News out of Hollywood this past weekend was that production has wrapped on Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, “The Battle of Baktan Cross.” The movie, scheduled for release next August, has a rumored budget of $150 million and a star-studded cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall and Sean Penn. But book nerds have another reason to anxiously await the film: Rumor has it that it’s based on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.
“Anderson adapts Pynchon novel” is a headline that might make some studio executives cringe—Anderson’s 2014 silver screen take on Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice was a commercial failure—but Pynchon fans will get a chance to revisit what is perhaps the famous writer’s most overlooked novel. Most readers probably think of V, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49 or Mason & Dixon when we think of Pynchon, not Vineland.
Born in 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, to an Episcopalian father and a Catholic mother, Pynchon was a bit of a child prodigy, graduating from high school at 16 and enrolling at Cornell University to study engineering physics.
He left Cornell and enlisted in the Navy after his sophomore year, serving on a destroyer. When he returned to Cornell in 1957, English had replaced physics as his primary interest. Pynchon wrote short stories for the college paper and literary magazine, and apparently also attempted to write a science-fiction musical (a fan since childhood of science fiction, he later proposed writing a libretto based on, I kid you not, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles).
His roommates included C. Michael Curtis, later the fiction editor for The Atlantic, and the novelist and songwriter Richard Fariña. Pynchon was later the best man at Fariña’s wedding (to Joan Baez’s sister Mimi) and a pallbearer at his funeral, and Gravity’s Rainbow is dedicated to him. In a 2022 essay for The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone noted that Pynchon’s friends at Cornell considered him “very Catholic,” with one saying Pynchon “went to Mass and confessed, though to what would be a mystery.”
After graduation from Cornell and a brief stint in New York while applying for writing fellowships, Pynchon worked at Boeing in Seattle in 1960—an experience that would inform his debut novel, V, as well as The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. It is possible Pynchon had met an oddball Jesuit or two along the way, as one of the characters in V is a Jesuit priest who haunts the New York City sewers attempting to convert the city’s rats.
When V was published in 1963 (and nominated for the National Book Award), Pynchon quit Boeing and moved to Mexico—where he was first tracked down by reporters looking for a quote, a picture, anything from the author. Pynchon is legendarily private about his personal life, so most biographical material about him is more or less speculative; one reporter in 1977 claimed that Pynchon was actually J. D. Salinger. He does not do interviews and has only been photographed a handful of times over the past six decades. One exception was his vocal appearance on two episodes of “The Simpsons”—see the photo above—where he was depicted with a bag over his head.
After bouncing around from Mexico to New York to Berkeley to Houston, Pynchon landed in Manhattan Beach in Southern California, in an apartment just blocks from the beach. The source material for the surf culture that appears in several of his books is likely drawn in large part from his time there. (His go-to restaurant in those years was El Tarasco, a Michoacán-themed stand started by two Mexican immigrants in 1969, just a few blocks from his apartment. It’s still there.)
The Crying of Lot 49 appeared in 1966. Fans of the short-lived but beloved television show “Lodge 49” will note the nod to Pynchon’s novel in the title—show creator Jim Gavin told America in 2018 that “Pynchon’s influence was there whether I intended it or not. He was an author I devoured in my 20s.”
Next, Gravity’s Rainbow appeared in 1973, cementing Pynchon’s status as a serious novelist (and making him more of a target for inquisitive reporters and fans; by some accounts Pynchon had blacked out all the windows of his beach apartment by that time). Gravity’s Rainbow was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Award. Pynchon refused to attend the ceremony for the latter, sending standup comic Irwin Corey in his stead.
America wasn’t always in the vanguard when it came to reviewing postmodern fiction in its early days, but Pynchon was an exception. Already in 1966, Thomas Fleming praised V in an essay on “The Novel of the Future,” and later that year James Lindroth favorably reviewed The Crying of Lot 49. “Pynchon’s new novel, like the first, reveals a fantastic, at times precious, imagination, a mastery of the satirical vignette—and most importantly, a firm belief in the meaning of existence,” wrote Lindroth, adding that “Pynchon’s writing has the density of poetry and, for those who will not be put off by the apparent tomfoolery, the rewards.”
Seven years later, Lindroth reviewed Gravity’s Rainbow with a bold opening line: “Gravity’s Rainbow is so symbolically dense, so rich in poetic imagery and so comically vital that perhaps only two other books, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, provide the reader with the proper perspective on its complexities.” That, friends, is some solid book blurb material.
Though short stories, essays and book reviews appeared from time to time, it would be 17 years before the appearance of Pynchon’s fourth novel, Vineland. The novel received mixed reviews—okay, mostly negative reviews—but it has always been the Pynchon novel that made the most sense to me; its biting satire and menagerie of characters give it a hint of Catch-22, except in California.
Seven years later, Mason & Dixon appeared—all 784 pages of it—to rave reviews. Three more novels—Against The Day, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge—have followed since. There are rumors of a ninth novel in the works, though Pynchon naturally hasn’t told us a thing.
The aforementioned Nick Ripatrazone has written several times of Pynchon’s Catholic (and Jesuit) characters and themes, noting in Church Life Journal that while “we know nothing of Pynchon’s personal faith after his years at Cornell,” at the same time the influence of Catholicism on him can be found on the page:
Pynchon’s fiction suggests that postmodern writers raised in the Catholic tradition do not merely dispose of the faith once lapsed. In fact, these writers, who were preternaturally drawn toward both high and low culture, symbol and extravagant metaphor, wordplay and literary performance, found all of these elements in a faith they once practiced.
Ripatrazone isn’t the only one to notice. In 2023, Alan Jacobs called Pynchon “America’s theologian” in The Hedgehog Review. While noting that Pynchon’s novels “seem to be dominated by the concerns of a late-twentieth-century secular world,” Jacobs also identified another strain in his fiction:
Whatever his religious belief or unbelief, theological elements are central to his imagination, and over the course of his long career have assumed a distinctive shape that is worthy of our closest attention, above all because these elements so powerfully address American culture today: a culture that wants to be thought spiritual but never religious, to use history as a weapon but never acknowledge it as an inheritance, to worship its own technologies while simultaneously lamenting their tyrannical power.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Gibbous Moon,” by Alfred Nicol. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Poet, feminist and nun: Sister Madeleva Wolff
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Who’s in hell? Hans Urs von Balthasar had thoughts.
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
