Category: American Literature

Nabokov’s Professor Pnin and the Pain of the Past

Pnin is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, written at the same time as his more famous Lolita. But Pnin is, to my mind at least, a much more enjoyable book than Lolita is. It is helped in this by its protagonist, the lovely and lovable Professor Tim Pnin, an American of Imperial Russian extraction like Nabokov himself, but one whose success in falling into American culture, his naturalization notwithstanding, has not been nearly so successful.

What this leads to is a series of comic misunderstandings and slapstick humour, bad accents and worse grammar, all of which ultimately make Pnin an almost light-hearted and innocently enjoyable book. But beneath the surface there is an unmistakable note of sadness, a mourning for the past that Pnin has left behind him in his homeland and is unable to forget altogether, and a sense of narrative sympathy towards all those who history treats as pawns or playthings of its grand designs. Once the laughter has stopped, then it’s time for the tears.

A photo of Vladimir Nabokov looking ready for a fight
Our author, Vladimir Nabokov. Pnin is in many ways similar to Nabokov. Both were Russians of noble birth who ended up in America in academic institutions, but Nabokov is a far more cunning man than dear Pnin ever could be, and much better at English

Tim Pnin’s Origins and Ancestors

Let’s begin with Pnin. Pnin is a Russian from a good family of minor nobility, not that that matters when bombs start flying in Saint Petersburg and the rest of the Russian Empire. He escapes to Europe, his family die, and when Hitler gains power and starts using it Pnin makes the journey to America, where his Russian wife (but met in Europe) leaves him almost at once. There, with the help of old-world knowledge and the network of fellow intelligent Russians that soon formed in the United States, Pnin ends up at Waindell College, a small university in a small university town, and settles down to teach and become a real American.

We first meet him on the train, because his life is one of movement, often involuntary. And we meet him on the wrong train because he is a fool. He has used a timetable that is five years out of date. In this moment the problem that is doomed to plague Pnin for the whole book is made clear – he is out of touch, and doesn’t seem to know it. As a result of all this, and his poor English and worse social skills, he becomes a comic figure in the vein of Gogol’s civil servants and Chekhov’s banal mediocrities. He struggles with teaching and academic intrigues, with finding places to stay, and even with driving. And wherever he goes and whatever he does, somehow memories of the past he has lost find a way of returning to him, for better or for worse.

Poor Pnin – Sympathy and Comedy

It is perhaps as a teacher that Pnin is at his most comedic. He is not the proud leader of a Russian department but rather slotted in, through academic jiu-jitsu, as part of the German Department in some kind of comparative role, and he has only a few students at the best of times. He is not a good teacher, by any stretch of the imagination, but he is one of those who we tend to look back on fondly. I know that I remember the teachers with heart and humour far better than I do the cold, bespectacled men who got me to Cambridge and then vanished into an almost-robotic silence in my memory. Pnin not like them – he is a fun teacher, beloved for “those unforgettable digressions of his”, and “what his listeners politely surmised was Russian humour”.

Against his pupils, brimming with ignorance and at best a secondhand passion for such books as Anna Karamazov, Pnin espouses in broken English the love that he cannot truly hope to translate, and fails dramatically at teaching anything akin to grammar or vocabulary. Poor Pnin at first veers uncomfortably between being the permanent butt of a joke and someone we can at least extend some sympathy to, but by the end of the book he has managed to acquire a sort of heroic dignity. Not that that stops him from regularly falling downstairs, mistaking one professor for another, and various other mishaps.

Pnin and his novel seem to bring over to American literature that very Russian mood of “smekh skvoz’ slyozi”, or “laughter through tears”, where comedy can at any moment transform into the deepest sadness and pity.

