By Stuart Mitchner

The eyes of a New York woman are the twilit side of the moon…

—Thomas Pynchon, from V

Going back to the beginning of my lightly marked up copy of Pynchon’s first novel V (Lippincott 1963), I found a paragraph I should have mentioned here last month:

“You felt she’d done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have been for her a city of smoke, its streets the courtyards of limbo, its bodies like wraiths. Smoke seemed to be in her voice, in her movements; making her all the more substantial, more there, as if words, glances, small lewdnesses could only become baffled and brought to rest like smoke in her long hair; remain there useless till she released them, accidentally and unknowingly, with a toss of her head.”

I marked the paragraph and penciled “Rachel” in the margin. The syntax goes a little crazy with the eyes looking out of the haze at you “sexy and fathomless,” an awkward bit that somehow eluded copyeditors who were about to embark on an almost 500-page-long adventure with a first-time author they’d never heard of.

The Plastic Surgeon’s Clock

The same second chapter, titled “The Whole Sick Crew,” begins with Rachel Owlglass walking to work at a downtown employment agency after a contentious meeting with an Upper East Side plastic surgeon named Shale Schoenmaker. If you’ve been reading and rereading as much Pynchon as I have this year, you’ll be struck by the contrast between the author’s intriguingly disjointed portrait of smoky Rachel and the mathematically precise performance in prose delivered on a turn-of-the-century clock in Schoenmaker’s outer office:

“The double face was suspended by four golden flying buttresses above a maze of works, enclosed in clear Swedish lead glass. The pendulum didn’t swing back and forth but was in the form of a disc, parallel to the floor and driven by a shaft which paralleled the hands at six o’clock. The disc turned a quarter-revolution one way, then a quarter-revolution the other, each reversed torsion on the shaft advancing the escarpment a notch. Mounted on the disc were two imps or demons, wrought in gold, posed in fantastic attitudes. Their movements were reflected in the mirror along with the window at Rachel’s back, which extended from floor to ceiling and revealed the branches and green needles of a pine tree. The branches whipped back and forth in the February wind, ceaseless and shimmering, and in front of them the two demons performed their metronomic dance beneath a vertical array of golden gears and ratchet wheels, levers and springs which gleamed warm and gay as any ballroom chandelier.”

“A Secret”

The quest for Pynchon’s mysterious “V” (no, it’s not Valletta or Victoria Manganese) reminds me of the Maltese falcon that Bogart’s Sam Spade calls “the stuff that dreams are made of” in John Huston’s film. Truth be told, the novel’s real mystery woman is the Bennington girl who exchanged “witty, desperate, passionate” letters with Benny Profane, Pynchon’s presumptive alter ego who now and again would feel the “invisible, umbilical tug” and “wonder how much his own man he was. One thing he had to give her credit for, she’d never called it a Relationship.” When he asked her “what is it then,” she’d said “A secret,” with “her small child’s smile, which like Rodgers and Hammerstein in 3/4 time rendered Profane fluttery and gelatinous.” Rachel visited him “at night, like a succubus, coming in with the snow. There was no way he knew to keep either out.”

Rachel and Rebekah

I might never have completed my second expedition through the badlands of Pynchon’s inimitable Mason & Dixon (Holt Picador 1997) but for the presence of Charles Mason’s dead wife Rebekah, who actually takes up only a small share of the book’s 771 pages and yet holds the story in spiritual thrall. After she appears “in an ordinary Dream,” Mason “prays to see her Face in the new Comet, — each night, this time, in terror of not seeing it. He tries to will it there, yet is amazed that for some Minutes now, he cannot even remember her Face. Yet at last arrives a clear night of seeing, so clear in fact that sometime after Midnight, supine in the Star-light, rigid with fear, Mason experiences a curious optical re-adjustment. The stars no longer spread as though upon a Dom’d Surface, — he now beholds them in the Third Dimension as well, — the Eye creating its own Zed-Axis, along which the star-chok’d depths near and far rush inward and away, and soon, quite soon, billowing out of control.”

The Performing Self

During this year of reading and finally finishing V, I’ve had Richard Poirier’s The Performing Self (Oxford 1971) close at hand. In his preface, Poirier identifies the sculpture on the cover as an unfinished work by Michelangelo, one of four “Captives” displayed at the Accademia in Florence. Pynchon appears in the opening chapter among “the great American writers who have sought to promote the elements of eccentricity in the sounds that make up America.”

A nudge from the beyond tells me that Poirier, who died in 2009, would have quoted the long paragraph that follows upon Pynchon’s dissertation on Schoenmaker’s turn-of-the-century clock, not because he never hesitated to quote a passage too long to quote, but because the passage I almost ignored is even more true to the clockwork essence of the novel:

“Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45°, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? Or was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light and be only, till death stopped the heart’s ticking (metronome’s music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an imp’s dance under the century’s own chandeliers. . . .”

May 8

When I finished V on May 8, Pynchon’s 89th birthday, I was reminded of the summation concluding my review of his longest novel, Against the Day (2007): “What he has always managed to accomplish, and never before so well as here, is to range smoothly between one-dimensional, even college-humor-magazine-level slapstick and profound themes eloquently expressed. The measure of a work as ambitious as Against the Day is that the book itself becomes the ultimate arbiter of its own inventions, its metaphors, its tricks, its systems, its vision of the world, or, as Pynchon puts it: “What the world might be” — “which is one of the main purposes of fiction.”

To Read or Not To Read

At the Pynchonian moment, I’m thinking of a conversation I had with my primary care physician during a wellness visit that coincided with the appearance of the April 15 column, (“Rachel Owlglass, Oedipa Maas, and The America Enigma”). As the doctor was checking my vitals, I asked, “Have you ever read Thomas Pynchon?” and suddenly he was smiling. “I just started The Crying of Lot 49,” he said.

I left a copy of that week’s issue of Town Topics with his receptionist. After visiting the same doctor a week later, my wife returned with the news that, alas, he hadn’t been able to “get into” either novel. Knowing that he was a serious reader (in 2006, when he still lived on our delivery route, we discussed Cormac McCarthy’s The Road), I’m thinking of all the readers who want to read this great American writer but have given up. Which is why so much of this column is devoted to providing something more substantial than brief sample passages from his work.