A Thomas Pynchon gallery...
















It was Paul Cavacuiti who first turned me on to Pynchon. (Oddly enough he also lent me the ropey C90 with a tantalizing fragment of Zappa's 'Watermelon in Easter Hay' and so ever since Pynchon and Zappa have been linked in my mind).

How to convey the frisson of reading these first stories? The cover art, dodgy printing, small limited issue format - this was the late 70s before Amazon, Abebooks, eBay where nowadays you can find just about anything if you've the time, patience and Visa card. Where did I find these volumes? Maybe amid the ramshackle shelving of Foyles Fiction department, Collets down the road, or was it Compendium? I never tracked down 'Entropy' to make the collection complete. For that I had to call it up from the bowels of the Bodleian. It arrived in a brown wallet, tied around with string - I was still adolescent enough to feel that this was like dipping into some arcane pornography.* Would MI5 get my number? Conspiracies shadowed me as I left the Reading Room ...

Then Picador spoiled it all by bringing out The Slow Learner including Pynchon's introduction where he was even brazen enough to mention Zappa. What! But that was our secret! Only I had made this connection!

Maybe this was the thrill of Pynchon - a sense of active paranoia in the very acquisition and furtive reading of the texts. We were all Oedipas on the quest of our personal Pierce Inverarities. Pynchon made library burrowing and footnote trawling sexy, hush-hush, a nod and a wink. We were all onto something (no idea what - but who cared?). Why, probably, I can't get remotely excited about Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. I didn't even find Eco's Name of the Rose that compelling (too much like research being rehashed into fiction).

The last book I read by Pynchon was Vineland and that badly. It came out at the wrong time for me and since then I've not found the time or inclination to get back in The Zone. Mason Dixon stands like a massive slab on the bookcase - when will I find the time, though? I don't even dare buy the more recent stuff.

I'd love to recover that excitement - the crazy sense of urgency that sent me round London bookstores at the rumour that a new Pynchon novel had been published (only to discover it was an April Fool in Time Out); the wide-eyed wow factor of seeing an actual photo of The Man. (And was that Him - my Dark Angelo - hiding his face on the cover of 'Mortality and Mercy in Vienna'?).

Those were the days ...

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* Reading early Iain Sinclair volumes of poetry in the Poetry Library - the original editions - had something of a similar effect some years later. The Paladin reprints have none of the nastiness, insinuations, occult menace. Mass paperbacks really can kill the visceral charge of some writing.