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Reviewed by:
  • Pynchon’s California ed. by Scott McClintock, John Miller
  • Casey Shoop
Scott McClintock and John Miller, eds., Pynchon’s California. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2014. 228pp. Paper, $45; e-book, $45.

As the proverbial “end” of the nation’s manifest destiny, California has long been overdetermined in the historical imagination: from the land of milk and honey to the land of millenarian last hours. No writer is perhaps more attuned to this ambivalent destiny than Thomas Pynchon, whose novels have repeatedly field-tested its prospects and possibilities. To date he has situated three novels in that fertile territory (The Crying of Lot 49 [1966], Vineland [1990], and Inherent Vice [2009]) and brought two others to rest there (Gravity’s Rainbow [1973] and Against the Day [2006]). The publication of Scott McClintock and John Miller’s edited collection of essays is thus an overdue and much-needed critical exploration of this connection between Pynchon and the place where history is so often presumed to end, for better or worse.

Taken together, the essays argue for what Margaret Lynd in the volume’s lead essay calls the “situated knowledges” of Pynchon’s California fiction over against what the editors see as the prevalent critical tendency to read “in the microcosm of California any ‘totalizing’ order of domination by postmodern, late ‘Capital’” (9). The essays demonstrate a wide-ranging and vital attention to the specific historical and regional contexts of Pynchon’s engagement with California. Hanjo Berressem, for example, offers a free-spirited reading of the state’s peculiar ecology in the “California trilogy.” Bill Millard insightfully tracks the sordid political history of land use and real estate through Inherent Vice, while Stephen Hock pursues the emblematic modernity of roads and freeways in Pynchon’s novels toward their ultimate expression in the California highway system. And Lynd finds in the smaller, more character-driven plots of the California novels a modicum of “situated hope” and agency against the rectilinear course of historical catastrophe that propels [End Page 260] Pynchon’s larger world-historical novels (22). In a manner that both complements and diverges from the concerns of those contrapuntal epics, Pynchon’s California makes a persuasive case for the intimacy of historical experience in the California trilogy (the 1960s through the 1980s), the felt-sense of an epoch lived through in tones both promissory and elegiac.

At the same time, this attention to the “local, regionally specific and ‘situated’ features of Pynchon’s California fictions” has its limits (9). Writing about California is challenging precisely because of the perceived conflict between the regional and historical specificities of place on the one hand, and the allegorical leveraging of that place into national and international meanings that far exceed it on the other. Rather than privileging one side of this opposition, Pynchon’s California would have benefited from a more dialectical account of the connections between the local and the global that California stages in the period Pynchon’s novels traverse. Posing questions about the relationship between periodization and place in his work makes this need clear: how do Pynchon’s novels imagine the growth of the California information economy that so deeply altered the US labor market? What is the link between Pynchon’s fascination with Hollywood image-culture and the dream-life of capitalism more generally? How does the California rise of Reaganism that so preoccupies Pynchon augur a crisis of faith for the legacy of sixties radicalism not only at Berkeley but also around the world? How do Pynchon’s California novels help us reconceptualize the global phenomenon of postmodernism, a concept that seems so indelibly Californian in its articulation?

On this last question, the editors are loath to rehearse the “by now all-too-familiar portrayal of California as a postmodern space of superficiality” and eager to “offer an alternative to the construction of Pynchon as postmodern ironist” (8, 9). I see this reduction of postmodernism to an aesthetic category as something of a lost opportunity for Pynchon’s California: when postmodernism is conceptualized as a periodizing term for the postwar economic and cultural transformations in the capitalist world-system, as in the influential accounts of Fredric...

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