Slow Learner (1961-1964) by Thomas Pynchon

The short story collection Slow Learner is my first exposure to Pynchon. I wonder if I've made a mistake and should have begun with one of the novels, such as V, or The Crying of Lot 49 instead.

Beginning with The Small Rain, I was struck immediately by some of the odd dialogue present (Pynchon seems to have confused Canadian accents with Southern), and the sex scene towards the end was curiously written. But I liked the character of Levine and the backdrop of a town destroyed by a hurricane and how the setting challenged Levine's worldview and lifestyle.

A bit rough in patches but it served as a decent enough introduction, I suppose.

The second story I found far more palatable. It's casually poetic, witty, fluid, dryly humorous, and more than a bit weird, Low-lands has me beginning to see what people adore so much in Pynchon. What I most enjoy about postmodern writers is the skill with which they render daily ennui interesting, and Pynchon does that well in the initial half of the story.

Pynchon is the second author (the other being Haruki Murakami) I've read lately who, in his own words, admits to disliking his early writings and tears them down in a foreword as amateurish work. Far be it for me to disagree with these legendary, masterful writers, but I've quite enjoyed the early material of both of them and found it worthwhile as a lead-in to later, more polished, and higher quality work.

Interestingly, Pynchon's story reminds me of a more humorous predecessor and obvious influence of Murakami's work in the surrealistic turn Low-Lands takes in its latter half, where we find our hero literally crawling down the rabbit gypsy hole and exploring an underground network of tunnels dug into a garbage dump in which a whole society of gypsies live in order to marry a three-foot-five-inch gypsy woman named Nerissa and help raise her pet rat called Hyacinth.

I swear I'm not making this up.

Up third, the story Entropy contains a few beautiful and genuinely humorous scenes that are well written, but both are constantly tempered by Pynchon's reversion back to having his characters talk at me as if he had a bullet list next to his typewriter filled with themes and ideas he had to force into this story by any means necessary. This doesn't work for me, and if Pynchon continues like this, I don't think we'll be able to be friends.

I could chalk this one up to being very-much-not-my-thing--I usually like my short stories subtle, laconic, and peppered with a bit of ambiguity; all of which Pynchon—in his overwritten style jam-packed with random factoids and obscure references—represents the polar opposite of.

I've heard that Entropy serves as a great introduction to Pynchon's unique style, which was made famous in his later work such as Gravity's Rainbow, which I'm building up to reading by first sampling some of his short stories. This is a bit worrisome since I didn't much care for this one. But I have a feeling his style will work better with a bit more polish and the more ample legroom offered by the novel versus the short story. We'll see.

Under the Rose, unfortunately, did nothing to dissuade the opinion formed by the prior story. Surely reading Raymond Carver's short fiction and John le Carré's spy fiction immediately before this didn't do any favors for Pynchon's brand of short spy fiction, which falls short of the high mark set by each. I found Under the Rose to be little more than an exercise in dry tedium. It's another story that probably works better in a longer format. I didn't feel I was given enough time to get to know these characters, indeed the only thing noteworthy about the characters are their silly names. The setting could have been an interesting one, but we're kept from spending much time there by a plot that trips forward monotonously, allowing for little life or character to the people in the story as it reaches a conclusion surely meant to have more impact than it does. Pynchon seemed more comfortable commenting on boring minutiae than filling out his characters. I found the entire thing a silly bore and loathed it.

I found the final story, titled The Secret Integration, to be a far more compelling one—at least initially. We're given a number of characters who instantly jump off the page at you, colored with Pynchon's trademark wackiness. The premise of a group of mischievous, memorable youths is whimsical and charming, but the serious edge Pynchon sets to it (the racial integration of a Massachusetts school during the American Civil Rights movement of the '60s) all but dissipates as Pynchon wastes his story mostly rambling on tangents about the various minutiae present in the story such as political figures of the Berkshires' past. I suspect this is just sort of Pynchon's thing: he seems to like vomiting his deep knowledge of useless, irrelevant facts onto the page right in the middle of a narrative that was really beginning to get interesting 8 pages ago when this meaningless diversion just got started. I didn't find any of these expository tangents engrossing enough to warrant their inclusion.

It's not all bad, though. This is the most well written story of the collection by far, featuring moments of virtuoso talent from Pynchon's pen. But the lack of a strict editor sees Pynchon waste this potentially entertaining story, and it fizzles out before it can make much of an impact, then ends.

Now that I've finished Slow Learner, my initial thoughts seem true: I do think I made a mistake reading this first of all Pynchon's work. It seems uneven and rambling, but I can see a glimmer of what folks must like about his work. So I'll pick another Pynchon up soon and hope that the good stuff shines through more often and more strongly, but for now I can't shake the fact that Pynchon's style just isn't for me.

⭐⭐