril she knows she will regret, while Hugh is led to fall in love with Fiona, which he resists vehemently enough that, together with his jealousy toward Cyril, it drives him to hang himself.

Hawkes to be sure does not make it easy for us to see through Cyril's self-serving rhetoric, so compelling can it often be. Here, Cyril describes one of the couple's interludes, in which they have brought another young native woman into their circle:

    But she would not stop, was unquenchable, even while I raised my eyebrows and smiled and demurred and Fiona, lovely tense barelegged Fiona, opened the widemouthed sack and passed around the cherries. No, hands laden with that suggestive fruit and mouth stuffed with cherries, lips pursed to spit out the stones, on she talked — singling out each one of us for analysis, glancing to the rest of us for confirmation of her judgment, her appreciation, her right to associate herself with our mystery, our beauty. She overlooked Hugh's missing arm, was simply not interested in his missing arm, but concentrated instead on Hugh's little black pointed beard, reached up and stroked it with fingers juice-stained and knowing. She had tousled with the horns of the largest goat, she knew that the affinities between certain men and certain animals were to be respected. She touched her bare foot to Fiona's bare foot, giggled when Fiona giggled, then swung about and exclaimed over Catherine's breasts and filled her wet hands with Catherine's hair. And then she turned to me.

Cyril's style is of a piece with Hawkes's prose style in general, as evidenced in his other novels. It is precise and controlled, even while individual sentences can be quite lengthy and incantatory. It is intensely visual, often accumulating images and detail, breaking into a figure only when to do so sharpens the image (the young woman's fingers are "knowing"). The atmosphere conjured in the passage above is one of comfort and contentment, and perhaps we are understandably not quick to judge someone who often evokes such scenes and who writes with such authority. But Cyril's narrative threatens to lull us into a kind of complicity with his own moral blindness if we don't remain wary of his charms.

It is as if Hawkes has found the most seamless way to integrate his suspicion of fiction as subject to overly "familiar" structures with his desire to create alternative structures that have aesthetic worth. In The Blood Oranges, he fashions a sleek, sinuous structure, one that is even attractive according to the norms of traditional fiction, only to bring that structure down, without necessarily appearing to do so. The pleasures that come from an appreciation of this observable structure, even the pleasures of Hawkes's own prose, are undermined for the sake of a more comprehensive pleasure, one that sees through all efforts to construct permanent aesthetic structures in works of fiction. The "totality of structure" in The Blood Oranges consists in part of its own negation, and what remains is the "vision" that the reader has helped to invoke.

For this reason, The Blood Oranges is Hawkes's most intricate and perhaps most important novel. It "abandons" the conventional novel by offering a simulated version of it, inviting the reader to assist in the experiment that reveals it as a façade. It provokes the reader to demand of fiction a more vibrant reading experience in general, and to recognize that all the conventions supposedly involved in writing "quality" fiction are also just façades that can easily be, in some cases might need to be, dismantled. In particular, The Blood Oranges exemplifies the subtle yet far-reaching possibilities in experiments with point of view, possibilities that, if anything, are taken even farther in Hawkes's 1976 novel, Travesty. If The Blood Oranges dramatizes the potential for a narrator's words to be deceiving, and for the "truth" to be outside of these words, Travesty raises the prospect that the narrator's words describe no "true" events at all, that the story is entirely the narrator's fantasy, even perhaps a delusion, making the question of narrative reliability almost infinitely unanswerable.

Travesty is narrated by a man who calls himself "Papa," and his narrative is implicitly enclosed within quotation marks, indicating ostensibly that we are to take his account as a spoken one, a monologue delivered in the presence of his daughter, Chantal, and her lover, Henri. Chantal and Henri are compelled to listen: they are passengers in a car that Papa is driving, and he informs them that he intends to crash the car into a wall. In the meantime, they must attend to his rambling explanation of how they have arrived at this moment. Or at least this is the situation as "Papa" informs us. The structure of the novel (which is brief, only 128 pages in the original hardbound edition) allows for no interaction with Chantal and Henri — Papa speaks for them — and once Papa's words are marked as provisional by their status as recitation, we can't simply take for granted that he is speaking to anyone, or that he is really speaking at all (who recorded this monologue?). Of course, all fiction relates events that are not "real," but the "story" Papa tells is so radically contingent it could just as easily be taken as an artifact of his troubled mind, and thus not real even within the fictive context.

What troubles Papa seems to be not just Henri's affair with Chantal but also his previous affair with Papa's wife, which Papa claims to have known about and tolerated. However, given the low regard in which Papa apparently holds Henri, it has now become only more evidence of his own lack of control, control which he is in the process of reasserting. Travesty thus parallels The Blood Oranges in its focus on a love quadrangle and the consequences of erotic adventurism, although in this novel Papa's response to the perceived harm of this adventurism is wildly excessive. The Blood Oranges depicts one man's destructive indifference to the effects of his actions when they don't conform to his grandiose notions. Travesty depicts one man's deliberate attempt to destroy those (including himself) whose actions have provoked him into formulating some pretty grandiose notions to explain his own final act.

