American Fiction: Pynchon and Fitzgerald

Hi, how are y'all? Do ya wanna hear 'bout some cool and wonderful books from the US of A? Oh say, do you see the star spangled novel? But outta my old man Thomas Pynchon here (who sure writes a damn good conspiracy thriller, despite his vile profanity) and the dude with sentences as sweet as a sip of ma favourite bourbon, F. Scott Fitzgerald: which of these two fellas is top dog?
As you may have realised, I do not make a convincing American. and I apologise profusely to our friends across the pond. But despite being a bourgeois Brit through and through, there is something compelling about American literature, and the American character at large. American fiction presents the flip side of the stereotypical arrogance and optimism of the American character, and the writing, especially Thomas Pynchon's, seems free from the straight-jacket like hold of what the English consider 'elegant sentences'.

Starting with Pynchon's postmodern classic, Gravity's Rainbow, and one is presented with an amorphous work, where the pages are teeming with oddball characters. Gravity's Rainbow is perhaps the postmodern novel. One naturally judges it in the context of Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse 5, two other major American postmodern works on the Second World War, and it certainly compares favorably. Pynchon has Heller's erudite wit and charm, combined with Vonnegut's determination to be as strange as he possibly can be.
To say what the book is about is no easy task. Paranoia? Calvinist predestination? Love? Sex? The break down of cause and effect? Racial conflict? War? Pynchon effortlessly weaves multitudinous themes whilst combining maths/physics ("double integral" anybody?), mysticism (there's a rather amusing scene involving communication with the spirit of Germany's ex-foreign minister: Walter Rathenau) and shameless lewdness. Fifty Shades of Grey has got nothing on this! Some of it may offend delicate sensibilities like mine, occasionally it borders on Naked Lunch levels of vulgarity, but the tangled mass of plots is so compelling that one can't help reading on.
The premise is certainly unusual. Our unwitting hero, Tyrone Slothrop, was experimented on by mad Pavlovian psychologists as a baby, and somehow this means that V2 rockets land on the exact location of his sexual conquests. As a consequence, he is abducted by the evil and barking mad Pointsman, and taken to Hotel Herman Goring where an encounter with a killer octopus introduces him to the mysterious Katje, a seductress with a dark past. Pointsman's plan begins to deteriorate due to Slothrop's crafty drinking game, and after becoming obsessed with the mysterious 00000 rocket and the plastic Imipolex G, Slothrop flees into the Zone (post-war Germany) where he is caught in the cross-fire of conspiracies, family feuds and the omnipotent Them.
So the reason to be reading Gravity's Rainbow is that it is one of the few works I've encountered that blur the lines between high and low culture, metaphysics and profanity, whilst presenting destabilised characters that occasionally dissolve before our very eyes. It's epic scope is captivating, and Pynchon manages to stray away from traditional syntax so the words flow in smooth perfection. The novel is insistently beguiling.

Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night is nothing short of beautiful. It bears more similarity to the sprawling farce of The Beautiful and Damned rather than the refined poetry of The Great Gatsby, but whilst the emptiness of Gatsby is what makes it beautiful (can anybody really say what Jay Gatsby is like?), Tender is the Night is more mimetic. Fitzgerald sings of love and misanthropy with "full throated ease", just like Keat's nightingale, as "tender is the night" alludes to this Ode. Unlike Gatsby, Fitzgerald finally has some developed female characters (who were also notably absent from The Beautiful and Damned), you can almost sense him releasing his inner feminist as Nicole longs to be free from simply being a satellite orbiting Dick Driver.
Dr. Driver is a flesh and blood Gatsby, a magnetic and initially mysterious figure. The first part of the novel focuses on Rosemary Hoyt, a naive starlet (Fitzgerald is very good at satirising youth and yet simultaneously longs for it) who is an awe of the Diver couple, and attempts to seduce Dick. Book One ends with a shocking revelation, before Fitzgerald fills in the Divers back-story, and Dick's enigma is replaced by his tragic fall from grace. Fitzgerald describes the novel as 'A Romance' in his subtitle, and Dick and Nicole's love dominates. We are left with a tragicomedy with a tone of muted sorrow, and an occasionally harrowing portrait of mental illness.

But in the end, the sheer scope of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow just about triumphs over the rare intimacy of Tender is the Night. Both however, are very funny and occasionally profound.