One example of this is Pnin’s purchase of a football for the son of his ex-wife and her second husband. Viktor is coming to stay with Pnin at his ex-wife’s behest. At first the whole idea is comic – Pnin goes to the store, has some difficulty with the American conception of “football” (“No, no,” said Pnin, “I do not wish an egg or, for example, a torpedo. I want a simple football ball. Round!”), but eventually gets the soccer ball he wants to give out of kindness alone. Yet when Viktor actually arrives, he reveals, unwittingly, that he doesn’t like sport, and Pnin’s mood is as deflated just as much as any ball could be, and he throws the ball out of the window when Viktor isn’t looking. The final scene of the chapter has the ball rolling through a windy night, alone and prey to the elements. Poor Pnin.

History’s Pnin-pong Ball

But all this pain is most in evidence whenever the novel deals with the theme of history itself and its effects upon the individuals who get in its way. I noticed that each chapter begins, more or less, with comedy, but ends with bleak rumination and the lonely exploration of Pnin’s memories. Pnin and his fellow Russian nobles left Russia under threat of death, and tried, some with success, some without, to establish themselves in Europe, and then when that dream failed due to Nazism, they headed West once again, to America. Some died in the struggle. Pnin’s first love was among those who were put to death in the concentration camps – she was a person who through the lens of memory becomes a symbol of a more innocent time, of peace and honesty as opposed to the serial adultery of his actual wife.

One recounted memory that I remember particularly strongly is of Pnin, the girl, and a few other young Russians putting on a play in an aristocratic estate in one of the Baltic parts of the Russian Empire. We don’t see the play in any great detail, but the image of its performance is a strong one. For those Russians, in the period of their youth before the Revolutions came, life was merely a game, a play, with no true conflict and no chance that history might turn against them and scatter them like leaves in the wind. Of course, their attitude towards life is not something to be applauded, but the tragedy that took place is something that within the context of their own lives ought to be lamented. Their peace turned out to be only a dream, and they were ill-prepared for the reality.

A picture of a country estate owned by the Nabokov family. In such a place Pnin would have put on his play
One of the Nabokovs’ estates in Russia, lost in the Revolution. In such a place it is easy to relax and believe that the world will sort itself out, and the most stressful part of the day can be just putting on a play. The play Pnin was in would have taken place in a similar such location.

What I liked was that Nabokov doesn’t stop with just criticising the Soviets and the Germans, the low-hanging fruit of the Second World War. He also suggests, with ever more urgency as the book goes on, that McCarthyism in America is another such dangerous and hateful trend. Pnin’s unpopularity as a teacher is, yes, partially due to the fact that he can’t exactly teach, but it’s also increasingly due to a cultural shift that sees everything “Russian” as being “commie” and dangerous. Even though he has escaped to America, Pnin can’t escape the hands of fools who wish to turn ordinary people’s lives into tools for political games. We as readers can only hope that he and the other Russians escape the worst years of American repressions intact.

Language in Pnin

Nabokov is a master wordsmith – everybody knows as much – but Nabokov’s language in Pnin is also, surprisingly perhaps, another place where sympathy can be located. Pnin is introduced as something of a fool when he speaks, spouting Russianisms and using idioms wrongly. At first we laugh, because such moments are indeed very funny. When he discovers that he is on the wrong train at the novel’s beginning we hear: ““Important lecture!” cried Pnin. “What to do? It is a catastroph!”” Having spent a lot of time among Russians with varying levels of English, I find Nabokov’s portrayal leaves nothing to be desired. As the novel goes on, Pnin’s English continues to be serviceable but broken, Russified, and occasionally plain wrong. We laugh and continue to think of Pnin as an affable old fool, as out of touch linguistically as he is culturally.

But then, when Pnin is at a retreat for fellow Russians in the American countryside, Nabokov takes his foot off the breaks and Pnin begins to speak. He does not lurch in broken sentences, but words – intelligent, reasonable, words – flow warmly from his mouth. And suddenly we realise that the fool we thought we saw, the bumbler who can scarcely speak, is not the real Pnin, but just the shadow that he is capable of translating. And we feel sad for him, so often isolated from his true self. He talks of beauty and of literature with wit and character, and we can only wish that his English were good enough to get the words out at other times – for his students’ sakes, at the very least.

