#143 Entropy- Thomas Pynchon

#143 Entropy- Thomas Pynchon

'Entropy' is a lack of cohesion, a steady and unavoidable erosion and spiral into chaos. When this march is inevitable, what would you do? Throw a party of course; thus we have a look into the dark, and brilliant mind of Thomas Pynchon.

When you are waiting for change to happen, you are done with your current situation and you can’t see what’s next, despair often sets in:

“He was forced, therefore, in the sad dying fall of middle age, to a radical reevaluation of everything he had learned up to then…he did not know if he was equal to the task.”

Pynchon offers such demented, muddy, surroundings and it’s like peering into a dark room: you’re not sure if you want to see what’s inside, and when you inevitable give it a peek, you don’t want to ask too many questions. The imagery is stark and the symbolism stings you like stepping on tack shoeless in the middle of the night. The story begins with a Henry Miller Quote:

“We must get into step, a lockstep toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.”

The temperature outside is 37 degrees and will not change, that is death looming for all of us. Why not keep checking the temperature, why not smash the windows and let it in:

“..and [she] turned to face the man on the bed and wait with him until the moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion.”

Many people confuse styles like gum-shoe pulp with noir. This is true noir, black cutting satire of human weakness and misery. Nobody does this better. You read through the muck and lurid lives of these characters and them BAM, a joke hits even though it isn’t really funny, you have to laugh at the sheer sickness of it:

“How much more human can I get? There are Europeans wanderiun around north Africa these days with their tongues torn out of their heads because those tongues have spoken the wrong words. Only the Europeans thought they were the right words.”

“language barrier” Meatball suggested.

Notable Passage: “She crawled into dreams each night with a sense of exhaustion, and a desperate resolve never to relax that vigilance.”

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40