Papa tells Chantal and Henri that he regards this act as embodying a strategy of "design and debris." The seemingly random debris that will be left by the final collision with the wall will also manifest the "design" that he has brought to the conception and carrying-out of his plan. He reflects on the scene:

    Well, you understand that . . . I would prefer that the remains of our crash go undiscovered, at least initially. I would prefer that these remains be left unknown to anyone and hence unexplored, untouched. In this case we have at the outset the shattering that occurs in utter darkness, then the first sunrise in which the chaos, the physical disarray, has not yet settled — bits of metal expanding, contracting, tufts of upholstery exposed to the air, an unsocketed dial impossibly squeaking in a clump of thorns — though this same baffling tangle of springs, jagged edges of steel, curves of aluminum, has already received its first coating of white frost. In the course of the first day the gasoline evaporates, the engine oil begins to fade into the earth, the broken lens of a far-flung headlight reflects the progress of the sun from a furrow in what was once a field of corn. The birds do not sing, clouds pass, the wreckage is warmed, the human remains are integral with the remains of rubber, glass, steel. A stone has lodged in the engine block, the process of rusting has begun. And then darkness, a cold wind, a shred of clothing fluttering where it is snagged on one of the doors which, quite unscathed, lies flat in the grass. And then daylight, changing temperature, a night of cold rain, the short-lived presence of a scavenging rodent. And despite all this chemistry of time, nothing has disturbed the essential integrity of our tableau of chaos, the point being that if design inevitably surrenders to debris, debris inevitably reveals its innate design.

Papa has clearly thought through the details of his projected act (almost like an artist envisioning the completed work). In fact, so completely has he laid out the "design" that emerges from the wreckage he imagines will result from that act we might indeed conclude the real design is Papa's discourse itself, bringing order to the debris littering his unsettled mind.

Numerous commentators have singled out the notion of "design and debris" as perhaps a name for the aesthetic philosophy at work not just in this novel, and not just in Hawkes's work as a whole, but in the collective practice of "postmodern" experiment in general: the existing conventions of fiction are smashed, but this smashing is itself purposeful and amid the debris a new design can be discerned. This is a compelling enough argument, but in the case of Travesty, The Blood Oranges, and Second Skin "design and debris" could be applied even more specifically to the effect of Hawkes's experiments in point of view. Hawkes so thoroughly hollows out the presumptive authority of the first-person narrative that this mode collapses of its own weight. Yet the novels still reveal an "innate design," partly to be found in the artful way that collapse is effected, through which the dominating "vision" is expressed. And while the terms of that vision are distinctive to each individual work, it is the kind of dark vision one might expect from a writer who believed that fiction should compel readers to confront the realities of human experience, not through the formulas of "realism" but through a kind of experimental writing that doesn't allow us our own usual evasions.

Ishmael Reed

Since Juice! is Ishmael Reed's first novel in almost twenty years, many of its potential readers, intrigued perhaps by its treatment of the O.J. Simpson murder trial, will probably be encountering Reed's work for the first time. Perhaps these readers are aware of him as an op-ed controversialist critical of media portrayals of African-Americans, particularly African-American men, skeptical of the achievement of African-American women writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, and a bete noire of white feminists and of the "liberal class" in general. That Reed was at one time controversial as the first, and arguably only, African-American "postmodern" writer of fiction, compared to Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme in his expression of the postmodern worldview and his disruptions of form and style, is likely at best merely an historical echo, however. Doubtless there are fewer readers now who can readily judge a new work by Ishmael Reed in the context of this earlier work and of his still-evolving career as a whole.

Those who have followed Reed's career as a writer should immediately recognize the significant differences between Juice! and the novels that initially brought attention to his unconventional fiction, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969). In consonance with the defiant, iconoclastic spirit of the period, these novels employ a kind of surrealist farce that travesties all that it encompasses, including fictional form itself. They exhibit what will become Reed's signature hallucinatory imagery—“Hairy Sam" ruling over his urban kingdom (also called Hairy Same) from his seat on a toilet in The Free-Lance Pallbearers—casual anachronism—although ostensibly a period Western, in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down characters listen to soul music and come across "old Buicks and skeletons of washing machines"—and outrageous names—Bukka Doopeyduk, Zozo Labrique, etc. They are entertaining in a deliberately zany kind of way, which on the one hand invests them with the spirit of postmodern comedy other writers of the time were venturing as an alternative to the sober realism of the 1950s, but on the other hand draws attention to the underlying racial and cultural issues more vividly than such sober realism could any longer achieve.

Even in their displacements and distortions, these two early novels maintain narrative coherence by adhering to an essentially allegorical structure through which the reader clearly is to discern a critique of American racial attitudes (on the part of both white and black characters) as manifested in the present as well as in the historical American past (the two sometimes intersect, as they will also in the later Flight to Canada (1976)). The Free-Lance Pallbearers is a coming-of-age story of sorts, tracing its protagonist's recognition of the cultural and political corruption of his immediate environment and of the futility of his own attempts to accommodate himself to this society, given its ultimate hostility to his interests and its disregard for his well-being. While to a degree Pallbearers is a parody of the coming-of-age story (Bukka Doopeyduk doesn't survive to apply the lessons he's learned apart from the way he applies them by narrating his story from the grave), Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is an out-and-out parody of the Western genre. Its protagonist, the Loop Garoo Kid, also confronts a white authority figure, the rancher Drag Gibson, although in this mock Western the rancher and the outlaw (John Wesley Hardin) are united in their racism and in their efforts to do in the Loop Garoo Kid, who has escaped a Drag-directed massacre and is hiding out in a cave in the hills.

From the cave, Loop begins practicing a form of necromancy related to voodoo, an activity or state of being Reed will later explicitly identify as "Neo-HooDooism." (In Yellow Back Radio, the Loop GarooKid is at one point called a "HooDoo cowboy.") The nature of this endeavor is suggested when we are told he performs "a tailor made micro-HooDoo mass to end 2000 years of bad news in a Bagi he had built in the corner of the cave." Although the spell is directed first of all at Drag Gibson and the town of Yellow Back Radio, the significance of Neo-HooDoo as a trope in Ishmael Reed's fiction is announced at the end of Loop's ceremony when he entreats "Black Hawk American Indian houngan of Hoo-Doo” to

open up some of these prissy orthodox minds so that they will no longer call Black People's American experience "corrupt" "perverse" and "decadent." Please show them that Booker T. and the MG's, Etta James, Johnny Ace and Bojangle tapdancing is just as beautiful as anything that happened anywhere else in the world. Teach them that anywhere people go they have experience and that all experience is art.

