I’m reading Thomas Pynchon’s latest, Inherent Vice.   I’ve loved the guy ever since, on my fifth attempt to read Gravity’s Rainbow, I let go of any allegiance to actually processing the plot,  expectations of narrative arc, or keeping the mad panacopia of characters straight, and just let the damn text wash across my cerebral cortex.

As a recent Times Book Review declared, he’s a metaphysical comedian.  And while he has had me in tears of laughter, there’s always a bit of a cosmic chill to the humour — and usually a deep social bite.

Here’s three examples that have already endeared me to this one:

The good news is that, like any living creature, Earth has an immune system too, and sooner or later she’s going to start rejecting agents of disease like the oil industry.

And this, his riff on Charlie the Tuna:

“It’s all supposed to be so innocent, upwardly mobile snob, designer shades, beret, so desperate to show he’s got good taste, except he’s also dyslexic so he gets ‘good taste’ mixed up with ‘taste good,’ but it’s worse than that! Far, far worse! Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, he wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, a deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won’t be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Supermarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, we want them to do it . . ..”

And finally, there’s this, one of the items on the ever-eclectic playlist of songs mentioned in the the book.  Surely, I thought, he’s making this up. Tiny Tim, back in the 60s, singing a bit of Apocalyptic children’s story about the ice caps melting?  See for yourself: