The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (review)

Abstract

Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian McHale, eds. 2012. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $90.00 hc. $27.99 sc. xii + 193 pp.Thomas Pynchon joins Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Don Delillo, and John Updike on list of US novelists to merit a Cambridge Companion during their lifetime, a significant milestone in academic mainstreaming of an author who, despite his reasonable sales and attendant research Pyndustry, retains a cultish aura. The volume is an informative, intuitively structured introduction to Pynchon's work. Sharing a publication date with John N. Duvall's The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction After 1945, it constitutes an extended claim Pynchon's career can stand for precedence of postmodernism in historical period. A wider readership, however, might find as much interest in what limits of Pynchon studies, and associated claim for enduring relevance of mid-1980s theory, tell us about postmodernism's relation to contemporary canonicity.The editors' brief introduction establishes book's necessity: there are currently relatively few books aimed specifically at those who study and teach Pynchon, and even fewer that non-academic reader could pick up and read with pleasure and profit (2). Starting from a point intelligible to Pynchon novices, collection gets progressively more complex and theoretical. After a biographical note synthesises what reliable information we have on this reticent author's life, it is divided into three sections. Chapters under heading of Canon introduce Pynchon's various works, outlining infamously complex plots, examining representative passages, and pointing to sustained thematic concerns. There follow three chapters addressing his distinctive forms of narrative-making under heading of Poetics, introducing some literary history, terminology, and criticism. Four Issues essays, which combine literary theory with cultural and historical citation, detail Pynchon's career-spanning engagements with Politics, History, Alterity, and Science and Technology. Finally, a short coda on readerly approaches surveys critical and theoretical roles his work has been made to play within academy.This structure readably scaffolds some very complex ideas: anyone starting from page one would be well prepared to assess Issues chapters' wide-ranging claims. Indeed, so lucid is exposition throughout book makes almost as good an introduction to canonically approaches to fiction of 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as it does to Pynchon in particular. Furthermore, in spite of vastness of its subject's novels, companion comes in at under two hundred pages, around fifty below average for series. The cover-to-cover reading its structure invites and even requires is thus not a daunting prospect. Early chapters aim explicitly to help readers past alienating aspects of Pynchon's styles and structures, and overall effect is to disarm his exaggerated reputation for inaccessibility.Providing a point of access is not limit of editors' ambition, however, and their other stated aim, to compile advanced specialist insights, reflecting state of art in field (2-3), is more problematic. If varying contributors can be said to offer a unifying argument, it is best summarised by Brian McHale's contention our understanding of postmodernism is as dependent on Pynchon's work as our understanding of oeuvre is on social and theoretical contexts of postmodernity. The 'state of art' in Pynchon studies is thus hard to untie from models of postmodernism emerged during process of his initial critical canonization.John N. Duvall, introducing his Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945, suggests postmodern metafictions of Pynchon generation now represent little more than the dead hand of history to scholars of, and authors within, contemporary (2012, 4). …