"Bleeding Edge" due in September

All the way back to the Visto, Mason is seiz'd by Monology. "Text, --" he cries, and more than once, "it is Text, -- and we are its readers, and its Pages are the Days turning. Unscrolling, as a Pilgrim's Itinery map in ancient Days...."
--Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, p. 497-98

I know what i'll be doing in September: I'll be reading the new Thomas Pynchon novel, Bleeding Edge!

From the New York Daily News:

"The novel will be set in Silicon Alley, a nickname for the cluster of tech firms based in Manhattan, many of them in the Flatiron District.
According to a Penguin 2012 results report, quoted by the Times, the novel will take place in 2001, "in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11."

I have high hopes for Bleeding Edge, even though I was relatively disappointed with Inherent Vice, his last novel published in 2009. It was amusing, and contained enough of those awesome moments of sublime paranoiac horror to keep me satiated, but in the end it felt like a minor effort, along the lines of DeLillo's The Body Artist (but much funnier then that curious little book).

Short Thought: Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon"

The New York Times takes the occasion of the availability of Thomas Pynchon's oeuvre in eBook format to sing the praises of Mason & Dixon. I keep threatening to write a long-form essay on how good this book is, and while that'll probably never happen, IMO M&D is every bit as good as Gravity's Rainbow, albeit not with his more famous work's hallucinatory intensity. Instead, Pynchon focuses on the enlightenment and the prehistory of the United States in a comic romp that becomes increasingly dark as our heroes draw their line deeper and deeper into the wilderness. Although it does take a while to get used to TRP's faux 17th century prose, once you relax into it, his writing takes you on a journey back to the days of wigs and revolution. To choose just one example:

"Does Britannia, when it sleeps, dream? Is America her dream? -- in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of mankind, seen, -- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true, -- Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied back in, back to the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments, -- winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair."
--Mason & Dixon, Chapter 34, pg. 345.

Looks intimidating, doesn't it? Don't be scared, though - it gets easier the more you read it, and the book rewards the work you put into it. (And if you need any help, just use the wiki!) It's a classic. I've read it twice already and will no doubt go back for a third go-round.

No Pulitzer This Year

On Monday, it was announced that the Pulitzer Prize board had withheld its fiction award for 2012. Speculation ran rampant as to why this occured for the first time in 35 years. For more, we go to the WSJ, who clarifies:

"In an interview with the Daily Beast, Maureen Corrigan, one of the three judges for the Pulitzer prize in fiction, clarifies that it wasn’t the judges, but the larger Pulitzer board that decided not to award a prize this year:

“I can safely say that anger and surprise/shock, and just sort of feeling this is an inexplicable decision on the part of the board—that really characterizes, I think, the way all three of us feel,” Corrigan said. “The obvious answer is to let the [jury] pick. We’re the people who have gone through the 300 novels. All the board is asked to do is to read three top novels that we’ve given to them…In fact, what’s happened today is a lot of the articles and blog posts have gotten it wrong—they’ve been blaming the three of us!”

“Honestly, I feel angry on behalf of three great American novels,” added Corrigan, a critic for NPR who also teaches at Georgetown University. According to the Pulitzer’s ground rules, the choice of the judges (or an alternative selection) must be approved by a majority of the board. Evidently that didn’t happen this year."

I am surprised that the larger board didn't feel that any of the three novels - Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, Karen Russell's Swamplandia! and David Foster Wallace's unfinished The Pale King - were worth promoting. I think one needs to consider the make up of the board: only one novelist - Junot Diaz - is on the board, and the rest are made up of journalists, reviewers, and academics. Are they really the best judge of the best literature in the land? Personally, I haven't put a lot of faith in the fiction Pulitzer Prize since I learned that in 1974 the board rejected Gravity's Rainbow, the unanimous consensus of the jury. They refused to give an award that year. From the 5/8/74 NYT:

"...members of the 14-member board, which makes recommendations on the 18 Pulitzer Prize categories ... had described the Pynchon novel during their private debate as "unreadable," "turgid," "overwritten," and in parts "obscene." One member editor said he had tried hard but had only gotten a third of the way through the 760-page book."

If the board reacts this way to one of the best books of the 20th century, god knows what their reaction is to the best of contemporary literature. If they don't like the three finalists, that means I should pick up my copies today!

Book Review: Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama

Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama is a beautifully-written novel that combines steampunk, revolutionary and authoritarianism politics, druggy subcultures, and anthropology together in an extremely entertaining brew. It takes place sometime in the not-so-distant past in the Arctic city of New Venice, a metropolis filled with wondrous Victorian-era inventions, including machinery that sustains life so close to the North Pole. The story focuses on two heroes: Brentford is the greenhouse administrator in charge of growing the city’s food. He’s part of the city’s nobility but dreams of reviving the city from its corrupt government by democratically integrating New Venice with the surrounding native cultures. He makes up half of an odd couple with Gabriel, a dissolute dandy musician who staggers through the book under the influence of a wide variety of drugs (a commonplace New Venetian pastime for combating the boredom of the short winter days). They both struggle in their own ways – high and low – against the authoritarianism creeping through the city, and one of the more fascinating aspects of the book is how convincingly Valtat depicts the creeping reach of the government, the dread of those subject to it, and the diverse and subtle ways that different subcultures combat it.

Aurorarama feels like a steampunk novel, but Valtat rarely allows the conventions of that genre to become stilted, partly as a result of his inventive wordplay drawn from English, his native French, the Nordic languages, and the Intuit, the latter from which he references wondrously bizarre arctic mythologies (the Kiggertarpok, or the Intuit “polar kangaroo,” plays a major role.) His Pynchon-lite sentences snake around their meaning, never afraid to take a digression into a fascinating detail or fun description before working its way back to the main point. The effect is relentlessly inventive, as when he writes: “Snow redesigned the streets with hints of another architecture, even more magnificent, more fanciful than it already was, all spires and pinnacles on pale palaces of pearl and opal. All that new Venice should have been reappeared through its partial disappearance. It was as if the city were dreaming about itself and crystallizing both that dream and the ethereal unreality of it.”

Despite all of its strengths, the book’s tone oscillates wildly as the action leaves New Venice to wander around the arctic wastes. For instance, a well-scripted horror scene featuring a group of undead explorers dubbed the “Phantom Patrol” awkwardly gives way to a utopian society living in a giant emerald embedded in the arctic permafrost. These tone changes take their toll on the main story, although the refreshingly revolutionary ending picks up the pace again, despite what I thought were sub-plots that were tied up a little too neatly (it read like a pale imitation of one of Neil Stephenson’s apocalyptic endings (The Diamond Age being the best example)).

But don’t let these quibbles disparage a novel that’s a hell of a ride. Valtat’s a great storyteller, and his bizarre and wonderful world has continued to linger in my mind in the weeks since I’ve read it.

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Cross Posted on Thought Ambience.