While the anachronism involved here is hilarious, this incantation also rather succinctly expresses the philosophy of Neo-Hoodooism  as it is further invoked in Reed's subsequent novels. "HooDoo" is the approach to both experience and art that, while most identified with the black culture of the Carribean, later imported to New Orleans, is, in Reed's version, attributable to all non-white and indigenous cultural groups in the Western hemisphere that have in one way or another resisted the wholesale incorporation of "Western" values and practices. The spirit of HooDoo thus animates the music of Booker T. and the MG's and the dance steps of Bojangles Robinson, and it affirms "Black People's American experience," which, although very "American" in the way it is shaped as a response to the conditions of these groups' encounter with Western values as embodied in the dominant culture, is finally not entirely assimilable to that culture. Ishmael Reed's fiction is both a celebration of the HooDoo aesthetic and itself an illustration of that aesthetic. Thus Reed writes novels, but, whether one finds them aesthetically satisfying or not, they are surely unlike novels written by anyone else in the way they explode expectations of what novels should be like.

Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974) are Reed's most thorough treatments of Neo-HooDooism, through the figure of Papa LaBas, portrayed as the most explicit example of what one critic has called a "HooDoo trickster." According to James Lindroth, the trickster "is driven by a mocking wit that subverts white authority and destroys white illusions of superiority while simultaneously promoting numerous value-laden symbols of black culture." ("Images of Subversion: Ishmael Reed and the HooDoo Trickster.") In Mumbo Jumbo, probably Reed's most intricate, resonant novel, the essence of HooDoo is evoked in "Jes Grew," a kind of spiritual distillation of HooDooism that first manifested itself in a 19th century New Orleans dance but that has its origins in ancient Egypt. Jes Grew has unmoored itself and inhabited the work of other artists and musicians. It encourages emotional release, as opposed to Western rationalism. In the words of Kathryn Hume, "those who practice the Jes Grew philosophy live for the present to enjoy every moment to the fullest, not simply to become something else in the distant future." ("Ishmael Reed and the Problematics of Control.") Acceptance of this philosophy of course threatens the established order, which profits from the ideological emphasis on "future," and so a secret society of the elite is trying to wipe it out.

Papa LaBas has been enlisted to foil this secret society and to recover an ancient text describing the original dance. He succeeds in the first task but fails at the second. Jes Grew is too appealing to too many to be stamped out, but it is also too dynamic and spontaneous to be adequately encapsulated in a single text. It has "grown" in too many directions, draws on too many different mediating inspirations to be given an authoritative expression. This variety is reflected in the form and style of Reed's novels, especially these earliest novels, which are characterized by what one critic calls their "syncretism," paralleling the syncretism of Jes Grew/Neo-HooDooism: "In Reed's novels, it is not uncommon to find the formal blend of language mixed with the colloquial, as it is Reed's contention that such an occurrence in the narrative is more in keeping with the ways contemporary people influenced by popular culture really speak." (Reginald Martin, "Ishmael Reed's Syncretic Use of Language: Bathos as Popular Discourse.") The central narrative voice primarily acts as the facilitator of the "blend of language," allowing the different modes of language to come into contact. This voice otherwise is notable for its directness and its avoidance of "literary" dressing.

Reed's syncretism extends to the formal structures of his novels as well—although Reed uses variety and juxtaposition largely to undermine structure as associated with the conventional novel. Other texts and narrative forms are freely interpolated into the main narrative to create a collage-like effect, the phantasmagorical qualities of which are only intensified in works like Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Flight to Canada by the blurring of time and rapid shifting between characters and subplots. The latter novel may represent Reed's last really satisfying use of the syncretic method to create a broadly surreal comedy that keeps Reed's satire from becoming merely polemical. Although it focuses directly on the source of the American racial divide, slavery, in its story of an escaped slave's quest for freedom in Canada, as a parody of a slave narrative it doesn't exactly present an orthodox account of the Civil War period and the struggle for emancipation. While the portrayal of its white characters, including an antebellum slave master and Abraham Lincoln, is excoriating enough (in Reed's typical cartoonish mode), its black characters are certainly not portrayed one-dimensionally as victims in the way we would expect of a slave narrative. Both of the main characters incorporate elements of the Trickster figure, while the novel ultimately discredits the notion of "freedom" associated with the flight "north." The white-dominated culture created in North America won't willingly extend its concept of freedom to non-whites, ultimately making Reed's Neo-HooDooism a permanent form of resistance.

In the novels Reed has published after Flight to Canada, the satirical range has become much more constricted, the targets more personal, the issues at stake arguably more idiosyncratic. Reckless Eyeballing (1986) takes aim at feminism, depicting it in particular as hostile to African-American men and initiating that phase of Reed's career in which he became a scourge of white feminists (although Reckless Eyeballing represents black feminists as also joining in on the abuse). Japanese by Spring (1993) is an academic satire that savages all the scholarly tendencies of the university as excuses for self-aggrandizement and individual agendas and depicts the academy as the redoubt of cowards and knaves. Aesthetically, this narrowing of satirical purpose has resulted in novels that are less adventurous, less interested in creating their own reality, more focused on evoking and critiquing existing reality. The humor is still there, but in this context of reduced satirical ambitions, Reed's mockery can seem heavy-handed, his exaggerated situations and behaviors merely contrivances. At the end of Japanese by Spring, when "Ishmael Reed" takes over as the main character, what could be if handled more nimbly an amusing metafictional conceit becomes instead just an opportunity for Ishmael Reed to editorialize and declaim.

