The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (review)

Thomas Pynchon joins Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Don Delillo, and John Updike on the list of US novelists to merit a Cambridge Companion during their lifetime, a significant milestone in the 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 that Pynchon’s career can stand for the precedence of postmodernism in that historical period. A wider readership, however, might find as much interest in what the limits of Pynchon studies, and the associated claim for the enduring relevance of mid-1980s theory, tell us about postmodernism’s relation to contemporary canonicity.

The editors’ brief introduction establishes the book’s necessity: there are currently “relatively few books aimed specifically at those who study and teach Pynchon,” and even fewer “that the non-academic reader could pick up and read with pleasure and profit” (2). Starting from a point intelligible to Pynchon novices, the 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 the heading of “Canon” introduce Pynchon’s various works, outlining the infamously complex plots, examining representative passages, and pointing to sustained thematic concerns. There follow three chapters addressing his distinctive forms of narrative-making under the 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 the critical and theoretical roles his work has been made to play within the academy.

This structure readably scaffolds some very complex ideas: anyone starting from page one would be well prepared to assess the “Issues” chapters’ wide-ranging claims. Indeed, so lucid is the exposition throughout that the book makes almost as good an introduction to canonically postmodern approaches to the fiction of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as it does to Pynchon in particular. Furthermore, in spite of the vastness of its subject’s novels, the companion comes in at under two hundred pages, around fifty below the average for the 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 the alienating aspects of Pynchon’s styles and structures, and the overall effect is to disarm his exaggerated reputation for inaccessibility.

Providing a point of access is not the limit of the editors’ ambition, however, and their other stated aim, to compile “advanced specialist insights, reflecting the state of the art in the field” (2–3), is more problematic. If the varying contributors can be said to offer a unifying argument, it is best summarised by Brian McHale’s contention that our understanding of postmodernism is as dependent on Pynchon’s work as our understanding of that oeuvre is on the social and theoretical contexts of postmodernity. The ‘state of the art’ in Pynchon studies is thus hard to untie from models of postmodernism that emerged during the process of his initial critical canonization.

John N. Duvall, introducing his Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945, suggests that the “postmodern metafictions” of the Pynchon generation now represent little more than “the dead hand of history” to scholars of, and authors within, the contemporary (2012, 4). The Pynchon companion operates, unsurprisingly, on very different axioms, best summed up by David Cowart’s contention, in his chapter on “Pynchon in Literary History,” that—far from being “superannuated”—Pynchon’s methods and preoccupations have grown into the “default” logic of mainstream entertainment in the US today (Dalsgaard, Herman, and McHale 2012, 94, 95). Even...