Since the 1960s and ’70s, when he made his name with “V.,” “The Crying of Lot 49” and the 900-page, National Book Award-winning “Gravity’s Rainbow,” Thomas Pynchon has been tagged with various highfalutin epithets: experimental writer, postmodernist, systems novelist. Gore Vidal, writing in The New York Review of Books in 1976, assigned Pynchon to the “R and D (Research and Development)” wing of contemporary literature. For Vidal, the opposite of R&D was R&R — the kind of fiction people might read for pleasure.
Nearly 50 years and five novels later, we can say that Vidal was half right. While Pynchon is properly celebrated as a formidable literary innovator, he is less often recognized as a great entertainer, a master of R&R. His books are challenging, mind-blowing, precedent-shattering — all of that, yes. They’re also a lot of fun.
So what if, as a kind of taxonomic experiment, we peeled off those academic-sounding labels and reshelved Pynchon’s eight novels in a pulpier part of the bookstore? (His ninth, “Shadow Ticket,” will be published on Oct. 7.) What if Pynchon is really, underneath it all, a genre writer?
I know, a Pynchon novel is a genre unto itself. His pages bristle with historical arcana and scientific data, some of it factual, some fantastical. His paragraphs swerve and digress. His characters have crazy names and crazier occupations. His prose is an inimitable amalgam of high and low; smutty and sublime; koans, data dumps and dad jokes. His wayward hopscotch plots defy summary, forcing deadline-addled critics to throw up their hands and cry “shaggy dog!”
But hear me out: Those plots encompass crime capers, costume dramas, spy thrillers and combat epics. Pynchon’s pages teem with spies, gumshoes, femmes fatales and popeyed sailor men. If his books don’t exactly follow genre formulas, they nonetheless reliably dispense genre gratification. His dizzying inventions are built on a sturdy, sometimes half-invisible scaffolding of popular fiction.
There’s more to it than that, of course. Graduate students revere him for a reason. But let’s roll with the conceit and proceed, in Pynchonesque fashion, to feed his defiantly anti-algorithmic work through a handmade mock algorithm. If you want an anarchist Dan Brown, a horny Robert Ludlum, a countercultural David Baldacci, Pynchon might be your man. Maybe that’s a stretch, and maybe (definitely) none of these books will stay in these conceptual boxes. But here are eight purposely whimsical recommendation prompts, gateways to a fictional universe that finally defies all categorization.
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