Another moment that truly humanises poor old Pnin comes at the very end of the novel, when the narrator is relating Pnin’s courtship of his future ex-wife, an artistic young poet who is a member of fashionable social circles where Pnin would never end up in a million years. And yet Pnin writes her a letter where he bares his soul and asks for her hand. We see Pnin as he really is, not barred by language or custom – we see him free and in love. “I am not handsome, I am not interesting, I am not talented. I am not even rich. But Lise, I offer you everything I have, to the last blood corpuscle, to the last tear, everything… I may not achieve happiness, but I know I shall do everything to make you happy”. The language is poetic, the sentiment heroic. This is the true Pnin.

Conclusion

Nabokov is famous for his formal trickery, unreliable narrators, and gameplaying, and in Pnin this is not limited to bad puns alone. The book ends with one of those classic reversals of postmodern ingenuity that no doubt will leave an eventual rereading of the book all the richer by undermining a lot of the narrative that has gone before. In other words, the ending does cheapen the rest of the book, no matter how much it does give you things to think about. To each their own, but personally I’m content just to enjoy the rest of the book without overthinking the implications of the closing pages. A second time through, no doubt, I’ll see everything a little differently. But for now, I’ll save myself the trouble.

Pnin is a short book, which makes it easy to recommend. However masterful its prose, I enjoy how much attention poor Professor Pnin receives. Like him, the book is funny and a little twee. But also like him, underneath the bumbling exterior there lurk depths that are worth looking into, and reveal a sadness and isolation that lend Pnin’s story a tragic note. Alongside the laughs there are also the tears that come from an understanding of another’s suffering, a suffering that until we have taken a trip through Pnin’s world may well have been completely unknown to us. The book summons up sympathy, and that’s a very valuable thing, especially in our modern world, where history continues daily creating playthings of individual lives. Perhaps you have already met your Pnin – perhaps your meeting is still to come. But now, at least, you’ll be ready for him.

For my rather more lukewarm response to Nabokov’s Strong Opinions, follow this link.  

Vladimir Nabokov’s Strong Opinions and (Less Strong) Arguments

One Big Misunderstanding

I recently finished Vladimir Nabokov’s Strong Opinions, a collection of the author’s interviews, essays, and letters-to-the-editor. Since the pieces were all short and written with some degree of accessibility in mind, it became my bedtime reading for a few days. The first thing of his that I read was “Lolita”, which stumbled through aged fourteen without understanding a word and thus thinking for most of it that Lo was having the time of her life.

Following that magnificent misunderstanding of Lolita, Nabokov’s interviews in isolation were what I read next. I was at an age and in an environment where I was wholly convinced of the sanctity of the Canon while at the same time not really able to say what exactly it was. I was open, in a sense, to an authoritarian or at the very least authoritative figure who seemingly knew what was what and wasn’t shy about letting me know. It’s probably for the same reason that Harold Bloom appealed at that point, even though I didn’t understand him either when I actually tried reading him. Nabokov in these sits on his great-writerly throne dispensing fireballs and lightning and very, very occasionally, a glimmer of praise.

Back then that all was very attractive – it gave me opinions so that I didn’t need to bother forming my own, and it told me what was worth reading so that I didn’t have to read either. But now, having read other writers’ (and critics’) essays, binged the back issues of the Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction”, and done a little growing up, the book that had I read it six or seven years ago might have seemed the masterwork of an assured genius, now appears in a much less pleasant light.

Structure

As I mentioned above, the book is made of interviews, letters-to-the-editor, and a few essays. The former make up most of the book, and stretch from immediately after the publication of Lolita until Ada’s own completion. The letters meanwhile include such banalities as Nabokov’s witticisms on the moon landings. While Lolita, being the most popular and enduring of his novels, takes up the main part of the interviews even long after it has been published, the essays that end the book are concerned with another book of Nabokov’s – his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. The collection, it is important to note here, is one organised by Nabokov during his own lifetime – each interview, for instance, is introduced by his comments explaining the circumstances of each meeting – and for that reason it’s fair also to say that these two works are what he considers to be his primary legacy, and indeed he says as much. I’ll tackle both the interviews and essays in turn.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was a Great Writer, sure. But here we’re after his personality.

The Interviews

These were on the whole pretty fun, and what I was here for. Though I had read a few before, I scarcely remembered them. It also doesn’t help that Nabokov repeats himself. He has a number of metaphors and images that he uses again and again for two reasons. The first of these is that as with the rest of us, the things that are at the forefront of his mind are often similar from year to year, even if his vocabulary is undoubtedly marvellous (I quite wanted to go through it again just noting down every new and exciting word of his), and so when they are stacked side by side these interviews become a little like paintings at an art gallery. What beauty and power they have individually becomes blurred and dulled by company of equals. The same is true of Nabokov’s metaphors.

The other problem, though, is that these aren’t interviews in the strictest sense. Nabokov admits in his preface that “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child” (was there ever a more blatant instance of praising with faint damning?) and so what he does instead of speak unprompted is get his questions in advance and prepare answers to them on flashcards. It means that the whole selection has a slightly odd feeling of unreality to it – this is obviously not who Nabokov actually is in speech, but nor is he entirely who he is in his fiction either. It has an uncomfortable artificiality to it.

The Interviews: Humour and Judgement

But they are fun, and by this term I mean that they appeal in a few different ways. One of those is that the interviews are actually pretty funny. I love the hilariously awful punning of things like “I differ from Joseph Conradically” or my personal favourite “Off the Nabocuff” – things that if I said them in person I would be met with a sigh and awkward smile but when written down Nabokov almost seems to get away with. Beyond the puns there is the casual tone, such as when he calls himself “the shuttlecock above the Atlantic”, or talks of the indifferent audience he has to face whenever he lectures. All this is simple and mindless, but things become a lot more complicated when the humour is derived from his judgements about others – and it is regarding his judgements of others that the centre of my distaste for the book lies.

I imagine at least a few people read this book to know what Nabokov thinks of other writers. It’s certainly why I read the interviews all those years ago, and it remains an almost unacknowledged reason for why I still read a lot of things by other writers, especially ones that I admire. I want the literary gossip – who’s in, and who’s out. Nabokov is very good at deciding who is passé and out of style. Conrad is obliterated whenever there is a chance – “I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist clichés” – and anybody who writes any fiction occupied by ideas is doomed to disdain. Hemingway is merely the author of “something about bells, balls, and bulls”, though Nabokov admits to liking “the wonderful fish story”. The authors of the Soviet period are also crushed by Nabokov’s own iron fist.

Praise is left for Joyce, Kafka, Borges, and Beckett, among others. But the greater part of the interviews are concerned with criticism of fellow writers, and here it goes hand in hand with witticism rather than analysis, much to its own discredit. Aside from comments about Conrad’s childishness and sentimentality there is very little explanation of why Nabokov didn’t actually like him. Meanwhile, when praise is given it is rarely a simple matter either: Nabokov’s desire to belittle Hemingway’s output is made clear through his language (and since he wrote everything for these conversations down beforehand, Nabokov’s language is absolutely worth a little close reading) – instead of naming The Old Man and the Sea or Fiesta, Nabokov refers to them by their topics, suggesting that their names were not good enough to remain in his memory. This is in contrast to somebody like Kafka, whose “Metamorphosis” (which Nabokov refers to as “The Transformation”, a little closer to the German “Verwandlung” original) is named, or Joyce’s Ulysses. Where praise comes, it is carefully and cunningly formulated so that Nabokov never seems to be praising outright anybody he wouldn’t consider to be his equal (thus Kafka and Joyce are worthy in his mind, whatever he may state in faux-humility elsewhere). We get little from reading these parts except for a list of literary friends and enemies.

Of course, perhaps you can say that it’s wrong to expect analysis from an interview – I’d grant that. But mere witticisms are far less helpful than even the pithiest of analytical comments.