Reed's chief editorial concern has become the problem of the besieged black man, and Juice! is wholly dedicated to elucidating that problem. The novel's protagonist is a cartoonist, Paul Blessings, who is fixated on O.J. Simpson, all of his trials, and the public reaction to Simpson as the embodiment of the image of the black man as killer, as "all black men rolled into one." Blessings keeps track of Simpson developments in minute detail, and his account moves back and forth from the original Simpson trial to the later civil trial to the incident in the Las Vegas hotel room that eventually led to his conviction for robbery, to other episodes relating to Simpson as well as all of the media response to and commentary about Simpson's actions. Reed uses the Simpson case to lambaste the American news media as the mouthpiece of cultural prejudice responsible for perpetuating stereotypes of the black man as Other. Since the criticisms made by Blessings (also known as "Bear") are the same criticisms—not just of media but also of feminists, academics, homosexual activists, politically correct liberals, as well as racist conservatives—made by Reed in his previous novels and in numerous of his public pronouncements, it is surpassingly obvious that Bear is a mouthpiece for Ishmael Reed, making the novel perhaps the most transparently polemical one Reed has written. It is as if the O.J. Simpson case provided Reed a fortuitously convenient instance that brings together all of his critical targets and allows him to take aim with an especially obsessive focus.

Paul Blessings' own obsession with Simpson is nothing if not comprehensive, and his insistence not just that racial fears contributed to the national fascination with Simpson's murder trial but that he was actually innocent of the charges against him initially give the novel a certain contrarian appeal. In addition, Blessings' surveys of the facts of the case and his media critique, while they occupy a large portion of the narrative, are not the only features of his story. Blessings is himself a media figure of modest renown, his cartoons featured on a public television station, in the transformation of which from an independent hippie station to a kind of low-rent Fox News he becomes involved. With O.J.'s downfall as a cautionary tale illustrating the dangers awaiting a black man who doesn't stick to the role assigned him, Blessings mutes the social commentary of his cartoons and plays along with the station manager and his reactionary agenda, even though that agenda includes using someone like Blessings to provide multicultural cover. Blessings even wins a prestigious cartoonist society prize for a cartoon perceived to be anti-O.J.

Reed thus implicates his protagonist in the very cultural practices the novel condemns, and in the process complicates our response to Paul Blessings as character and narrator enough to give Juice! some aesthetic credibility as a work of fiction rather than merely an extended screed masquerading as a novel. To an extent Reed holds his narrator up to satirical examination as well, if only to suggest how difficult it is to avoid reinscribing corrupt behavior while still trying to negotiate one's way in a corrupt system. But the satirical veneer is nevertheless very thin, and few readers will think that Blessings' demonstrated flaws as a human being are what invalidate his views of the O.J. Simpson case or gainsay his analysis of American society's attitude toward black men. Some, perhaps many, readers will find these views unconvincing and the analysis tendentious, but responding to the novel's argument as an argument is ultimately unavoidable given that so little effort is made to keeping that argument implicit, as is generally done in the best satire, while much is devoted to fleshing out the argument in exhaustive and explicit detail.

It seems likely that Reed considers his audience to be mostly hostile to the argument. While it is possible that readers sympathetic to O.J. Simpson would enjoy Paul Blessings' contrarian account, the novel is most provocative as a challenge to readers who believe Simpson was guilty of double murder and subsequently received just, if insufficient, punishment. However, it doesn't seem likely that either set of readers would find the elaborate exposition of this account other than tedious after a while, although perhaps all readers might be persuaded to take seriously the notion that more than concern for O.J. Simpson's victims were involved in the media coverage and commentary surrounding the "trial of the century." But at this point one might well ask: Why not offer an actual media or social critique, an essay or book on the public response to the Simpson trial and its aftermath, not a novel narrated by a substitute media critic in the guise of a fictional character? Surely Reed's opinions on this subject are not so outrageous they couldn't be sustained through a straightforward nonfiction analysis or be accepted as seriously intended. Indeed, few people will read Juice! and not understand that the opinions expressed by Paul Blessings are consistent with the author's.

Certainly Ishmael Reed has always been a writer whose novels provide social and cultural commentary, often explicit rather than subtle. But some of those novels also provide complexity of form, style, and theme, as well as a more raucous kind of humor, missing from Juice!. Reed's best work qualifies as satire, but the satire of Juice!, as well as Japanese by Spring before it, has become disappointingly laborious, degenerating into a kind of ridicule without humor. Further, the narrowness of focus in both Japanese by Spring and Juice! means that future readers will probably find the subjects dated—in fact, they may already be dated—and the details included impenetrable. While I think readers will still come to The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, and Mumbo Jumbo, the arc of Reed's career nonetheless can be taken as illustration of what can happen to a writer who uses fiction as a medium for "saying something." However much what Reed wants to say leads in his best work to imaginative creations in which the "message" is just part of the interest we might as readers take in them, in Juice! the message now seems about the only thing of interest to the author.

Thomas Pynchon

That Thomas Pychon would come to draw on the resources of the detective novel is not really surprising. As many reviewers of Inherent Vice correctly pointed out, Pynchon's fiction has long incorporated the mystery plot as its essential narrative device, with characters such as Herbert Stencil, Oedipa Maas, and Tyrone Slothrop taking on the role of "detective." What Will Blythe says of Doc Sportello, private eye protagonist of Inherent Vice, is true of these other characters as well: "Doc attempts to solve a mystery that may or may not be solvable, so dense are the thickets of information through which he must hack, so opaque the motives of nearly everyone he comes across” (“Conspiracy in a Different Key”. 

