Warlock by Oakley Hall

"Bitter?" he heard Kate say. above the humming in his ears. "Why yes I am bitter! Because men have found a way to crucify every decent man, starting with Our Lord. No, it is not even bitter--it is just common sense. They will admire him because he killed a man they wouldn't've had the guts to go against. But they will hate him for it, because of that."

I cut my grown-up reading teeth on Westerns, mostly Louis L'Amour and numerous knock-offs. I can recite the structure of those books now. It's a bonding ritual amongst those who've read many. A loner comes to town, usually with a dark past. The town is run by the seemingly benevolent but actually malevolent "largest rancher in the valley". There's a grudging gunfight as a cowboy who's had too much to drink can't help but throw iron on the stranger. There's at least one fistfight that usually ends with the stranger taking his bruises, and then a final gunfight against overwhelming odds. And there's usually a girl there to help pick up the pieces. Within this framework, there's a lot of fun stuff that can happen, but the structure is sacrosanct.

Warlock, one of the numerous award winners that NYRB has rescused from obscurity, has a full-length blurb from the rarely terse Thomas Pynchon on the back cover, and that might lead you to believe that it's the sort of book that would wildly buck those conventions--an ambiguous ending, perhaps? Historical characters behaving anachronisitically? Or, at a minimum, a modernistic nihilism like Unforgiven. But you'd be wrong, because in many ways, Warlock follows the aforementioned structure to a T. The way it follows it is sometimes surprising, sometimes moving, sometimes predictable, but after finishing and taking a step back, it's not hard to see the contours of L'Amour and John Wayne.

Where it bests most Westerns though, is the thoroughness with which it examines the mining town of Warlock and its denizens. Although most of the book focuses on hired-gun sheriff Clay Blaisdell, black-sheep former outlaw John Gannon, amoral drifter Morgan, and the mysterious Kate, plenty of other citizens get moments of focus to make them more than the cardboard cutouts that tertiary characters in these sorts of books tend to be. We get a side-plot about the organizers of a miner's strike, a look at the politics in the little big Bright's City and their uncaring--and half crazy--beauracracy, and about 1/4 of the book is told through the diary entries of Henry Holmes-Goodpasture, a put-upon store owner who, in a clever bit of metacommentary on the genre, keeps getting his front window smashed.

But Gannon and Blaisedell form the beating heart of Warlock. Blaisdell has killed so many men that he can't seem to stop, in spite of the wear on his spirit. And Gannon reluctantly but unwaveringly takes up the office of deputy after Blaisedell steps down early in the novel, after killing Gannon's brother. Though the gunman-stranger is usually--and even here, is--the magnetic center that holds everything together, Gannon gets the most character work, starting the book regretting a massacre he participated in and ending it... well, there's a fistfight and a gunfight, but anything more would be telling.

Warlock is able to sustain its tight-broad paradoxical focus because Hall recognizes that the town itself is too small for anyone or anything to really be a sideplot. Often we learn about events after the fact second-hand, and while there's no real unreliable narrator here, that level of remove is engaging in a way that a straightforward telling might not be. There are plenty of frontier ruminations on the nature of society, and of man, but in the end, it comes down to guns and fists because the land, the people, the government, the mines, they are brutal. It takes a certain constitution to make it through with both life and soul intact, and Hall expertly breaks down his archtypical characters until they feel like real people. Then, in an epilogue, he tells what ultimately became of them all, bringing the archetypes to the foreground and showing us that the cycle never really ends. It's only the geography that's different.

To my mind, Blaisdell is only a small and temporary blight on the body politic; with all else healthy and aright he will automatically disappear. Like the rest of us, but perhaps for different reasons, he too is no longer interested in the Citizens Committee. I am apathetic of his ambitions; I am contemptuous of his optimism. The old, corrupt, and careless god has been replaced in his Heaven, and so, he feels, all will be well with the world, which is, after all, the best of all possible ones. It is a touching faith. But I am more drawn to those who wander the night not with excitement but with dread for it.

