By Stuart Mitchner

….What it’s like west of Ithaca and south of Princeton.

—Thomas Pynchon, from V.

Rachel Owlglass is asking Benny Profane to write to her “how the road is,” the “boy’s road” that she’ll “never see, with its Diesels and dust, roadhouses, crossroads, saloons,” Ithaca being Cornell, where Thomas Pynchon attended Vladimir Nabokov’s lectures on literature, and Princeton being where this columnist moved after attending Richard Poirier’s lectures on Pynchon.

Rereading V. for the first time since I quit halfway through (as I did with Mason & Dixon and Gravity’s Rainbow), I’m asking myself how I could walk out on a novel with a character as fetching as Rachel, who drives her MG “like one of the damned on holiday” and sweet talks it as she runs a sponge “caressingly over its front bumper (‘You know what I feel when we’re out on the road? Alone just us …. The way your brakes pull a little to the left, the way you start to shudder around 5000 rpm when you’re excited’).”

Equally loveable is the way Rachel walks the streets of Manhattan, with “a kind of brave sensual trudging: as if she were nosedeep in snowdrifts, and yet on route to meet a lover, … her grey coat fluttering a little in a breeze off the Jersey coast. Her high heels hit precise and neat each tie on the Xs of the grating in the middle of the mall. Half a year in this city and at least she had learned to do that. Had lost heels, and once in awhile composure, in the process; but now could do it blindfolded. She kept on the grating just to show off. To herself.” Where’s she headed? She’s on her way to pay for her friend Esther’s nose job, meanwhile giving the plastic surgeon a hard time (he tells her she’s “a nasty girl…and so pretty, too”).

April 15

I’ve compared my weekly task to tossing a pair of dice, but on April 15 it’s like being dealt an illegally loaded hand in an epic game of chance with cards featuring everyone from birthmates Leonardo DaVinci (1452), Henry James (1843), and Bessie Smith (1894), to deathmates Abraham Lincoln (1865), Matthew Arnold (1888), and Greta Garbo (1990), who seems as heavy as the fog in Anna Christie compared to 4’10 Rachel singing Pynchonesque torch songs in the shower “in a red-hot mama voice which the tile chamber magnified,” amusing people “because it came from such a little girl.” Now that I’ve introduced my favorite character (so far), I can go ahead and finish the novel in time for the author’s birthday early next month.

Nabokov at Cornell

Pynchon’s second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), begins with reference to “a sunrise over the library slope of Cornell University,” where the author of Lolita (1955) taught from 1948 to 1959. He discusses his time there in a Playboy interview (reprinted on longform.org): “I loved teaching, I loved Cornell, I loved composing and delivering my lectures on Russian writers and European great books. But around 60, and especially in winter, one begins to find hard the physical process of teaching, the getting up at a fixed hour every other morning, the struggle with the snow in the driveway, the march through long corridors to the classroom, the effort of drawing on the blackboard a map of James Joyce’s Dublin or the arrangement of the semi-sleeping car of the St. Petersburg-Moscow express in the early 1870s — without an understanding of which neither Ulysses nor Anna Karenina, respectively, makes sense. For some reason my most vivid memories concern examinations. Big amphitheater in Goldwin Smith. Exam from 8 a.m. to 10:30. About 150 students — unwashed, unshaven young males and reasonably well-groomed young females. A general sense of tedium and disaster. Half-past eight. Little coughs, the clearing of nervous throats, coming in clusters of sound, rustling of pages. Some of the martyrs plunged in meditation, their arms locked behind their heads. I meet a dull gaze directed at me, seeing in me with hope and hate the source of forbidden knowledge. Girl in glasses comes up to my desk to ask: ‘Professor Kafka, do you want us to say that…? Or do you want us to answer only the first part of the question?’ …. Windowpanes getting misty. Boys peeling off sweaters. Girls chewing gum in rapid cadence. Ten minutes, five, three, time’s up.”

Oedipa Maas

I wonder about the girl with glasses asking questions of “Professor Kafka.” My guess is that’s Nabokov having fun. I’m having fun myself imagining that Pynchon or one of his friends put her up to it. Maybe the glasses were a feint to cover the truth, which was that the girl was a Rachel Owlglass or, better yet, an Oedipa Maas from The Crying of Lot 49, which Pynchon was writing as the Beatles and Beatlemania landed in America. After all, Oedipa hangs out with the Paranoids, a Beatlesque foursome whose leader has written a lyric bemoaning “all those Humbert Humbert cats coming on so big and sick / For me, my baby was a woman / For him, she’s just another nymphet.”

I already mentioned the Cornell sunrise in the opening paragraph of Lot 49. What makes the moment sing and stay is Oedipa, who is already feeling the “kirsch” in the Tupperware party fondue, plus the news that she’s been named executrix of a vast estate. After speaking “the name of God” and trying to feel “as drunk as possible,” she envisons a hotel room in Mazatlán whose door had “just been slammed, it seemed forever, waking up two hundred birds down in the lobby.” As for that sunrise, nobody had ever seen it before because the slope faces west. But what opened the door of the book for me was that slammed door. Pynchon didn’t need to add the “dry, disconsolate tune” from the Bartók Concerto for Orchestra or the bust of Jay Gould. Everything was in the lobby at Mazatlán.

Plenty of Room

If any one living American novelist could fit April 15 birth and death mates into the same novel, it’s the author of Lot 49. How he goes about it is up to him, there’s plenty of room to range in this 138-page marked-to-the-max paperback, where The Courier’s Tragedy and the Tristero System coexist with a lost American battalion of GIs near Lago di Pietà during the reign of Charles I, a sect of Puritans “whose central hangup had to do with predestination.” As Henry James himself once put it — “our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task, the rest is the madness of art.”

Twenty years before he died, Matthew Arnold summed it up for the ages in “Dover Beach”: “Ah, love, let us be true to one another! for the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; and we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.”

In Poirier’s Class

My heavily marked-up copy of Lot 49 saw service decades ago in Richard Poirier’s “Recent American Literature” course. If anyone on the literary watch tower spotted Pynchon coming and sounded the news, it was Poirier in the June 1, 1963 New York Review of Books, although he was careful not to give the young author too easy a ride, terming V. “a designed indictment of its own comic elaborateness.” Reviewing the second novel at length in the May 1, 1966 New York Times, he linked Oedipa with Rachel Owlglass as “lovable, hapless, decent, eager girls” in novels “populated by self-mystified people running from the responsibilities of love and compelled by phantoms, puzzles, the power of Things. No plot, political, novelistic, or personal, can issue from the circumstances of love, from the simple human needs, say, of a Rachel or an Oedipa, and Pynchon implicitly mocks this situation by the Byzantine complications of plots which do evolve from circumstances devoid of love.” In the end, Poirier sees Oedipa as the hero in a book of The Faerie Queene, “tempted from her human virtues while on a quest that takes her through all manner of seemingly prearranged weirdness and monstrosity, all kinds of foreign ‘systems’ thriving within an America which is itself ‘a grand and so intricate enigma.’”

One truth I hold is that there’s no end to Pynchon. You may think you quit a novel in 1966, but you’ll go back in 2026, as I’ve been doing in this year of rereading. As for the grand American enigma, my wife just showed me the president’s Sunday self-portrait on Truth Social.