#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

#72 Fat Man- Joe Frank

#72 Fat Man- Joe Frank

This is the second offering from Joe Frank’s The Queen of Puerto Rico.  Like the first, It has a definite pulp quality. You can tell that Frank reads a lot of Charles Bukowski. So the story telling has an engaging quality, enough dirt to keep it interesting, and a level of cheeky cleverness that makes you laugh every once in a while.

Unfortunately, unlike Bukowski I don’t fine much heart in the story, which is fine on the surface. Sometime a story about a miserable, unemployed, loveless failure of a man is just a story about a miserable, unemployed, loveless, failure of a man. You don’t always need redemption, hope or plot. The narrator seems to have a good handle on who he is:

“You know, when I think about myself and the life I’ve led, I feel self-loathing, shame, disgust. I’m a waste and a failure…but when I imagine myself as a character in a novel…well I think I’m pretty interesting, kind of offbeat, intriguing, entertaining.”

There is value here, but not deep meaning. Reading through this is like watching some nameless cable sitcom: you mindlessly ingest the show, are somewhat entertained, but forget it before the next one starts. All the lines sound vaguely plagiarized from some other pulp novel:

“She smoked camels, wore no make-up, picked her teeth with a toothpick, and drank a lot of coffee.”

“You can see that the subway stations were originally fine examples of innovative architecture. Now they’re filthy and defiled.”

Sometimes Frank hits a winner, like the *Notable Quote below which I found brilliant. And of course there is the very amusing story about Aaron stealing thousands of brownies from dozens of roadside Howards Johnson’s, then quietly returning them one-by-one months later.

Notable Passage: “After all, if one were to remove the turnstiles [in the subway] but make everyone go through the same motion as they passed into the subway, the sight of strangers queuing up to take a strong pelvic thrust at one another from behind would serve as an apt metaphor for the human condition.”

Rating: 7-6-8-6 Total= 27