My good friend Jeff e-mailed me the other day to ask how the book is coming. (I'm 25,000 words into a comedic novella.) He knows I've run into problems with it here and there (I won't call it writer's block) as I try to work out the story line and keep numerous balls in the air at the same time. He asked what I do when I get bogged down. Watch a movie, perhaps?
This is what I wrote back to him (in stalled-writer mode):
Correct, sir. To combat blockage, I do resort to movies, books,
diversions (Twitter, LinkedIn, long e-mails to friends), more coffee, a few minutes on the porch while the dogs take their potty break, basically anything but exercise (not counting sex
as exercise, in this case). Last night I watched half a movie. May or may not watch
the rest. A story about some people who try to befriend an antisocial dwarf who has inherited a broken-down train depot. I am not kidding.
That's the premise. I thought I might get some ideas while watching it.
But it's kinda slow. Yet it got great reviews. It's called "The Station
Agent."
I also continue to read Gravity's Rainbow. The story is
starting to pick up a little (p. 270 now, near the end of Part 2 out of
4) although the book can't, in all seriousness, be said to have a plot. I
do admit to being fascinated by Pynchon's writing style. Mystified
and fascinated. How did he get this thing published? First of all, what English-speaking reader is going to know all the French and Latin and German
terms? What kind of audience knows even the English words he uses? words
like palimpsest, scombroid, nacreous, velleity. Who said it's okay to
have a 700-page novel without a plot? etc. etc.
The reason I read it is that the command of language is
unbelievable. And the damn fool knows his writing is ace, because he delights in
throwing in the occasional "sez" (for "says") and other irritations just
for fun! Reading it is a kind of Zen challenge. I deconstruct as I go; I
look at what he's describing, and compare it with HOW he's describing
it, and it's quite educational. The dialog is just as infuriating as the
narrative: characters speaking in half-sentences, two chars engaging in
parallel soliloquys rather than replying to each other, punctuation all
over the place. Someone in a forum excerpted a 100-word sentence and
called it a "cluster-fuck of words." That's about right.
Still, there's a certain logic behind it (I can see the
Boeing tech writer in him), and it's endearing to go from a
sadomasochism scene to differential equations in the space of a few
pages. He actually cites a few equations here and there (Poisson's
formula, plus an equation for yaw stability of a rocket).
The love scenes lack passion -- which I have to conclude
must be deliberate on Pynchon's part -- and the story, overall, lacks
heart, but I think (not to belabor the obvious) there's a certain attempt here to render the story
that way intentionally, yes? because it's a war story, and war (with its
debasement of life and monstrous bureaucracy) is a sterile and heartless
business by its very nature. So again, Pynchon gets away with things that would
not work in other stories; this "story" (if it can be properly so called)
works well with the kind of approach he uses, whereas I don't think it
would work for a wide range of settings and themes. The meta-theme here
is death, war, destruction, paranoia, the culture of war-engineering; the (quick, quick, Mr. Pynchon, what's the German word?) Sinnlosigkeit, the meaninglessness, of all the above. The tale is told in suitably parallel
style, aggregating seemingly pointless
vignettes into a strenuously lifeless non-story about characters who
come, go, eat, fuck, talk, all the while never quite interacting with each other
in any kind of meaningful way. A remarkable synthesis, really.
Reading Pynchon, I feel like I'm on a grand journey of some kind, and having been liberated from the tyranny of plot and climax and denouement, I'm at leisure to enjoy the journey for its own sake with no obligation to care about the destination or route. If the journey should end with disorienting, unfulfilling suddenness (as the war in Europe did, Hitler vanishing into the aether...), I'll disembark none the worse for wear.
