Thomas Pynchon may be one of America's most reclusive writers, but his influence on popular culture is pervasive. John Dugdale on a new film about the enigmatic author
Back in the 1970s, an academic fan intent on getting an interview tracked Don DeLillo to Greece. The reclusive novelist handed him a card that read: "I don't want to talk about it." By which he meant, naturally, his fiction.
DeLillo has since come in from the cold, and is now regularly interviewed by journalists; he even agreed to submit to a lengthy promotional tour for his novel Underworld (1997). His friend Thomas Pynchon, by contrast, has remained aloof: no interviews, no bookshop signings or festival readings, no publicity photos. As the Pynchon-influenced cyberpunk writer William Gibson put it, he "makes J D Salinger look like Boy George".
When artists won't agree to commodification and behave like celebrities, arts television can't handle them; it requires their physical presence so we can peer at their furniture and assess their clothes, listen to them talking like chat show guests about their parents, childhood and encounters with other celebs. The media need writers to agree to their work being simplified.
This has so far deterred US and British film-makers from tackling Pynchon, but the Swiss brothers Fosco and Donatello Dubini - probably encouraged by the snatched images of the author that appeared six years ago when he published Mason and Dixon, which guaranteed them a physical presence of sorts - took on the challenge for German TV in 2001. After trundling around the festival circuit, the film will be shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts this month. The ICA has made something of a speciality of charismatic sages, playing host to Jean Baudrillard chatting to a bemused Anthony Giddens and, recently, screening a movie about Jacques Derrida.
The film Pynchon: a journey into the mind of [P] is principally a patchy biographical quest and full of risibly blatant errors and misspellings - a CV of the (married) author contains the words, "Martial status: unknown". It has an interview with a girlfriend from the novelist's Californian years in the 1960s and ends with video-paparazzo footage of Pynchon, and a journalist recounting how he took a photo of the baseball-capped sexagenarian on a Manhattan street.
The film concentrates on Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Pynchon's sprawling novel about the Second World War. It attempts to explain why that novel is preoccupied with sinister mind-control experiments and with the links it makes between the Nazi and Nasa rocket programmes. Pynchon's celebrated paranoia is explained partly as a result of the guilt he feels at having worked for the missile-maker Boeing.
Although moody visuals and the Residents' zany soundtrack suggest avant-garde aspirations, the film is disappointingly conventional. Like a routine edition of The South Bank Show, it combines a fixation on the artist's life with gleeful attempts to switch its attention from fiction to its historical basis.
Pynchon has written five novels, ranging in setting from 18th-century England, America and India in Mason and Dixon to the 1980s West Coast in Vineland. They display a dazzling range of tones and styles. Yet the Dubini brothers, on the whole, confine themselves to Gravity's Rainbow - perhaps not coincidentally, the one novel set in Germany - and by sifting out the fun leave the impression of a relentlessly grim author whose work is dominated by pre-apocalyptic dread. You wouldn't guess from their film that the paranoia is laced with playfulness in everything Pynchon writes; or that The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) - in which a graduate housewife stumbles on a secret postal system linking contemporary California's dispossessed - is one of America's funniest postwar novels.
Also misleading is the Dubinis' line- up of interviewees, all male apart from the ex-girlfriend and overwhelmingly middle-aged or elderly. There is George Plimpton, the veteran editor of the Paris Review, recalling his amazement on first reading V, Pynchon's 1963 debut; online curators of Pynchoniana tending their websites in darkened rooms; the mock-academic comedian Professor Irwin Corey, who collected a prize on the shy author's behalf. They all convey a sense that Pynchon is the preserve of a backward-looking geeky cult, wholly absent from the cultural present.
In fact, Pynchon is everywhere in today's pop culture: in The Simpsons ("You're reading Gravity's Rainbow?" Lisa asks in awe of a student) and a slew of movies; shaping new-wave sci-fi in Gibson's work; lending The X-Files its distinctively Pynchonesque mix of state conspiracy, black humour and the paranormal; name-checked by musicians as diverse as Laurie Anderson, Warren Zevon, Yo La Tengo and, erm, Pat Benatar. Radiohead lyrics echo him, and the band's merchandising website (w.a.s.t.e.) is a reference to Lot 49.
In literature, Pynchon is the primary model for Bill Gray, the reclusive writer in DeLillo's Mao II, but his key influence (most clearly discernible in Salman Rushdie and Peter Carey) is in pioneering a form of learned, larky costume fiction that may play parodic and ironic games - V, about a 60-year quest for a shape-changing female spy, has a strong claim to being the first postmodern American novel - yet recreates and peoples the past with what he calls "historical care".
Too fully realised ever to be merely metaphoric, history in Pynchon is nevertheless always potentially a metaphor for the present; in Gravity's Rainbow, for example, the German "Zone" of 1945 is, in part, a lightly disguised version of the fragmentation of America under Richard Nixon. The same novel now seems uncannily to have foreshadowed today's geopolitical landscape, with warmongering giant corporations the puppet-masters behind nation states and anarchists, eco-warriors and third world rebels allied in resisting their globalising ambitions and repressive methods.
Remarkably prescient in foreseeing the shape of 21st-century capitalism, Pynchon's fiction was also ahead of the game in consistently fixing its gaze on US imperialism. Again, the approach is oblique: the British empire - first portrayed 40 years ago in V, sliding from grandeur to impotence between Khartoum and Suez - prefigures the hubristic decadence that awaits America. The recent conflict in Iraq, a blackly farcical war, might have been scripted by Thomas Pynchon.
Pynchon: a journey into the mind of [P.] is at the ICA, London SW1 (www.ica.org.uk or 020 7930 3647) this month before opening nationally
John Dugdale is the author of a critical study of Pynchon
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