13 Ways of Looking at Pynchon & DeLillo

Comedic duo

My experiment in serializing fiction reached its conclusion this past week! As the date indicates, it was a cult read, with a fairly small number of readers clicking through. I kind of expected that—the newsletter remains an imperfect form for distributing fiction. But going into it, I viewed the whole endeavor as an experiment, to learn from, and in that regard, I count it as successful. Throw that spaghetti against the wall.

I also wrote a painfully embarrassing confession of professional jealousy for The Republic of Letters. Click through if you dare!

This week, in honor of Pynchon’s forthcoming Shadow Ticket, a riff on the big boys of postmodernism.

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1. The enfant terrible vs. The adult in the room

Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo are almost exact contemporaries. They were born less than 8 months apart. Pynchon on May 8, 1937, and DeLillo on November 8, 1936, making DeLillo slightly older. In terms of their reputations, however, Pynchon was, and remains, eternally youthful, the forever adolescent, while DeLillo is the cool-headed adult, the man in the small room. This owes to the manner each of them entered the public scene.

Pynchon debuted auspiciously. V., his first novel, was published in 1963, when he was only 26 years old. It hit bestseller lists, generating interest in the wunderkind, so much that he fled to Mexico to avoid photographers.

DeLillo debuted more quietly. In 1971, when he was 35 years old, he published Americana, the novel he worked on for for four years while working in the advertising industry. It did not hit bestseller lists. Indeed, DeLillo would remain fairly obscure throughout the 70s.

This dichotomy obtains all the way to the present day. Pynchon the prankster with a copy of Mad magazine in his back pocket, DeLillo the adult riding the train out of the city and into Ossining.

2. The Descendant Vs. The Immigrant

Pynchon’s family history extends deep into American history. So deep, in fact, that the Pynchon clan lived in American before it was even a country. William Pynchon, little Tommy’s ancestor, was a New England pastor during the pilgrim era. Pynchon’s deep familial relation to the Puritan history of United States is surprisingly similar to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s.

DeLillo, on the other hand, is the son of Italian immigrants. Part of the wave of European immigration that came to New York during the early twentieth century, very similar to Martin Scorsese. He played stickball in the streets and spoke Italian with his grandmother.

Thus, Pynchon is consumed with America’s past, while DeLillo can’t help but drawn by its promise, by its mythic resonance.

3. The past vs. The present

Which brings us here. Pynchon is, in many ways, a historical novelist. Many of his novels portray some corner of the historical record and tease out the forgotten stories and characters found therein. Against the Day takes place from the late 19th century to the moment just past World War I, Mason & Dixon looks at the earliest days of the US as a country, and of course, Gravity’s Rainbow portrays World War II—the last nine months of the conflict, specifically.

Nearly all of DeLillo’s novels, however, take place in the present day. Running Dog captures the cynical, exhausted moment of the late 70s. White Noise captures the mood of Middle America during Reagan’s 80s as effectively as Blue Velvet. Point Omega sketches out the mood of fear and righteousness that characterized the country during the early days of the Iraq War. Vibe checks par excellence.

4. Protestant vs Catholic

Okay, I’m fudging a little bit here. Pynchon attended both Catholic and Episcopal Churches during his youth, and one could argue both institutions influenced his work. But! In deference to his august ancestor Wm. Pynchon, I am counting him on the prot side.

And rightly so! The textual mania evident throughout his work, the sudden shifts in tone and voice and tense, can’t help but put one in mind of reformationists chasing meaning through the scriptures that were finally theirs.

Contrast this with the stately, ritualistic pace of DeLillo’s prose, imbuing everyday routines with ritualistic performativity. Inanimate objects become sacred, grail-like, through the obsessions of his characters Underworld tracks a baseball, and the various characters taken with it, across the whole postwar era. You can almost smell the incense wafting from the censer.