It might be said that this portrayal of Doc Sportello as a kind of perplexed if intrepid jungle explorer makes Inherent Vice a pastiche of the detective novel, or even a parody, an exercise in genre revisionism that takes the epistemological core of the detective narrative—the search for knowledge—and uses it to mock the pretensions of such narratives to finally arrive at "truth" and to satirize the very notion that a "search for knowledge" in modern America is even possible. There is some accuracy in such an interpretation, of course, but Pynchon's novel surely is not simply a burlesque of the detective novel and nothing more. The touchstone for Inherent Vice is pretty clearly the fiction of Raymond Chandler in novels such as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, and it could equally be said that Chandler's own work evinces a good deal of epistemological skepticism itself, as Philip Marlowe is frequently portrayed attempting to hack his way through "thickets" of misdirection. Marlowe often seems just as confused by the opaque motives of those he encounters as Doc Sportello.

Inherent Vice is at least as much a homage to the radicalism of writers like Chandler and Ross McDonald, a testament to the adaptability of the detective novel to various settings, styles, and concerns, especially in contexts in which the very possibility of uncovering "truth" is or ought to be a lingering question. Doc Sportello may seem a sorry excuse for a private eye—a shambolic, laid-back stoner—but he's also dogged and perceptive, and he feels a sense of duty toward those he is enlisted to help. If he is led through some mazes that remain mazy, and if the full import of what he discovers is not altogether assimilated, this is only par for the course in Pynchon's fiction, and having gone through the process of seeking the truth has been more enlightening than not, both for Doc and for the reader. Through Doc's peregrinations around Los Angeles, he and we become more fully aware of the historical and cultural forces at work that will transform the hippie haven of Gordita Beach into just a memory of personal and countercultural resistance to the encroaching power of new technologies and an unleashed capitalism that will shut down the brief emergence of a more humane way of life--the way of life associated with "the sixties"--before it could become more than a fragile utopian moment.

What ultimately makes Inherent Vice compelling is that in accepting the narrative protocols of the detective novel—which includes the obligatory visit of the femme fatale who initiates the action, an encounter with goons that leaves Doc unconscious, episodes of verbal sparring between Doc and a cop, etc.—Pynchon also manages to produce a novel that is recognizably Pynchonian. The detective novel is used to his purposes and is thus in this instance transformed into a comic picaresque in which, as with most picaresque narratives, characters are thinly developed beyond a few essential features, their adventures themselves of more importance than what these adventures might add to our sense of the characters as "rounded" individuals. (Thus the frequent enough criticism that Pynchon's characters are "cartoonish" is completely misconceived.) Thomas Jones writes that

the Anglophone novelist whom Pynchon most closely resembles – with his delight in silly names, scatological jokes, wild digressions and impromptu outbursts of song lyrics, his disregard for distinctions between fact and fiction, his scientific background, his belief in the randomness of the world and fascination with the patterns that appear in the chaos – is Tobias Smollett.

In such novels as The Adventures of Roderick Random, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker—even the names of the protagonists are appropriately Pynchonesque—Smollett helped establish the picaresque as a narrative strategy in the early English novel, but despite Smollett's influence on, for example, Charles Dickens, both he and the kind of picaresque narrative emphasizing "randomness" and digression was superseded by the post-Flaubert novel of realism and the "well-made story." Writers like Pynchon and John Barth partially revived the picaresque strategy in the 1960s, and surely both V and Gravity's Rainbow can usefully be read as picaresque accounts of randomness and incipient chaos.

What really unites Pynchon and Smollett is an essentially comic vision of the world, a world full of mishaps, bad luck, and evil portents, that presents itself not as an orderly arrangement of plot points but as an entirely contingent series of events—one thing leads to another. And it is a comic vision that at its best is also greatly entertaining. Pynchon's best work is above all funny, and the most unfortunate consequence of the scholarly attention Pynchon's fiction has gathered over the years is that too much emphasis has been put on "paranoia" and "entropy" and other weighty matters, obscuring the fundamental fact that Pynchon is in the line of great American literary comedians. His work is "postmodern" to the extent it is comic in a particularly extreme way, not because it invokes the second law of thermodynamics or posits the existence of global conspiracies. When his fiction becomes bloated and leaden, as I would argue it does in both Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, it is because he has lost this comic facility, or is intentionally disregarding it.

In this way Inherent Vice marks a return to the approach he seemingly abandoned after Vineland. It takes us on a comic/picaresque journey around southern California at the turn of the seventies, playing much of what it records for laughs even as it exposes us to acts of murder, brutal violence, drug trafficking, sadism, and economic rapacity—all the "inherent vice" to which humanity inevitably succumbs. The detective novel conventions give the novel a structural spine that helps to focus the novel's comedic energies while also allowing Pynchon the flexibility of form that characterizes his best work. Some might say the kind of pothead humor that arises from his choice of milieu and protagonist sometimes descends to the level of Cheech and Chong, but this is arguably a necessary side effect of the aesthetic strategy Pynchon employs: the world in which Doc Sportello roams is comic precisely because of the perspective the dope-smoking detective provides.

If finally Inherent Vice is somewhat less satisfying than Pynchon's other two California novels, Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49, not to mention V and Gravity's Rainbow, I would identify its most serious flaw as a kind of sentimentality about the vanished hippie world it evokes. It's a sentimentality only reinforced by the novel's conclusion—Doc driving in the inland fog, clearly enough symbolic of the coming cultural fog of the 1970s—although the novel's strongly sympathetic portrayal of the hippie scene has by then long since itself settled in. Perhaps it has been lurking in Pynchon's work all along, but the wistful tone of innocence lost pervades this novel, perhaps a little too obviously. The characters in Inherent Vice, including Doc Sportello, are subject to a mild degree of comic mockery, but not enough to deprive them of their status as heroes of naivete.

