World Literature Today

m > m ?s z m D H H D O papers on the desk are a settling of accounts, an indictment against Schepp for his neglect of her. In particular, several years earlier, the nearly blind Schepp had undergone laser surgery; able to see clearly, he joined theworld, became a fre quenter of bars, and became infatu ated with a low-life Polish barmaid on whose neck, moreover, was tat tooed the twenty-ninthI Ching sign "Kan," representing the abyss and also the great divide between life and the other side. (Dingsymbol, anyone?) Schepp spends the entire afternoon, as her body goes through stages of decomposition, reading the philological revenge thatDora has spent the night writing. He learns that Dora, who has been consulting theI Ching her entire life, had known of this infatuation and had been enjoying a friendshipwith the Polish woman. Moreover, she had been planning to leave Schepp when shewas struck down. Sounds complicated and even grotesque? Well, maybe none of the foregoing happened, and it was only Schepp's imagination that sup plied the details of Dora's death and his infatuation.Perhaps Schepp resented thebargain he had struck with Dora, whose fears he had impulsively taken on while they were both, in their younger years, viewing Arnold B?cklin's Island of the Dead? Perhaps, Walter Mitty-like (Politycki refers often to Schepp's comb-over), he yearned for lifeand escape fromthedaily focuson death Dora imposed on him? Politycki, a "promovierter" aca demic before becoming a full-time writer, knows his metafictional con ventions. Besides textswithin texts (Dora's commentary is appended to a fragment of Schepp's attempt at a novel from before theirmar riage), Politycki has also supplied an alternative ending tohis novella. Or rather an alternative beginning. The troubling smell is still in the air when Schepp enters his study in the morning, Dora is in the same posi tion at thedesk, with her head on a pile of papers before her. This time around, however, it is a Hinrich Schepp who is only contemplating laser surgery and who cautiously makes his way into the roomwith out his glasses, and Dora is only sleeping. As for the smell, Dora is offended at the suggestion that she has neglected her domestic duties, Schepp cautions her against becom ingupset, because ofher headaches. Though the two of them do not discover the source of the smell, perhaps it is their rottenmarriage? There ismuch here that leaves one unsatisfied, butMatthias Politycki's ambitious novella shows there is still lifein thisclassic genre. ElizabethPowers New York Thomas Pynchon. Inherent V?ce. New York. Penguin. 2009. 370 pages. $27.95. isbn978-1-59420-224-7 Graduate students across the land are undoubtedly outlining theobvi ous similarities in theme, style, and structure between Thomas Pyn chon's 1966 novel, The Crying of Lot 49, and InherentVice. Both have mysterious, perhaps nonexistent secret organizations conspiring to do something not entirely clear; characterswho disappear or are dis appeared; comic names thatwould embarrass Ben Jonson; a general atmosphere ofmalaise; central char acters on a reluctant quest to find the truth;mazes of speculations, hints, and cryptic revelations that often dead-end forboth characters and readers; and governing prin ciples (entropy in the first,the title . _ _ ^-. _-t syndrome in the second). Both have ?B!? Wiki siteswith indices of characters l^ESi and page-by-page annotations. What graduate students may ^Hral not realize, or admit?and some Hh early reviewers like Louis Menand IH^?I in theNew Yorkerwere reluctant to HB! say?is that while Inherent Vice is BBnl more thantwiceas longas Lot49, I^BB it is exponentially duller,and any ^BBI effortused to compare thenovels is ^HHj wasted.Theenergy ofLot 49'sprose flBBI has settled into a bland uniformity. IBBi UnlikeOedipa Maas in theearIBBI liernovel, who has a vision ofwhat ^BBI America might have become before ^BH it is threatened by themysterious HH Tristero, Vice's detective Doc Spor- ^HB tellois "caughtup in a low-level j^^BI bummer he couldn't find away out IHR of,abouthow thePsychedelic Six- ^^Bi ties, this littleparenthesis of light, iBB might close afterall, and all be lost, ^BB taken back Into darkness ../' Oedi...