The American novelist Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) is best known for V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland, and Mason & Dixon, complex fictions noted for their encyclopedic erudition and parodistic, labyrinthine plots. Thomas...

Thomas Pynchon 's ancestral roots go deep into the soil of America--an appropriate genealogy for a writer whose overriding concern in his fictional project is the construction of "America" and the necessary conditions for living within that...

Thomas Pynchon 's willingness to address the most important cultural and social issues makes him an important writer. He depicts the plight of contemporary humanity caught in, rather than sustained by, a culture that celebrates technology and death...

Though a difficult literary author who has written only five novels in 35 years, Thomas Pynchon has remained a figure who has captured the imagination of a wider public and has avoided the academic and literary communities who revere him. His use of...

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I ought to be writing about Thomas Pynchon. His gargantuan new novel. But I’ve lost confidence in Mr. Pynchon, who hasn’t written a good book since Gravity’s Rainbow, 33 years ago, and so I found I couldn’t force myself to read the whole of Against...

I ought to be writing about Thomas Pynchon. His gargantuan new novel. But I’ve lost confidence in Mr. Pynchon, who hasn’t written a good book since Gravity’s Rainbow, 33 years ago, and so I found I couldn’t force myself to read the whole of...

Don't expect a lot of sunshine in Oprah Winfrey's latest book club pick. Publishing's leading hit-maker has chosen Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," a bleak, apocalyptic novel by an author who rarely talks to the media."It is so extraordinary," Winfrey said Wednesday. "I promise you, you'll...

gasp) socialize with their fellow New Yorkers. These hipsters tend to congregate in the southwest corner of the pool courtyard, isolating themselves from the splashing local families. They read trashy magazines and Atlas Shrugged. They take a dip—some even swimming a few laps. They have...

The image of the artist alone in his room is a familiar one, almost mandatory for any contemporary writer suspected of self-conscious narration. Pynchon does not disappoint his readers. His first novel [V.] provides a stereotype so clearly drawn that no one can miss the point. Fausto Maijstral is a poet and he is alone in his room…. To occupy the room is to accept the closed system as the environment of fiction and entropy as the metaphor for memory. What is a story if it is not a digression? While F...

When we read a Pynchon text we may be disconcerted by it, but we usually find ourselves comfortable with at least one of its elements: setting. In fact, Pynchon's mise en scène may be the only reason for calling his books novels. He is as archeologically precise about places and things as Flaubert, although he should probably be compared to the Flaubert of Salammbô. In that text, Flaubert transports Emma Bovary's problems back to Carthage, rendering both Emma and the setting abst...

On its surface, V is an incredibly active novel, with an immense cast of characters as vigorously in motion as a swarm of paramecia in a drop of swamp-water. They penetrate the sewer systems of Manhattan, yo-yo up and down the East Coast, rattle around Egypt, Florence, Malta, and South Africa; they change appearances, change identities, couple like rabbits, group and regroup, diffuse and drop out of sight as fast as motes in a beam of sunlight. The activity isn't completely pointless, since plots and...