I’m Tom Pynchon
Paris Review on ‘Pynchonicity’.
More than any other recurring Pynchonian concept, paranoia receives nuanced treatment in the novelist’s work. A tendency toward the “p” word would seem to color his personal life as well: although he reputedly lives in plain sight on New York’s Upper West Side, he keeps his private life more private than that of any other major American artist. And, after being a stone Pynchonophile for nearly thirty years, I’ve finally started feeling a bit paranoid myself. It’s not the dot-com “hashslingrz,” Pynchon’s latest fictional conspiracy, that’s freaking me out, but the author himself. Never before has he set one of his novels in a time and place which I myself inhabited, and as I whooshed back to the New York City of 2001 — this time through Pynchon’s aesthetic filter — his world spookily coincided with mine, mapping over it at points both minor and major. Call it a case of “Pynchonicity.”
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Other New York–based readers of Bleeding Edge, particularly those closer to his age and background, will no doubt discover a sense of Pynchonicity even more uncanny than mine. Even so, reading Pynchon’s newest has allowed me to see myself in him for the first time. It’s as though I once stood gazing through a window at the author’s blurry self, yet now, with Bleeding Edge, a light has been switched on behind me. This light has not significantly sharpened his image in the glass. But it has superimposed over that image a surprisingly new one — that of my own reflection.
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