I see many of them through my window, unable to sleep now that the fire is out. For what fire is out, and what is newly lighted and what will burn forever and consume us all? How can men live, and know that in the end they will merely die?

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

As Doc approached downtown L.A., the smog grew thicker til he couldn't see to the end of the block.  Everybody had their headlights on, and he recalled that somewhere behind him, back at the beach, it was still another classic day of California sunshine.  Being on the way to visit Adrian Prussia, he'd decided not to smoke too much, so he was at a lost to account for the sudden appearance, rising ahead, of a dark metallic gray promontory about the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.  Traffic crept along, nobody else seemed to see it.  He thought about Sortilege's sunken continent, returning, surfacing this way in the lost heart of L.A., and wondered who'd notice if it did.  People in this own saw only what they'd all agreed to see, they believed what was on the tube or in the morning papers half of them read while they were driving to work on the freeway, and it was all their dream about being wised up, about the truth setting them free.  What good would Lemuria do them?  Especially when it turned out to be a place they'd been exiled from too long ago to remember.

I'm a big fan of P. T. Anderson, and I loved the only other Pynchon novel I've read, The Crying of Lot 49, so I wanted to read Pynchon's latest, Inherent Vice, before Anderson's film came out.  I've read the book and I've seen the film, which axes about a third of the novel's intricate plot.  Normally, such a drastic cutting might hinder the intelligibility of an adaptation, but the movie makes as much sense as the book does.  That is, it makes no sense at all.

Of course, Pynchon's not really in the business of making sense.  In fact, here and in Lot 49 he seems to be after a kind of anti-sense, or the impeccably cultivated impression of sense, created by an overwhelming accumulation of details.  Most thrillers and mystery stories are no different these days, but Pynchon's skill is in the careful parody and deconstruction of those books and movies.  Like Lot 49, Inherent Vice is a conspiracy story, but it never quite becomes clear who's behind the conspiracy, or why, or even what it is they want.

The story centers around Doc Sportello, a private investigator looking into the disappearance of a Los Angeles real estate mogul named Mickey Wolfmann.  Wolfmann happens to be the lover of Sportello's ex, Shasta, who warns Doc of a plot by Wolfmann's wife to extort Mickey and have him committed, and then promptly disappears herself.  Behind this lies a mysterious organization called The Golden Fang, which is the name of both a 19th century schooner currently docked just off the Port of Los Angeles and a consortium of dentists set up by tax purposes, and who are probably mixed up with both the FBI, the Aryan Brotherhood, and the LAPD.  The powers that be, as best as I can tell, want Wolfmann to disappear because he feels bad about his life of capitalist exploit and wants to build a community called Arrepentimiento in the Nevada desert where people can live rent free.  This is a threat to the white-collar, straight-arrow interests that Pynchon thrusts together by sinister suggestion.

Sportello, by contrast, is a hippie who is perpetually high on grass, acid, or cocaine, who doesn't seem to ever ask to be paid for his services, and whom Pynchon sets up as a moral foil to the forces of evil.  Inherent Vice is set at the tail end of the 1960's, when the Manson murders seem to have discredited the hippie philosophy, and Sportello is presented to us as one of the last of an increasingly endangered species.  This is the worst thing about Inherent Vice.  The bitter end of the 1960's "era of good feelings" became a tired trope as early as Gimme Shelter, and it's currently being done in a more interesting way on Mad Men than Pynchon's callow depiction of it, which seems rely mostly on bad jokes about drug use and the overuse of the word "groovy."  The conspiracy paranoia of The Crying of Lot 49 is effective because it's so closely tied to our paranoia about the future, and a capitalist and technocratic society that becomes increasingly inhuman and difficult to understand.  Inherent Vice sacrifices that dread for shallow nostalgia, like being forced to listen to the oldies station in the car with your Dad.

The lost continent Lemuria (like a Pacific Atlantis) in the passage I quoted above stands in for the inexorable feeling that there is a world just past our understanding, something ancient and lost to us that defies our attempts to investigate it.  The problem with Inherent Vice is not that it merely is nonsensical, but it wants to have it both ways: Pynchon wants both to insist that the values of 1960's hippie culture embody that lost world, and to slyly suggest that when you investigate closely enough, there's nothing there.  If the conspiracy at the heart of Inherent Vice is nothing but a postmodern heap of silly jokes and red herrings, what is Sportello supposed to be opposing?