The Interviews: the Nabokov Show

For those people interested in Nabokov himself, these interviews admittedly do contain a wealth of information. On his compositional methods: “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose. These bits I write on index cards until the novel is done. My schedule is flexible but I am rather particular about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well-sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers.” He includes a detailed description of his daily routine too, but for those who seek the secrets of success there is likely only disappointment: Nabokov spends a lot of time walking, drinking tea, and playing Russian Scrabble.

We also learn what he read as a child, and what has fallen in and out of fashion with him as he has aged: “Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok” are his childhood’s occupation, while “Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin” gain ascendency once he is into his twenties, thirties, and forties. We are told that Lolita only survived being incinerated after an intervention by his wife, Vera, and a little bit about his life in Berlin and France before he reached America. Biographical details, simply put, but nonetheless interesting if that is to your taste.

The Interviews: A Cutting Edge

Nabokov wrote, by common admission, pretty good fiction, and when he wants to in these interviews he can well deploy that power of insight which contributes a great deal towards his reputation, just rarely. It is here too, that his strong opinions are most useful, for they allow him to say boldly what others might not. He is at his most interesting when discussing themes also addressed in his novels and stories. When discussing how we view reality he imagines it in a series of steps: “reality is a very subjective affair… a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist”. He also talks about memory, the ways that the past changes as we grow older and begin to focus on different aspects of it – “The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is”. Less interesting is his dismissal of Soviet fiction in its entirety as mere banality – though much of it was, his answer lacks a lot of nuance and could conceal from a reader the value of what was produced in the Soviet Union in terms of writing. One thing I did agree with though was his statement about Osip Mandel’shtam, the Russian poet, whose death in the camps Nabokov states makes his poetry look better now than it would do otherwise, good as it is. This is close to my own experience of him too, but I’m keeping my mind open since I’ve not read as much as I’d have liked to.

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), whose novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin details the tragically aimless life of its eponymous hero.

The Onegin Affair – Introduction and Background

The interviews at their best are a collection of witticisms and occasional insights into their author’s talent and creative process; at their worst they are rude an unfounded criticisms of others with nary an analysis in sight. The majority of the essays in the second half of the book deal with Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin, and unfortunately they are much oftener similar to the bad interviews than to the good ones. Nabokov’s version of Pushkin’s novel in verse was first published in 1964, and included as an appendix a section on prosody differences between English and Russian – for both works (“Notes on Prosody” was published separately later) he met with fierce opposition, and responded equally fiercely. His own translation was written in accordance with his own views on the act of translation, expounded among the interviews and in the essays too. That view was one of extreme literalism. Nabokov wanted every word to be translated exactly according to its meaning, so that works translated from a foreign language ought to sound strange, precisely because they are not being adapted or smoothed over for their new audience. It makes them clunky but according to Nabokov also much more correct. It’s not a debate to get into here, but needless to say the style of his version of Pushkin’s work raised a few hackles among academia and the wider public.

The Onegin Affair – the Nature of the Defence

Nabokov, way back when, used to be good friends with the literary critic Edmund Wilson. During the course of the affair things between them got a little heated, and a sort of mangled retelling of all this is possible by looking through the essays and following up a few of the references within them. The key essay is the fourth one, “Reply to my Critics”, which is “a magazine article of explanation, retaliation, and protest” but mostly the latter two. Nabokov takes to task a huge number of minor denizens of the academy who have been critical of him, before rounding on Mr Wilson in particular. Wilson, in his own article, had begun by stating that he and Nabokov were old friends, but ones whose affection was “sometimes chilled by exasperation.” Nabokov, nonetheless, rounds on him. Where Wilson suggests he has “an addiction to rare and unfamiliar words” Nabokov arrogantly responds that “it does not occur to him that I may have rare and unfamiliar things to convey”. Elsewhere, he compares him to “some seventeenth-century pedant discoursing on high and low style”.

