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<\/p>\n\n\tPoor Hollywood. Now that Paul Thomas Anderson has adapted Thomas Pynchon\u2019s work not once, but twice \u2014 the upcoming One Battle After Another riffs on Pynchon\u2019s 1990 novel, Vineland, with Leo to boot \u2014 someone\u2019s assistant might actually have to read Gravity\u2019s Rainbow. (That is, if they can\u2019t get their hands on an advance copy of the author\u2019s much shorter new novel, Shadow Ticket, out next month.)<\/p>\n
\n\tPynchon\u2019s daunting masterpiece, a white whale of a Great American Novel, is stuffed with pun-tastic songs, rocket science and World War II-era occultism. It\u2019s the kind of book grad students dare each other to read under the influence of illicit substances. But Hollywood should do its homework. If Pynchon is the high priest of 20th century postmodernism, he\u2019s also proved a prophet of America\u2019s 21st century. Across his oeuvre, he trumpets a constant warning against America\u2019s penchant for both shambolic rebellion and playing footsie with fascism \u2014 and Southern California is the Rosetta stone to decode it all.<\/p>\n
\n\tThese days, Pynchon is a resolute New Yorker. His Upper West Side neighbors protect the famously press-averse 88-year-old author like a Praetorian guard. And his novels\u2019 Byzantine plots span the globe. But Pynchon traversed California far and wide in his youth. Gravity\u2019s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49 were partly written here, in Manhattan Beach. The latter riffs mythopoetically on the region\u2019s aerospace industry, and the former features an anthropology of our freeways any native Angeleno could get behind. Vineland is putatively set in NorCal but pops down to chronicle old Hollywood\u2019s labor struggles; and Against the Day leads its shaggy-dog revenge play to L.A.\u2019s Bradbury Building, of Blade Runner fame. Then, there\u2019s the first book PTA adapted, Inherent Vice, a Raymond Chandler-meets-Cheech & Chong love letter to the SoCal counterculture of his youth. (No surprise, Pynchon\u2019s papers are now at San Marino\u2019s Huntington Library.) Clearly, we left our mark on the genius.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tThomas Pynchon\u2019s Gravity\u2019s Rainbow (1973), Vineland (1990) and Inherent Vice (2009)<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Publisher (3)<\/p>\n
\n\tOr, rather: We gave him a vision. Pynchon\u2019s work is often labeled \u201capocalyptic\u201d \u2014 the most obvious tangent point. After all, Hollywood loves its disaster movies. Between wildfires and earthquakes, the End Times are the closest thing we have to seasons. Ours is a geography of cataclysm: Santa Anas wreak their psychic wrath; the odor of disaster seeps from the street like that sulfurous egg smell of the La Brea Tar Pits. Forget Randy Newman\u2019s crowd-pleaser \u201cI Love L.A.\u201d \u2014 The Doors\u2019 \u201cRiders on the Storm\u201d is our true spiritual anthem. It\u2019s as if Pynchon mainlined that vibe and found the perfect metaphor for his great theme: the dark plate tectonics that snapped when the American dream ran out of frontier to conquer.<\/p>\n