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Authors
Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937)
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Pynchon’s novels are V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Vineland(1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day (2006). Slow Learner (1984) collects early stories. Book-length studies are William M. Plater’s The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon (1978), Thomas H. Schaub’s Pynchon, The Voice of Ambiguity (1981), and David Seed’s The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (1988). Alan N. Brownlie studies the author’s first three novels in Thomas Pynchon’s Narratives: Subjectivity and the Problems of Knowing (2000), while the fourth and fifth novels are analyzed in Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery’s edited The Vineland Papers (1993) and Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin’s edited Pynchon and Mason & Dixon (2000), respectively. New critical essays are collected by Niran Abbas in Thomas Pynchon: Reading from The Margins (2003) and Ian D. Copestake in American Postmodernity: Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon (2003).
Thomas Pynchon is one of the most mysterious American writers of the twentieth century: though we know he was born on Long Island, attended Cornell University, and currently lives somewhere in California, the only other definite facts that remain are the five distinctive novels he has produced since the 1960s. Pynchon's voice is both eloquent and colloquial, exhibiting equal familiarity with science, history, and popular culture. Critics agree that he is one of the most daring and unique American novelists. Pynchon's works include V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Vineland (1990), and Mason & Dixon (1997).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Entropy (1984) includes classic Pynchon themes and strategies: the high-intensity anxiety about human experience, from worldly human foibles to frightening laws of physics and uncrackable conundrums in epistemology. We also have fast-moving, sometimes eloquent characters orating and tearing about in the foreground. You may feel similarities between this narrative and The Simpsons, other darkly toned comic work by Matt Groening and Berke Breathed, or some of the recent Hollywood dystopic comedies.
1. Good stories are supposed to run on characterization: personages presented to us should be compelling somehow, or complex, and what they do and how they fare should matter to the reader. Is that true for Entropy? If the story does not play by conventional rules, then what does it do instead to hold the reader's attention?
2. It is often (and rather gloomily) observed that Henry Adams's law of acceleration has proved true for culture and that motion and quick changes have taken the place of substance -- in art, in letters, in the self. Does Entropy seem to you to be a symptom of such a problem, a commentary on that problem, or somehow both? What qualities of the story inform your answer?