5. The 60s vs. The 80s

As mentioned, Pynchon debuted in the 60s with V. Not only that, he was very much a character of the 60s, smoking dope on the beach, hanging out with Brian Wilson, palling with around Joan Baez’s brother-in-law. Gravity’s Rainbow, while taking place during WWII, also serves as a real-time document of the rise and fall of the Capital-S Sixties, as it was written 1966-1972. Indeed, one could frame Pynchon’s whole output, post-GR, as an elegy for the lost promise of the Sixties.

DeLillo, though, didn’t come into his own until the Eighties. Dude went on a historic run during the nuclear decade. The Names in 1982, White Noise in 1985, Libra in 1988. That decade of dread, of waiting for the other shoe to drop, fit DeLillo’s gnomic brand of prophesying perfectly well.

Another thing: during these decades of DeLillo’s career, the 70s and into the 80s, Pynchon was MIA. After GR dropped in 1973, he didn’t publish another novel for 17 years, with Vineland in 1990. For DeLillo, who couldn’t help but work under the influence, or perhaps in the shadow, of Pynchon, might it have felt like the torch was being passed to him in the Tomster’s absence? Did Donny D, possibly, feel a twinge of annoyance when Vineland dropped and he had to compete with him in real time again?

6. Slapstick vs. Deadpan

Pynchon’s funny. DeLillo’s funny. Yet they are funny in such different ways that one wonders if the same adjective actually pertains.

Pynchon is, to put it in a technical terms, a dang goofball. Why did the guy with prophetic Chinese characters tattooed on his toes have to use talcum powder? Because he had I-Ching feet!

Like, come on. He loves puns, the stupider the better. He loves songs, the more nonsensical the better. He loves dumb set pieces, like the part in Against the Day where Kit nearly drowns in a vat of mayonnaise. He loves silly voices and fake mustaches.

DeLillo, though, is more detached. More distant. Ironic, as befits an author who came into his own in the 80s. The Most Photographed Barn in America sequence in White Noise is Kids in the Hall meets Godard.

It must also be said that DeLillo’s sense of the deadpan startled to diminish going into the 90s, where he called upon humor less and less, and upon the prophetic more and more. And look, I’m a bigger fan of his 2000s than others, but I do miss that element. Pynchon, though, remains the same goofball as ever. Think of the TV channel in Bleeding Edge that plays nothing but biopics, including The Jennifer Aniston Story.

7. California vs New York

Pynchon was born in New York State and has spent much of his life there. He lives there now, in fact, and has for decades. Yet, as befits a true Sixties head, his time in California in the 60s and 70s looms large, and remains fundamental to his outlook. To his work, too. From The Crying of Lot 49 to Inherent Vice to Vineland, plus the excursions to early Hollywood in Against the Day, California plays a bigger role in his work than New York City.

DeLillo, on the other hand, has spent most of his life in and around New York City. Well, except for that time in the late 70s when he lived in Greece and grew a beard. Da Big Apple plays a huge role in his work, too. Great Jones Street, Players, Running Dog, Falling Man, Underworld—all of these novels take place largely or even exclusively within New York City.

Yet it would also be inaccurate to call DeLillo a ‘New York Writer’ in the same sense as, say, Ann Beattie, or Richard Price, or Edith Wharton, or Taffy Brodesser-Akner. His New York is not an arena of shifting social alliances, of the street and the board room, of the high faith of ambition. His New York is a portal to another level of reality, one we can peer through without quite crossing to the other side.

Think of the story of the orange juice billboard, which first appeared as a late chapter in Underworld and later appeared as standalone story in the collection The Angel Esmeralda. The face of a young girl, recently killed, appears on a billboard for orange juice at a specific hour of the day. A local nun becomes obsessed with it, among others in the neighborhood, who view it as an appearance of the divine, of a sort with the Virgin Mary revealing herself on flour tortillas. Even when the girl’s face turns out to be a trick of the light reflected off the windows of a passing subway, the sense of the miraculous remains, residually. The portal glimpsed through just as it closes.