But beyond these criticisms of tone and personality, Nabokov also states that Wilson has no right to complain about his writing because Wilson is actually bad at Russian – which as a language learner is among the most offensive things you can be told. Nabokov acts in such a way that leaves no room for misinterpretation – he says himself that “my facts are objective and irrefutable” even as they are simply more and more opinions disguised as facts by a grandiose prose style. He is rude and, if not often wrong, then at least far less “right” than he seems to think he is. When Wilson tried to make things good again between them, saying that his article was “more damaging” than he had intended, Nabokov, instead of accepting the apology merely rubbed salt in the wounds by saying “his article, entirely consisting, as I have shown, of quibbles and blunders, can be damaging only to his own reputation”. In one of the letters-to-the-editor written later, Nabokov once more dismisses the possibility of making up with his old friend, writing “I am aware that my former friend is in poor health but in the struggle between the dictates of compassion and those of personal honour the latter wins.” The very next year Wilson was dead.

This may all sound ridiculous. In a sense, after all, I’m just criticising Nabokov’s personality. But when we read interviews and essays, at least outside of an academic context, part of their appeal comes from the way they somehow contain the essence of their authors. Nabokov’s personality does not appeal to me – I would even go so far as to say that he should little appeal to anybody. He is cruel, insistently so, and arrogant beyond all measure. He may well have assembled this collection hoping to impress his readers, but anyone with unclouded vision will instead see whatever idol they’ve constructed for him crumble with each passing page. We rarely read fiction for the personality of a work’s creator (excepting, for example, the Beats) because the text is rarely so autobiographical that we cannot move beyond the author’s experience, if the work is good enough, into something exciting and more universal. But here Nabokov’s personality is overwhelming, and overwhelmingly toxic. Other essays just take aim at differing people who have annoyed him over the years, such as Robert Lowell and Maurice Girodias, and are just as tiresome.

Montreux in Switzerland, where Nabokov spent his later years.

Rays of Light

For that reason, the best parts of the book are where Nabokov is doing something similar to telling a story and his own person takes a back seat. One of the letters-to-the-editor recounts the death of his father shortly after the family had arrived in Berlin. At the end of the book Nabokov details some expeditions in search of rare butterflies. In both instances we can enjoy the texts as independent of the personality created them. Another time where the book takes a turn for the better, and for me the most frustrating moment, is in the article on the Russian poet Vladimir Hodasevich (Khodasevich). It is a rare incidence of praise, and the only essay here that he translated from the original Russian work he did before coming to America. It includes the line “even genius does not save one in Russia; in exile, one is saved by genius alone”, which sounds rather good if nothing else. But it is annoying because essays like this, where Nabokov turns your eyes towards writers you hadn’t considered or even heard of, are almost non-existent here. In one of the interviews he famously declares Andrei Bely’s Petersburg as one of the four great masterpieces of the 20th century, which almost singlehandedly brought about that book’s revival and appreciation in the West. But again, that’s two new authors after a whole book’s worth of vitriol.

Conclusion

It is not easy to do, by any stretch of the imagination, but once one tears oneself away from the fancy prose style and the enchantments of his undoubtedly beautiful and charming language, the book offers far less than perhaps might be expected, based on Nabokov’s colossal reputation. The revelations are few and far between, and not even the sparkling of nice words can disguise the insipid cruelty of which he gives every indication of being proud. We may read criticism to watch our literary temples be torn down as much as we want to see them be built up, but Nabokov rarely undermines the foundations of what he attacks – instead he simply slings mud and insults at them until the walls are stained brown, but ultimately left easy enough to wipe clean. Rarely do we learn why things are bad, only that Mr Nabokov thinks they are. We do get the odd bit of insight into Nabokov’s life and times, but that’s not enough to redeem the book. It is a failure underneath the prose.

If you are after analysis, take a look at his lectures or book on Gogol’. If you are after style and an entertaining story that is not dripping with nastiness, he wrote plenty of fiction to keep you busy. But this… this is just a disappointment. Better to stay away.

