Planetary Pynchon

Single author studies come in two flavours: the kind that point out the writer’s neglect in their time and the kind that argue prescience of our own. Tore Rye Andersen’s Planetary Pynchon is a well-researched example of the latter. Using theories of “world literature” and the value of books for understanding the Anthropocene, Andersen gives Pynchon his 2023 makeover.

A funny, postmodern satirist of 1960s American counterculture (and an influence on everyone from Soft Machine to the Coen brothers), Pynchon appears here in the guise of geopolitical commentator. Behind the metafictional games, behind the famous ironic style, lies a “leading novelist of globalization”.

Andersen’s premiss is that a “world-historical” scheme emerges on reading three of Pynchon’s novels side by side: Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Mason & Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006). In these “sprawling, complex global novels”, home to “a thousand characters” ranging across three centuries of western history, Andersen finds “one coherent story about how European technological modernity has since the Enlightenment spread its web across the world”. Carefully, inventively, he joins the dots between the fun Pynchon has had with the eighteenth-century American frontier, world events between the fin de siècle and the Great War, and the Nazi design of the first long-range guided missile.

Pointing out that this “global trilogy” spans exactly the timeframe of the Anthropocene (the geological phase in which the human impact on the environment has become irreversible), he reads Pynchon’s caricatures of colonial and capitalist hubris as before-their-time comments on ecological suicide.

Guy Stevenson,TLS