 

Surely if 9/11 conspiracy theories had not already arisen, like the dust plumes from the Twin Towers, Pynchon would have invented some. As it is, those existing theories seem to have been propounded by readers of The Crying of Lot 49 or V, novels whose plots imply endlessly ramifying connections, always complex, if ultimately mystifying, alternatives to simpler explanations, and leave the impression that if no final explanation is really satisfying, that’s because the actions to be explained are so puzzling, the conspiracies so potentially vast. Certainly the world evoked by 9/11 conspiracy theories seems very much a Pynchonian kind of world.

The same thing could be said about the Internet. With its origins in the U.S. Defense department, the “world-wide-web” is in some ways a predictable phenomenon emerging from the corporate-military structure whose power and potential reach are depicted in Gravity’s Rainbow. Given the pervasive “connectivity” made possible by the Internet, the mischief such connectivity enables, and the existence of the “Deep Web,” lurking beyond the “surface” web accessible to ordinary searches, it would probably seem odd if Pynchon never did address the development of the web as an all-encompassing presence in American life. Although much of Pynchon’s fiction employs a historical setting, works such as Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and parts of V examine the present circumstances (at the time) of American society. Even the historical novels are not really concerned with history per se but with the ongoing continuities between past and present, the portents in the past of what in the present has become only more ominous.

Thus Bleeding Edge comes to us so instantly recognizable as a work by Thomas Pynchon that after we have read even the jacket copy (or any of the publicity materials), we might feel we have read this novel already. It does indeed tell a story set in New York City immediately prior to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, and the story does traverse some of the darker regions of the Internet, which in 2001 was a more mysterious, if less enormous, place than it is today. And, as we likely suspect, the attack itself is surrounded by its share of possible shadowy participants, making it even more nefarious and frightening than the official version would have it. The Internet, particularly in the environs of the Deep Web, is a zone of unreality whose best and worst qualities are that it reinforces the unreality of the “real” world. The cyber reality in which Pynchon’s protagonist, Maxine Tarnow (a “fraud investigator”), finds herself enmeshed focuses her attention on the sheer lunacy of the reality we Americans have created for ourselves at the same time it promises to intensify that lunacy.

Maxine handles the paranoia-inducing discoveries she makes about the lengthening tentacles of oligarchical control and an underworld of secretive cyberspace with rather more equanimity than do most of Pynchon’s previous protagonists, who of course inhabit similarly paranoia-soaked worlds. As with many of these characters, following Maxine through such a world reveals why paranoia is a justified response to modern experience, and through her Pynchon works to give shape to the paranoid outlook. Considering that she is also struggling with professional setbacks (her Certified Fraud Examiner license has been revoked and she is now working freelance) and family problems (she is separated from her husband and raising two children on her own), Maxine steadfastly maintains her purpose in investigating the affairs of Gabriel Ice, a financial wheeler-dealer whose activities lead Maxine to websites involved in abetting his fraudulent financial transactions but that also lead her to other denizens of the Web, some clearly sinister in their intentions, others more benign, technogeeks motivated by the sort of idealism that seemed to accompany the early days of the Internet. In part, Bleeding Edge shows how that idealism was inevitably going to be submerged by the overwhelming force of American profit-making, destined to be the handmaiden of oligarchs like Gabriel Ice. The initial dot com boom and bust, the immediate precursor to the events in Bleeding Edge, was just the presage to the complete commodification of the Web.

Not only is Maxine Tarnow impressively reliable as our guide through this cyber underworld, as well as pre- and post-9/11 New York, she is probably the most compelling, fully-developed female character in all of Pynchon’s fiction. She plays the same role as P.I. Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice—both novels could be seen as variations on the detective novel—and she is at least as tenacious as he is, her efforts as effectual in “getting to the bottom” of the situation she confronts—although finally in neither novel is there really a “bottom” to the possible depths of contingency and corruption they otherwise do make visible. Certainly both of these characters are more effectual than Pynchon’s schlemiel characters such as Benny Profane and Tyrone Slothrop, although in some ways it is the latter two’s slacker-like qualities that make them as appealing as they are. Maxine Tarnow has her undignified moments (especially where sex is concerned), treated with the usual Pynchonian slapstick comedy, but finally she seems perhaps the most self-possessed adult character Pynchon has created.

Still, it may be Maxine’s strengths as a character that make the familiarity of Bleeding Edge’s narrative less a sign of the continuity in Pynchon’s work than of lagging inspiration, a willingness to go with the expected plot devices. If Maxine is a more rounded character than we have come to expect from a Thomas Pynchon novel (to say that for the most part he has relied on caricature and other forms of comic flattening is not a criticism), the story for which she provides the focus seems curiously less interesting than she is. Pynchon has given us this different kind of character only to involve her in the same kind of paranoia narrative experienced by Oedipa Maas or Tyrone Slothrop, but since Maxine has a different relationship to this narrative, the effect is to make it almost perfunctory, simply the sort of thing a Pynchon character must undergo.