For Nabokov in a much more enjoyable guise, I have a piece on Pnin, over here.

Picture of Vladimir Nabokov by Walter Mori (Mondadori Publishers) is in the public domain.

Portrait of Alexander Pushkin is by Orest Kiprensky and in the public domain

Photo of Montreux is by Nserrano and used under CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

An Aging Stoner’s Advice: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice

To have something by Thomas Pynchon recommended in any kind of studenty or similar context will likely elicit a groan from anyone who has already encountered him. What is the point, it’s well worth asking, in reading an author who fills his works with arcane knowledge, history, philosophy, poetry, and so on, when we are already steeping ourselves in such information at almost every moment of our waking lives, and at least for all that we might get a few positive words from a teacher at the end of it? Pynchon is known for his big stuff, monsters of novels like Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, often set in a meticulously crafted version of the past but dealing with the concerns of the present in ways both direct and more subtle. More than anyone else this side of 1900, Pynchon’s novels are novels of ideas.

So then, it is something of a surprise to come across Inherent Vice, a book which at 369 pages seems positively anaemic from Pynchon. The setting, California in 1970, is no grand historical gesture but rather straight out his own youth too – Tom was born in 1937. Regular Pynchon tomes aren’t devoid of drugs and danger, but here the cloud of weed smoke and cop-show crime-fighting violence that accompanies private eye hero Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello fits right in as just a sign of the times. The plot – and there is, more or less, a plot – is not too complicated either, at least compared with Gravity’s Rainbow’s. Doc is visited by an old girlfriend, Shasta Fey Hepworth, who tells him her current boyfriend, real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann, may be about to be kidnapped and brainwashed by his wife and her boyfriend on account of his, Mickey’s, decision that it was time to start giving back to the poor, instead of buying their houses for development. Only, Wolfmann gets kidnapped by someone else early on, dead men turn up alive, Shasta disappears, and Doc goes on a chase that may or may not be of the wild-goose variety, all while discovering clues about a shadowy group/business/drug cartel/boat called the Golden Fang. It is confusing, and I know I could have understood it more, but with Pynchon you know you’ve gone wrong when things start making sense, so it’s best just to focus on the ride.

And what a ride it is. Pynchon mashes genres – this is no stuffy academic prose you’ve got here. Cop shows, Raymond Chandler’s crime novels, the movies and books of the sixties are all at times parodied or played straight, giving the book an easy accessibility and light tone. “She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to” – the book’s opening sentence – drops it in a crime novel mood you just can’t tell whether to take seriously or not right from the get-go. “She” instead of a name suggests a femme fatale, adds mystery; “alley” and “back steps” are all standard locales for your crime scenes; and “always used to” adds history, flavour and colour to a relationship that means our detective won’t only have difficulties on the job. While the book is occasionally serious, at other times it’s more than happy to satirise its own world: one of my favourite descriptions was of a street looking “like a crime scene waiting on its next crime.”

Parody of genres isn’t the only way this book is funny. Pynchon’s humour is refreshingly moronic. One conversation between a black gangster and Doc ends with the former saying: “Sledge was right, you are one crazy white motherfucker.” Doc: “How can you tell?” Him: “I counted”. The characters all have idiotic names, packed with puns and other meanings. Even the pretentious presumption on the part of novels to tell us what to think is mocked by such advice as “Can’t say it often enough – change your hair, change your life” from Doc’s friend Sortilège. After one person is encased in concrete underneath a bridge a character says that it brings new meaning to the phrase “pillar of the community.” Pynchon’s humour is one of the main ways in which the novel consciously tries to avoid being a stuffy highbrow tome, and instead be a part of a relaxed cultural environment where the pleasure of the text doesn’t have to be mingled with the pain of trying to understand.