Both the novel and the film struck me as the work of innovative artists who are capable of a whole lot more.  That's Pynchon's fault, I think, and not necessarily Anderson's.  Inherent Vice is too loose, too diffident, too tired, and somehow at the same time too sincere to work.

The Broken Estate by James Wood

The last and titular essay in James Wood's The Broken Estate is uncharacteristically schizophrenic. It is sometimes about literature and sometimes about religion, and only infrequently about both. In it, Wood claims that both our literary and religious landscape are an inheritance of the nineteenth century, when "historical biblical criticism began to treat the Bible as if it were a biography or even a novel, and when, in turn, writers such as Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold began to treat the Bible as if he were the hero of a mystery tale." This "broken estate," Wood argues, blurs the line between truth and fiction, and thereby blurs the line between belief and the pretense to belief, the kind of believing we do with a novel and the kind of believing we do with a hymnal. Wood, in a sternly un-postmodern mood, condemns this empty religiosity:

Were Christianity simply true, its effect on the world could not be a way of measuring its truth. "Success" would be immaterial. But Renan and Arnold do not believe it to be true; its "truth" lies only in its usefulness. It is painful to see them wallow in the most primitive consequentialism. Both are defensively triumphant, and entirely circular... Such thinking, which does not deserve to be called thinking, with its clownish contradictions and repulsive evasions, positively deserves Nietszche's decisive hammer.

This is contrasted with Wood's defense of his own atheism, buttressed by the story of his own evangelical upbringing in England. It is not a unique defense but it is lucid, and takes a mutant form of the pretend-religion that he deplores:

The child of evangelicalism, if he does not believe, inherits nevertheless a suspicion of indifference. He is always evangelical. He rejects the religion he grew up with, but he rejects it religiously... Nominal belief is insufficiently serious; nominal unbelief seems almost a blasphemy against earnest atheism.

There is a final station this train of thought that does not quite reach: "Only when Christianity is understood as a set of truths," he writes, "does it retain uniqueness... [t]he 'great strength' of biblical Christianity is that we need it." Except it isn't true, and therefore we don't need it. In this way Wood neatly justifies any and all suspicion and revulsion toward religion he has exhibited in the 200 pages of literary criticism that precede this essay.

At least Wood is upfront about the origins of his points of view. I say this without sarcasm; we should all be so honest. After all, "the writer-critic, wanting to be both faithful critic and original writer, does it acutely, in a flurry of trapped loyalties." But it puts the two of us at eternal odds. Eliot's orthodoxy is "clenched, spiritless, and wrong." Luther's belief of justification by faith "was a cruelty that not only demanded an inhuman mental loyalty, but that, brought to its logical end, abolished the purpose of Christian conduct on earth." The narrator of Knut Hamsun's Hunger begins to devour himself because to do so is a "Christian perversion" by which "infinite humility is the soul's aim." Gogol's conflicted sense of self becomes Manichean:

On the one hand, he is the earnest Christian who argued, in an essay in 1836, for satire's traditional moral divide-and-rule... this Gogol renounced literature and food, incinerated the manuscript of the second part of Dead Souls and, in 1852, starved to death.

On the other hand, there is the satirist who is always falling over in laughter, who is never a convincing Christian, whose fanaticism seems parodic... The fanatical Gogol, we are told, destroyed Part 2 of Dead Souls because fiction was an unworthy activity for a saint. But it is not possible that the writerly Gogol, who had devoted twelve years to this manuscript, saw that a fiction of religious exhortation was no fiction at all, and not worth having?

It is possible, but not quite probable enough to justify the monstrous imposition of proclaiming Gogol's thoughts. I can buy the split-personality theory of Gogol, but the Puritan Gogol won out; Wood's stony absolutism--religious fiction is worthless!--cannot rewrite the historical record. Without irony, he later writes that D. H. Lawrence "is a mystic literalist. He is always a poet and a preacher at the same time. He should not be opened in two."