Oedipa and Slothrop are subjected to the forces prompting the paranoid response in a much more threatening way (especially Slothrop, who at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow almost literally falls apart), threatening both physically and psychologically. Both are profoundly affected by what they discover and by the events unfolding around them. It could be said their whole way of being in the world is altered, as is, potentially, the reader’s as well, as a result of witnessing these events (or at least their impact on the characters). Maxine is certainly affected by what she discovers, but she seems to find her experiences less personally unsettling, less likely to force an existential crisis, however extreme they may be. Often Maxine acts more as an observer of the spooky world she encounters than as someone irredeemably spooked by it. The ultimate effect is that, on the one hand, Maxine consistently proves a steady navigator through this world, but, on the other, her stability of perception also makes the novel something closer to straight satire or even a kind of journalistic expose than one would expect from the author of Gravity’s Rainbow.

475 pages worth of cultural satire can come to seem a bit excessive, although not in the sense that the novel goes too far but in the sense that it attempts too little beyond drawing our attention to cultural folly. Portraying the deeper dangers of such folly while also suggesting it is quite likely to persist has always given Pynchon’s more satirical impulses an extra edge, taking his fiction beyond conventional satire into what in the 1960s was called “black humor” but in Pynchon’s case encompassed a more distinctive kind of comic vision that combined low-brow, farcical humor and existential dread. In Bleeding Edge the danger seems muted because it doesn’t fully extend to Maxine herself, who is too intrepid to succumb to terminal angst. The humor is still here, but it is more diffuse and sporadic, manifested in wiseacre dialogue and the narrator’s sarcastic asides (usually reflecting Maxine’s sarcastic attitude) rather than through such extended set pieces as, for example, the “Byron the Bulb” episode in Gravity’s Rainbow.

Bleeding Edge is in general a much more dialogue-dependent novel than Gravity’s Rainbow or V. Indeed, much of the novel’s “action” is related not through its direct depiction but by reports conveyed through the dialogue, to the point that this can seem less a novel concerning the events to which it mostly alludes (including the 9/11 attacks) than talk about these events. Some of the talk is mordant and witty in the usual Pynchon fashion, but much of it is surprisingly routine, an impression left only more insistently by the novel’s formal arrangement as essentially a series of scenes organized around verbal exchanges between the characters. Those of us who admire the stylistic audacity and rhetorical power of Pynchon’s prose in previous novels get very little of either in Bleeding Edge.

Bleeding Edge is a book worth reading simply because it’s by Thomas Pynchon, although anyone contemplating it as an introduction to Pynchon’s work should instead go immediately to V or Gravity’s Rainbow or even The Crying of Lot 49, which, although now apparently somewhat disdained by Pynchon, has long served as a more accessibly condensed example of Pynchon’s literary strategies and worldview. Ultimately, however, Bleeding Edge is not so much “minor” Pynchon as it is a kind of synthetic replica of a Thomas Pynchon novel, all the more disappointing because it was written by Pynchon himself.

           

It has always seemed to me that of the two most notorious literary recluses of the late 20^th century, J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, it was Salinger whose whereabouts provoked the most interest.  Perhaps this is because Salinger was more visible in the early part of his career, and his withdrawal thus seemed more puzzling, or perhaps it was just that Catcher in the Rye had been such an overwhelming success (fleeing from which may have been one motivating factor in his behavior) that fans wanted more of the author’s comments about it. (Eventually Gravity’s Rainbow may have achieved such status with Pynchon readers as well, but it took a while for Pynchon to gain cult-like status.) Certainly, Pynchon’s work seemed more esoteric than Salinger’s, but at the same time his elusiveness was, if anything, more complete. Yet ultimately few strenuous efforts to expose his whereabouts comparable to the stalking of Salinger were ever really reported, even in his later years when he was essentially hiding in plain sight in New York City. 

In a way that is not true of Salinger and his work, Pynchon’s fiction has seemed sufficiently enigmatic that readers have been preoccupied enough with interpretation that inquiry into the author’s biography could be taken as less urgent. Further, both the subjects and situations of Pynchon’s novels (perhaps less with the early stories) appear far enough removed (historically, geographically, personally) from what we do know of Pynchon’s biographical circumstances that even those who might be intrigued about Pynchon’s withdrawal from a public role as author and his reasons for persisting in his seclusion perhaps wonder whether acquiring more information about his life would be particularly helpful in coming to terms with the work. Still, a book such as Joanna Freer’s Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture seems to demonstrate pretty firmly the influence of the 1960s on Pynchon’s preoccupations as a writer, so presumably more familiarity with his attitudes and activities during this time at least would shed some light on the source of those preoccupations.

Albert Rolls’s Thomas Pynchon: The Demon in the Text reinforces Freer’s focus on Pynchon’s endorsement of countercultural values, but doesn’t merely read the fiction as an engagement with those values. Instead, it attempts to identify Pynchon’s own sublimated appearances in the fiction as a ‘demon in the text,” through whom the dynamic energies at work in the fiction are prevented from dissipating into a kind of interpretive entropy, kept circulating as literary possibilities when their source in the short-lived promise of deliverance represented in the actual American counterculture has gone into eclipse. For this reason, Pynchon’s public persona must remain cloaked in secrecy, or the continued efficacy of the textual persona is threatened. Nevertheless, Pynchon’s autobiographical presence is still detectable in the fiction’s particulars. Rolls shows that in ‘Entropy,” Pynchon’s situation in his immediate post-collegiate years is reflected in the pairing of Meatball Mulligan and Callisto, the former of whom is depicted in the story as pursuing the most appropriate strategy in confronting the entropic disorder in his apartment, choosing to ‘engage’ with it rather than retreat into isolation as Callisto does. Pynchon, as well, chose a form of such involvement, according to Rolls, in attempting a career as novelist – the equivalent of confronting the ‘disorder’ with which Meatball contends – rather than staying at Cornell and perhaps becoming an academic. Paradoxically, such academic isolation no doubt would have precluded the ‘enclave of privacy,” as Rolls puts it, that Pynchon the novelist has maintained.