There is some meaning and thematic heaviness here, though, if that’s your cup of tea. Dealing with California at the beginning of the 70s is to deal with a community that is breaking up, a paradise that is rapidly being lost. The trials of Charles Manson and his followers are constantly referenced with fear and trepidation. Here was someone who had turned the hippie lifestyle and dreams of world peace on their head, with catastrophic results. Inherent Vice follows the music makers and dopers whose community Manson was just on the edge of. Growing police corruption is hinted at, and though Pynchon is more than happy to complain about his usual bogeyman – capitalism and its effect on humankind – he doesn’t just blame money and Henry Kissinger for destroying the dream of weed and wacky hair-dos. At one point Doc walks past a new music shop and sees a bunch of children listening to music, all using different headphones. “Doc was used to outdoor concerts where thousands of people congregated to listen to music for free, and where it all got sort of blended together into a single public self, because everybody was having the same experience. But here, each person was listening in solitude, confinement and mutual silence.” Technology and our relationship to it is as much to blame for the destruction of our community as is money. An “inherent vice”, a fault inside this seeming perfection, is the root of its eventual collapse. At another point, Doc watches a whole load of people sitting and watching TV, and all he feels for it is loneliness. That is the feeling that pervades the book, once the veneer of light humour and mad antics is brushed aside. The fear that the good days are ending, and things are only going to get worse if we’re not careful.

And all of these fears and worries, once we scrape away the satire and the humour, are delivered in a prose that is without a doubt among the most lyrical and beautiful being produced today. Because jokes aren’t serious enough for the honest concern that underlies the work. Listen to this sentence about Shasta, looking out to sea: “It wasn’t headlights – before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety”. The connections between people are what Doc, as a private eye, is all about. And it is these connections that are under threat by forces and human error, dragging people away from each other. In another moment of beauty and poignancy Pynchon writes of Doc and Shasta again: “Later they went outside, where a light rain was blowing in, mixed with salt spray feathering off the surf. Shasta wandered slowly down to the beach and through the wet sand, her nape in a curve she had learned, from times when back-turning came into it, the charm of. Doc followed the points of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool’s attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it did. The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the dark and be lost forever, some to edge into the fitful light of his attention whether he wanted to see them or not. Shasta had nailed it. Forget who – what was he working for anymore?” The book doesn’t just tell us about the problems that face society, or rail against their causes. For perhaps the first time, Pynchon truly shows the human side of things, the effect of all this chaos and isolation on you and me.

The power of the work lies in the way that its themes – and there are far more than the ones I just mentioned – creep up on us when we least expect it. But that’s not to say the work is perfect – far from it: in fact, it’s one of the weaker novels Pynchon has produced. The jokes do occasionally fall flat, the whole thing is still confusing as ever; but more than anything else the smaller scale of the work means that these little foibles are not coated in the grandeur that a hefty tome rightly or wrongly usually manages to inspire. The writing is beautiful, but it’s hard here to forgive Pynchon’s reluctance to clarify what is going on – not in the sense of explaining the conspiracy, but rather just in reminding us, every so often who is doing what, and why. What makes this book accessible, and a good introduction to his work – its short length; its fewer, relatively well-made characters; and comparative closure at the end – are also the things that hurt it. The short length brings with it a different set of expectations on the part of the reader, and these it struggles to meet.

With all that said, Pynchon and Inherent Vice are still important for us as students and others who have to deal with swathes of knowledge on a day to day basis, and not only because even in Inherent Vice we find a book that is complex and filled with interesting and thought-provoking questions and themes. No, the importance is not in the themes, but in Pynchon’s attitude towards them. Most of the things we are forced to read at Cambridge or other universities are thematically dense by design, and when we write essays we go off with magnifying glasses, searching for key ideas and perfect little quoticles. In a world where every moment has to be useful and every article has to have import upon our next piece of work, Pynchon’s stoner’s voice telling us just to chill out and enjoy the ride could never be more timely. Of course there are things to be found, hidden themes and connections, but the book teaches us that they don’t need to matter, that our own enjoyment, and our own choices, always come first. Enjoy yourselves, smoke some weed if that’s your thing, and relax.