I find most of this fascinating but wrong. If The Broken Estate cleaved as tightly to this framework as I have so far suggested, I doubt I would have enjoyed it. But "Jane Austen's Heroic Consciousness" has little to do with the literature of belief, and "Thomas Pynchon and the Problem of Allegory" even less. These and many other essays seem to be here for no other reason than Wood wanted to write them. They hang together not because they have been marshaled into his anti-Crusade, but because Wood remains tremendously readable and thoughtful. He eschews the inscrutability of the academic in favor of writerly metaphor and turns of phrase: The preacher Lawrence is "the bully of blood, the friendless hammer." Pynchon's sense of allegory points "like a severed arm to nowhere in particular." I love John Updike, but I am continually amused (and a little chastened) by the thought that Updike "finds the same degree of sensuality in everything, whether it is a woman's breast or an avocado."

Wood's How Fiction Works succeeded because it was written with a non-academic, though educated, reader in mind, but when compared with the author of The Broken Estate he seems to be stooping low. The Broken Estate is simultaneously more academic and more personal, both more enthusiastic and more savage. It is brilliant but bitter, and despite Wood's assertion that loss of faith "brings great unhappiness to others, but not to oneself... It is like undressing," his book finishes disconsolately:

Why must we move through this unhappy, painful, rehearsal for heaven, this desperate antechamber, this foreword written by an anonymous author, this hard prelude in which so few of us can find our way?

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disc jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

The Crying of Lot 49 was confusing. I don't say that as a pejorative, but a simple statement of fact. Although it's Pynchon Lite from what I hear (certainly lighter than the 800pp Gravity's Rainbow), it's still an exercise in maximalism and absurdity, full of inside jokes, historical references, and weird names.

The plot, as far as I can interpret it is this: Oedipa Maas, happily married post-modern woman, stumbles across a worldwide conspiracy that may or may not involve the government and every person she has ever known (including her disc jockey boyfriend). Actually, the conspiracy may not even exist. It centers around an auction (The auctioning of Lot 49) and a symbol resembling a trumpet. Also, the postal service and a play that is written out in play format about halfway through the book.

I'm sure Crying is a very good book if you study it. It was entertaining and fairly amusing even when I didn't. Still, the lack of resolution and the distance created between the reader and the characters reminded me of the first third of Cosmopolis, and my uninformed opinion about Crying is similar: It's a good book, maybe even very good, for those who are drawn in enough to draw out the references on top of references on top of everything else. The writing is strong, the story is interesting, and I didn't care for it a whole lot.

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

When Noah Webster wrote the dictionary in 1757, he created the English language, but more importantly he created the word super. Well, when our neighbors across the pond found out about this new language a hundred years later, they decided to make a dictionary of their own, but they weren't satisfied with the word super. The OED needed a better word, so James Murray and some looney named Minor added a letter to it, thus inventing the word superb. That is what this book is.

Oedipa Maas is our protagonist. On page 1 she is summoned to execute the estate of a billionaire friend and heads off to southern California to do so. Once there she discovers a clandestine postal system with roots in the middle ages that's been illegally competing against the USPS in a massively orchestrated conspiracy. The muted post horn is their symbol and it's seemingly graffitied everywhere once she starts to look for it.

The book is filled with references. Everything is a reference. I don't even think Pynchon would catch them all if he reread it. He pokes fun at cultural phenomena like Beetlemania and urban sprawl (read California). He mocks used car salesmen, psychiatrists, commercial radio, stamp collectors, pseudo scientists, sex, marriage, and drugs. There are words in Spanish, French, Greek and Dutch. The novel is short in length but huge in scope. Yes it's about a conspiracy, but you won't find it mixed in with those cheap paperback mysteries you find in the grocery. It's not just plot. It's dense.

I think it merits a second read. I'll probably go back through it next year. This is the first book by Pynchon I've read, and I've heard his others are much longer, so it's a good starting point. Read it and enjoy it.