Rolls’s perspective on the way the ‘life’ inflects the work in Pynchon’s case, it would seem that Pynchon’s fiction is a near-reversal of T.S Eliot’s dictum that a literary work is an ‘escape from personality.” To the extent we can determine the “personality” of Thomas Pynchon, it can only be found in the work, as the writer has deliberately escaped from the kind of public presence that might allow us to deduce a personality at least comparable to that which we might attribute to other writers of his stature. Of course, that personality must remain a construct, imputed by the critic – or the critic-biographer – who with Pynchon has to settle for “available information” – even derived from “rumor”– and proceed by asking, “What shape can be traced over the cluster of information that one finds.” Thus the biographical critic posits an authorial shaping presence embedded in the fiction, but that presence has already been shaped by the fiction fashioned by the critic.

Does this necessarily invalidate the insights—primarily the insights into the implications of the work, but also the life—that this biographical fiction helps supply? Not really, to judge by the readings Rolls provides in his short book (100 pages, but 35 pages of notes), not just of the early fiction but also the later works Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. (Against the Day and Mason & Dixon receive much less attention, presumably because their historical settings less obviously display immediate autobiographical connections, especially those expressive of Pynchon’s ties to the counterculture or of the nomadic life in which Pynchon persisted in the years after the success of Gravity’s Rainbow). The attention given to Inherent Vice, as well as Vineland, is, of course, on the one hand entirely expected, since they are the novels most directly reflective of the counterculture era itself, but on the other is simply welcome acknowledgement of these books as centrally important Pynchon novels, since both of them have been accused (the latter by no less than David Foster Wallace) of being relatively lightweight entries in the Pynchon oeuvre. In these novels ostensibly nostalgic for the lost promise of the counterculture, we actually find, as Rolls has it, recognition “that a pure adherence to the Dionysian principle is as problematic as a rigorous acceptance of the Apollonian principle. Rigorous adherence to either principle alone leaves one unliberated, caught in a mode of being from which escape is necessary.”

Rolls takes Pynchon’s mediating “demon” figure in Vineland to be the investigator Takeshi, in Inherent Vice, protagonist Doc Sportello himself. Each of these characters act as the “liberators” of those around them, facilitating the escape into a more unobstructed consciousness of the socially and politically imposed narratives in which they find themselves enclosed. While focusing on the roles these characters play in the larger narrative of entrapment and confusion Pynchon has devised in all of his novels provides a perfectly sound critical pivot around which to render a plausibly synoptic view of Pynchon’s work, however, it still seems germane to ask whether finally it is necessary to identify these characters specifically as stand-ins for “Tom Pynchon,” the actually existing individual with all of his “real” experiences. For Takeshi and Doc to serve the function they do in Rolls’s reading of the novels does not, it seems to me, require they autobiographically correspond to any particular motivating circumstance or any specific “phase” in Pynchon’s life. We need not know anything at all about Thomas Pynchon (even less than we do know) to appreciate the “demon” figure (more precisely an identifiable character type) as a device used in the novels to illustrate a process of discovery that propels all of their plots – although some characters are better able to act on what is discovered than others.

Certainly, a case could be made that this orientation to his characters and their dilemmas is what Pynchon in fact wants from readers, else why otherwise take such pains to hide his biographical circumstances in the first place. Of course, it may be just as likely that Pynchon recognized that in the vacuum of information readers (and critics) would confront, they were likely to fill it with what speculation and purposeful interpretation (including misinterpretation) can summon. One could argue as well that among the possible allegorical readings of Pynchon’s epic quest narratives is that they mirror the reader’s own attempt to encompass Pynchon’s novels with an interpretive resolution to their own persistent mysteries, both the aesthetic and thematic indeterminacy inside the text and the historical/biographical uncertainties outside. The enigmatic aura surrounding both Thomas Pynchon’s work and his life may be mutually reinforcing, so that the very attempt to use the latter to illuminate the former seems a precarious endeavor, works of imagination understood through inference and supposition substituting for verifiable fact.

Rolls is entirely correct that the best a biographer of Pynchon can do is draw such inferences from “available information”—even if this effort in effect amounts to a “metaphorical quest”—and The Demon in the Text actually serves as a useful guide to the trustworthy sources of that information we do have about Pynchon’s life. From the letters to college friend Kirkpatrick Sale and to his publisher (of V) Corlies Smith and agent Candida Donadio, to the Pynchon collection in the Harry Ransom Center, to the non-fiction pieces written by Pynchon himself, to the 2013 essay by Boris Kachka that may be the most sustained piece of reliable biographical writing on Pynchon, the book sifts through this material so that the applications of the life to the work (and to some extent vice versa) that Rolls makes never really threaten to themselves escape into pure conjecture. Since the book addresses an academic audience (at least in the sense it assumes already existing familiarity both with Pynchon’s novels and the generally accepted biographical details of his life), it does not really offer the casual or novice Pynchon reader with an organized account of the known facts of Pynchon’s life. But finally The Demon in the Text does reinforce a view that Pynchon’s work reflects not just his erudition or attention to historical detail but his extended response to the cultural and political realities of his time.

But it hardly seems possible that he might have done otherwise. Surely a writer cannot live outside his time and place, certainly not a writer like Pynchon, whose work resonates so distinctly with the felt urgencies of the literary era it occupies. Thomas Pynchon seems the epitome of the writer for whom biographical readings—however tenuous they might have to be in the first place—are destined to offer ever-diminishing returns. Eventually we may learn more about Thomas Pynchon’s life, but about the work this is likely to tell us only what we already know.