Fantastic Metropolis

For me, 2003 will be a year marked by salt, spindrift, and seaspray—for the first part of the year, all I read were Patrick O’Brian’s tales of Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin. For many years I have been a rabid Herman Melville fan, but not until finding Patrick O’Brian have I experienced the same sense of pure joy when reading about the sea. O’Brian resurrects an entire world—at once utterly immediate and unutterably lost—and invests his creation with the insights of all great literature, brilliantly portraying the complexities of human behavior and the mysteries of the physical world. Although the driving force behind the books is certainly the call to adventure, at the heart of the series lies a friendship that ranks among the best that literature has to offer. Although virtually polar opposites, the two main characters—united by a love of chamber music—are both fully realized and completely compelling. While any comparisons to Joyce are always suspect, not since Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom have I read two such different personalities brought so convincingly to life by the same creator.

And speaking of literary friendships, I also re-read a book that I count among my Top Ten Novels of All Time—Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, which revolves around the relationship of two astronomer-surveyors as they inscribe the line which will one day divide the New World. Still underappreciated by critics and readers, and partially eclipsed by the long shadow of Gravity’s Rainbow, my second reading confirmed what I initially suspected: this is a better book than Gravity’s Rainbow, and perhaps the finest American novel since Moby-Dick. (I must confess that I think Pynchon is the only living writer that ranks with Melville, Joyce, and Borges. You mileage, as they say, may vary.) Told in an often ironic, faux eighteenth-century prose, the convoluted story ranges from the absurdity of sentient mechanical ducks and talking dogs to the harrowing realities of massacre, colonization, and enslavement. At its center are the titular characters, the ghost-haunted Mason and the irreverent Dixon, bound by an uneasy friendship that bridges the Gothic and Romantic through a shared belief in the Enlightenment. With its nested layers of unreliable narration, eccentric cast of jesters and geniuses, and edgy sense of humor, Mason & Dixon explores the boundaries between belief and knowledge, superstition and science, vision and reality—even as it relentlessly questions the nature of boundaries themselves.

My other “big book” of 2003 was William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, a work I’ve been putting off for years. Written in the 1950s and often considered to be the “missing link” between Faulkner and Pynchon, Gaddis’ sprawling novel is about…well, nearly everything: art, craftsmanship, and forgery; the nature of creativity and inspiration; the anxiety of influence; the corruptions of money, power, and status; the experiences of faith, doubt, and religion; the superficial relationships of the modern urbanite; and the many ways of recognizing and not recognizing essential “truths.” Encompassing both incredibly dense interior monologues as well as rapid-fire party banter, Gaddis’ allusive epic unfolds over a thousand pages and swarms with minor characters—including the author himself, busily writing the book from the sidelines. Although somewhere in the middle of this labyrinthine novel I began to worry that I was getting lost, everything finally connects to everything else, and it all comes together brilliantly in the end. Oh, yes—after it was published, it was so reviled by critics that Gaddis wrote nothing else for twenty years.