Pynchon and His Bloviation's Similiarity to Bloated Congressional Legislation

Thomas Pynchon is a writer with whom I've always struggled. You'd think I'd enjoy his digressiveness, since I frequently get sidetracked and forget what my original point was. However, the difference is that I do this mainly when I'm talking, and Pynchon does it, sometimes painstakingly, in his prose. Physics can be interesting, I think. (I notoriously canceled my score for an AP Physics exam after I opened the test booklet, took one look at the material covered, about which I knew nothing, and shut it. Luckily, I'd brought along reading material that interested me much more than the test. Now, though, I can't stand Ken Kesey, so that little anecdotal incident would not happen again, at least not exactly.) But hundreds of pages of this kind of digression bore the hell out of me. Hence, Pynchon has been a writer whose work I always viewed the same way I view exercise: arduous but necessary. He's objectively very good, but subjectively he has not been my cup of tea.

As you can see, I'm fond of digression, but those of Pynchon always bored me. I think I got maybe 100 pages or so through Gravity's Rainbow before I finally gave up. The same went for Mason & Dixon. When he's tried to go short, what has come out has been a condensed jumble of compact writing that can make stereo installation instructions read like a real potboiler. I was assigned The Crying of Lot 49 in several classes in college, and I read it. Although it was relatively short by Pynchon's standards, I cannot reread it without succumbing to a visit from the Sandman.

The same goes for congressional bills, I'm sure. This new health care bill is over 1,000 pages long, and I'm sure even the congressmen who loaded it with earmarks that inflated it to that length have not read it. It should be a fairly simple, straightforward piece of legislation. Then, of course, you have to take into account the tenacity of insurance companies, whose grip on Congress is not unlike that of a pit bull. Their jaws will not let go. Ever.

But now, though, Pynchon has written a relatively short book called Inherent Vice that I must now plow through. I hope it's not a slog, and its noir-ish premise and 300-some pages make me optimistic. I wish Obama could do the same thing. Who knows? By the time the bill gets ratified, perhaps more than half of it will be excised, of Congress's own volition or the threat of a veto from one swipe of Obama's mighty pen.

With regard to politics, though, I have doubts about that proverb's realistic applicability. In the end, I'm pretty sure that Obama will have to morph into Beowulf and cut off Grendel's head (any Republican legislator will do as an avatar). To mix medieval metaphors, I hope he'll be like King Arthur, remove Excalibur from the stone, and start swinging it.

As for Pynchon's new book, I likewise hope that I won't have to cut it from my shelf. Literally and figuratively.

R