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Layers - Thomas Pynchon & Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith has a gentle touch when it comes to dissecting the layers of identity that provide us shelter, and which we throw up in moments of fear and vulnerability (the smoke screens I'm most familiar with are careers, religious convictions, and education pedigrees). Her gentleness - and maybe this is what I most appreciate of her writing - offers a point of contrast to Thomas Pynchon. Far from gentle, he applies a blade to the assortment of masks any person might inhabit. That is, his characters are, to the shock of the reader, strangely one-dimensional. His cartoonish approach to character development is compensated by the intricacies he spins across story lines and between characters and settings. Zadie Smith aims for this level of polyphony - the haunting resonance among character, plot, and place is what I most enjoyed in "Swing Time" - but her humanity keeps her back. She's too invested in her protagonist to sacrifice this beautiful creature to the greater logic of her novel. Pynchon, however (and one wonders if he really is human), blows through such conventions and, undoubtedly, establishes something far stranger and, disputably, far greater.

The polyphony - the baroque, and even inhuman (or transcendental?), quality of his writing - is what keeps me coming back. Exhibit A is the "V" theme of, well V: character, diagram, metaphor, and all-around object of mystery.

"If you look from the side at a planet swinging around in its orbit, split the sun with a mirror and imagine a string, it all looks like a yo-yo. The point furthest from the sun is called aphelion. The point furthest from the yo-yo hand is called, by analogy, apocheir."

--

"Directly across the room from Rachel was a mirror, hung high on the wall, and under the mirror a shelf which held a turn-of-the-century clock. The double face was suspended by four golden flying buttresses above a maze of works, enclosed in clear Swedish lead glass. The pendulum didn’t swing back and forth but was in the form of a disc, parallel to the floor and driven by a shaft which paralleled the hands at six o’clock. The disc turned a quarter-revolution one way, then a quarter-revolution the other, each reversed torsion on the shaft advancing the escapement a notch. Mounted on the disc were two imps or demons, wrought in gold, posed in fantastic attitudes. Their movements were reflected in the mirror along with the window at Rachel’s back, which extended from floor to ceiling and revealed the branches and green needles of a pine tree. The branches whipped back and forth in the February wind, ceaseless and shimmering, and in front of them the two demons performed their metronomic dance, beneath a vertical array of golden gears and ratchet wheels, levers and springs which gleamed warm and gay as any ballroom chandelier."

--

"Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some halfunderstood moral purpose? Or was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light and be only, till death stopped the heart’s ticking (metronome’s music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an imp’s dance under the century’s own chandeliers."

--

"He will learn how to be a twinned man and will go on at the game, straddling until he splits up the crotch and in half from the prolonged tension, and then he will be destroyed. She assumed ballet fourth position, moved her breasts at a 45 degree angle to his line-of-sight, pointed her nose at his heart, looked up at him through her eyelashes. “How long have you been in New York?”"

--

"The point of the green triangle is Cairo. It means that relatively speaking, assuming your train stands still and the land moves past, that the twin wastes of the Libyan and Arabian deserts to right and left creep in inexorably to narrow the fertile and quick part of your world until you are left with hardly more than a right-of-way, and before you a great city. So there crept in on the gentle Waldetar a suspicion cheerless as the desert."

--

"Profane had moved across the frontier, the alligator still in front of him. Scrawled on the walls were occasional quotes from the Gospels, Latin tags (Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem—Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, grant us peace). Peace. Here had been peace, once in a depression season crushed slow, starving-nervous, into the street by the dead weight of its own sky. In spite of time-distortions in Father Fairing’s tale, Profane had got the general idea. Excommunicated, most likely, by the very fact of his mission here, a skeleton in Rome’s closet and in the priest-hole of his own cassock and bed, the old man sat preaching to a congregation of rats with saints’ names, all to the intention of peace."

--

"The pulp is soft and laced with little blood vessels and nerves. The enamel, mostly calcium, is inanimate. These were the it and I psychodontia had to deal with. The hard, lifeless I covered up the warm, pulsing it; protecting and sheltering."

--

"An ivory comb, five-toothed: whose shape was that of five crucified, all sharing at least one common arm. None of them was a religious figure: they were soldiers of the British Army. She had found the comb in one of the Cairo bazaars. It had apparently been hand-carved by a Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an artisan among the Mahdists, in commemoration of the crucifixions of ’83, in the country east of invested Khartoum. Her motives in buying it may have been as instinctive and uncomplex as those by which any young girl chooses a dress or gewgaw of a particular hue and shape."

--

"It was time to make another round. The building was empty except for Profane. No experiments tonight. On the way back to the guardroom he stopped in front of SHROUD. “What’s it like,” he said. Better than you have it. “Wha.” Wha yourself. Me and SHOCK are what you and everybody will be someday. (The skull seemed to be grinning at Profane.) “There are other ways besides fallout and road accidents.”"

--

"They also knew about the Bad Priest. There is a certain fondness for the Manichaean common to all children. Here the combination of a siege, a Roman Catholic upbringing and an unconscious identification of one’s own mother with the Virgin all sent simple dualism into strange patterns indeed. Preached to they might be about some abstract struggle between good and evil; but even the dogfights were too high above them to be real. They’d brought the Spitfires and ME’s down to Earth with their R.A.F. game, but it was only simple metaphor, as noted. The Germans to be sure were pure evil and the Allies pure good."

--

"But logic is a human attribute after all; so even at that it’s a misnomer. What are real are the crosspurposes. We’ve dignified them with the words “profession” and “occupation.” There is a certain cold comfort in remembering that Manganese, Mizzi, Maijstral, Dupiro the ragman, that blasted face who caught us at the villa —also work at cross-purposes."

--

"Draw a line from Malta to Lampedusa. Call it a radius. Somewhere in that circle, on the evening of the tenth, a water-spout appeared and lasted for fifteen minutes. Long enough to lift the xebec fifty feet, whirling and creaking, Astarte's throat naked to the cloudless weather, and slam it down again into a piece of the Mediterranean whose subsequent surface phenomena - whitecaps, kelp islands, any of a million flatnesses which should catch thereafter part of the brute sun's spectrum - showed nothing at all of what came to lie beneath, that quiet June day."