8. Paranoia vs. Conspiracy

Obviously Pynchon and DeLillo are both obsessed with the conspiracy as the organizing principle of postwar life, be it military or corporate or even religious. Yet they come at this obsession from entirely different angles.

To put it in terms of characters, Pynchon is interested in paranoids, while DeLillo is more interested in conspiracists.

Paranoids as in the hapless fools who become obsessed with unraveling some grand conspiracy, failing to do so, then becoming enmeshed in it. Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, a test subject from birth, traipsing across wartorn Europe, subsumed into newsprint as a face in the background of a photograph. “You hide, They seek,” per one of the ‘Proverbs for Paranoids’ in GR.

DeLillo is more interested in the people—the men, more often than not—who enact conspiracies, who become enmeshed in its web. Nicholas Branch in Libra, the CIA archivist piecing together the fragments of the Kennedy assassination, drawing closer to the beating heart of some other life.

“A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence.”

9. The recognized masterpiece vs. The unrecognized masterpiece

The consensus is, and has been for fifty years, that Gravity’s Rainbow is Pynchon’s masterpiece. The consensus is correct. I have no interest in stating that GR is overrated somehow, even though I might have to say that Against the Day is my personal favorite.

But with DeLillo, the consensus seems to be that Underworld is his masterpiece, the summation of his talents. And this is not true! I like Underworld a lot, great set pieces, but his best book is Libra, the Lee Harvey Oswald/Kennedy epic. Why the discrepancy?

Because Libra, in addition to being DeLillo’s best book, is also his least characteristic. The historical setting, the research, the factual figures rendered as characters—including Marguerite, Oswald’s mother, the best and by far most convincing female character he ever wrote—there is nothing else like it in DeLillo’s oeuvre. Which raises an uncomfortable question: is DeLillo at his best when he is acting least like himself?

10. Never getting photographed except for cartoons vs Only occasionally getting photographed, with cats

11. Never hanging out with writers vs. Occasionally hanging out with other writers

When Norman Mailer invited Pynchon out for drinks, Pynchon famously declined by saying, “Sorry, I only drink Ovaltine.”

DeLillo, though, went to Mets games with Paul Auster and Philip Roth. Brooklyn Boyz 4eva.

12. Exciting biography vs. Boring biography

Were an enterprising biographer ever to get the proper access, a full dress biography of Pynchon would be incredible, actually. He even appears as a minor character in Positively 4th Street, David Hajdu’s account of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the folk scene of the early 60s. And imagine if you got access to Pynchon’s FBI file! Like William T. Vollmann did! The mind reels at the possibilities.

A DeLillo bio, though, is something of a non-starter. As Christian Lorentzen once wrote,

Sometimes shy people are just shy, and boring, and we all have the right to be boring, except on the page. I once asked a prominent literary biographer if he might next write his next book about Don DeLillo, knowing the two were acquainted. “No story there,” he said. “He sat at his desk and wrote.” (Brilliantly, I’m sure he’d add.)

(I am absolutely of the DeLillo school here, myself. Boring dad scribbling away in his basement, just the way I like it.)

13. Science fiction vs. Realism

In addition to being a historical novelist, Pynchon is also, kinda sorta, a science fiction novelist. Against the Day is practically a work of steampunk, right down to the airship. Gravity’s Rainbow was nominated for some science fiction awards in the 70s, crossing over from literary to genre.¹ Later on in the decade, Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren would cross that Rubicon from the opposite direction, from genre to literary.

DeLillo, though, is much more firmly a realist. If he’s adjacent to any sort of genre, it would be the thriller, what with the conspiracies and occasional murders. Unlike genre works, though, DeLillo’s mysteries never quite resolve, only endure.

1. Even though the concept of ‘literary fiction’ didn’t really take off until the 80s, as a marketing term. See editor Gerald Howard’s indispensable dispatch on the topic for n+1.