Notes on Slow Learner

9 years ago or so I decided to start rereading a Pynchon book once per year. A few years ago I decided I would do this each May, in honor of May Day. Later I learned Pynchon's birthday is also in May.

He is turning 89 this year, unless he dies in the next few days.

Last year I held off to October because of his new book, Shadow Ticket. Since that’s his latest and now I’ve read each previous books multiple times, I felt this year I could start reading his work chronologically and cycle them.

Since he has ten books, that means each cycle would take exactly a decade. I also entered a new decade this year, so… cool symmetry.

Thus:

• This is my third read of Slow Learner. The first was early in college and the second was the summer after I graduated. It has been 17 years.

• My previous opinion on this book is that only dedicated Pynchonheads should read it. To a degree I still feel the same, but with a couple qualifiers I will note below.

• Firstly, the real joy of this book remains the Introduction, where Pynchon expertly tears his own work apart. In explaining what is so bad about his early work he really helps illuminate what’s good about his work overall. Also super funny.

• My two introduction takeaways still remain: (1) Spike Jones, Jr.’s quote, “The thing about my father’s music that people fail to appreciate is that you can swap a C-sharp note with a gunshot, but it better be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful.” Pynchon applies that quote to surrealism and it’s been a guiding principle in my writing ever since. (2) Pynchon agrees with me that Crying of Lot 49 is a bad book; however, I thought his description of it as “a short story with a goiter problem” was from this Introduction, and it is not. All he says about it is how, “it seems I forgot everything I learned [about writing] up to that point.” Huh. I have read the goiter problem quote in his own writing before, now I’ll have to look up where.

• There is something to be said about reading these stories with the Introduction to learn how to avoid bad writing, but that may only interest a few dedicated craft-studiers; it’s only essential, I think, for anyone who gets in their heads the foolish idea they should try to write like Pynchon.

• “The Small Rain” is truly an awful short story, to a degree that I think it may have been a bad idea to include it in this book. I don’t even understand how it got published in the first place. It’s definitely a college try, that's for sure. But it’s fractally bad: the sentences are bad, the characters are bad, the intentions are bad, the plot is bad. Basically it’s about a Jewish Sgt. Bilko type who has to help clean up after a Louisiana hurricane and hooks up with a “co-ed.” Nothing much happens most of the time and of the two details I mention, Pynchon is clearly emotionally afraid of committing to. The dead body clean-up section, Pynchon strains language to avoid dealing with the fact these are human corpses. He basically describes them like trash bags full of stuffing thrown about. The sex scene he jokes about in the Introduction as being unclear whether sex even happened; and if it did, it’s remarkable how vanilla and shy and coy he is about it, considering his work not much later.

• I would hate, hate, hate to imagine a curious reader, having heard the praises of Pynchon from fellow -heads, grabbing this book in curiosity, skipping the introduction as many readers logically do, and starting with “The Small Rain.” My God. What an unfortunate starting place.

• “The Low-lands” is immediately better, but to a point. Sheer prosedy improvement here is remarkable. In fact the story is pretty good until near the end, when it takes an interesting but completely underdeveloped left turn. In fact this is the story I think a lot of Substack short story writers should read as warning, because they do much the same thing: they develop a good character, setting, scenario, and really get the thing started, only to hit a wall with where to go, and throw some absurdity to wrap things up a bit. In fact this is also the vampires in Sinners, though Coogler then made them work by giving them a thematic resonance the twist of “Low-lands” does not have.

• “Entropy” is again terrible. The prosedy is… fine, but the Pynchon calls the story out about being centered on theme rather than character and that’s understating it. The characters, both the guy locked in the warm room and the man hosting the party downstairs, literally break out in monologue about thermodynamics and disorder and stuff. Completely ridiculous. Though “The Small Rain” was a college short story, it was based off of a real story Pynchon heard from a military friend; “Entropy” feels like the actual college short, a kid who learned a thing and thinks he grasped the whole of everything.

• “Under the Rose” is mostly good. Pynchon makes fun of his tin-ear for American TV-based British dialect, but this is a genre spy yarn and actually kinda works with it. Had he gone off to write pure pulps, I don’t think anyone would have complained. The story’s main issue is that Pynchon gets bored and starts rushing along at about the 3/4s mark: which, interestingly, is my exact problem with The Crying of Lot 49. Suddenly ideas he must have outlined, at least mentally, become summary sentences and he stops doing the work to tell the whole bit, punchline and all, that makes his work so good.

• This is also sort of the reason Shadow Ticket fails, but not because he gets impatient, but rather because he struggles to see the threads through, like an old jazz player who just can’t keep pitch and tempo anymore.

• All four of the short stories listed so far have a moment when a character worried about being middle aged, a strange thematic concern for a young writer.

• “The Secret Integration”: great! This story is great. This story is not only great, but better than much of his work overall. In fact, it almost makes me pine for a Bizzaro Pynchon who wrote young adult suburban boy adventure books like Stand by Me and whathaveyou. The Goonies with viscera and teeth. He absolutely nailed the canny boiling-over anarchic impulse of pre-teen and teen kids who are starting to get the sense that their parents are not ideal people and the world intends to mold them rather than give them the opportunity to reform the world. This short story should be taught in high schools, but the PTA would cringe over the n-word (which the story itself makes clear “isn’t funny” in a really remarkable description of a practical joker whose father says that jokes will be the only thing left after automation) and the suggestions of ways the boys can really fuck up infrastructure and institutional spaces. 10/10 no notes.

• “The Secret Integration” is by far the best title, and by far the best math:culture pun, Pynchon has ever done.

• It was also published after the novel V. which still remains one of his absolute best. Again, there exists a theoretical possible parallel universe Pynchon who, instead of focusing on drafting Gravity’s Rainbow, pumped out masterful “hang out” novels every couple-three years for six decades. I wouldn’t trade away his bricks for that bibliography but I sure wish we had both.