Fragment: Intro to a Pynchon Book Review

From our vantage point in America 2013, it is impossible to experience a novel that opens on the first day of Spring 2001 with any degree of innocence.  The colossal plume of the collapsing twin towers moves backward in time, obscuring the jittery ennui of the Pynchonian universe and rendering his de rigueur dread in smoky relief, transforming it from a crackling current that powers his narrative to a big fucking stick that is going to smack you in the head, and soon.  So, the white pear blossoms, the kids streaming out of school on a spring afternoon: prelude.  The tech bubble collapse, the maturing power of the internet?  Prelude.  Dot com espionage? Prelude.  Prelude upon which you (the reader) inscribe a distance, a quaintness, an innocence . . . prelude upon which you (the reader) inscribe a world that wasn't, a world that COULDN'T POSSIBLY EXIST AFTER 9/11 . . .

 (Which, of course, is total bullshit.  While lines of apocalypse were painted circa-2000 with Bush v. Gore - the Coke v. Pepsi of its day - there was real prelude, prelude that was clear even to whiskey-swilling smartass lowlifes in Kentucky: the US embassy bombings of 1998, the USS Cole bombing less than a year before 9/11, all the way back to the Carter administration and the shadowy alliances of the Afghan resistance of the 80's.  9/11 was an event, and events don't just happen, they are inscribed upon blank bodies, they are formed out of formless matter.  Events like 9/11 are never caesura, they are vortices, foci written upon narrative in human hand).

None of this is really Pynchon's fault: the only way to avoid the toxic time-travelling cloud is to not write about 9/11.  But, yeah, he's going to do it.  He's gonna write a New York novel, and set it in 2001.  He's going to stare 9/11 in the face.  And if the other stuff is almost afterthought, whose fault is it, ours or his?

This is not a blameless project: a novelist can ride the pathos of 9/11 to cheap sentiment the same way that Rudy Giuliani tried to ride his long con all the way to the White House with 9/11 as window dressing (noun/verb/9-11 being his standard rhetorical pattern).