Openers

By Paul Gray

SLOW LEARNER by Thomas Pynchon

Little, Brown; 193 pages; $14.95

The urge to make an impression on the public consciousness does not combine easily with the desire to go through life unnoticed. Witness the besieged reclusiveness of Greta Garbo, J.D. Salinger and the late Howard Hughes. They all made the same mistake: trying to change the rules of celebrityhood after they had become household faces. Author Thomas Pynchon, 46, apparently anticipated this problem during his adolescence. The only photograph of him to surface publicly shows a typical American teen-age male circa mid-1950s: crew cut, protuberant ears and a sleepy stare. Since then, nothing, not even a forwarding address; rumor has him spending a lot of time in Southern California. An eerie question arises: How did the young Pynchon know that his writings would one day set readers off on a quest to find him? His prescience has proved remarkable.

His first novel, V. (1963), with its fusion of paranoia and surrealism, provided one of the most impressive literary debuts of the decade. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), shorter and more straightforward than its predecessor, won more converts to the growing Pynchon cult. And the encyclopedic Gravity's Rainbow (1973) stunned both critics and readers as the most ambitious American novel since Moby Dick.

Through all the awards, invitations and beseechings that accompany success, Pynchon remained an invisible man.

Slow Learner, a collection of five short stories written and published while the author was in his early 20s, has no photograph on the dust jacket. Pynchon fans have come to expect that. The book does offer one major surprise: a 20-page introduction that amounts to Pynchon's first public gesture toward autobiography. Yet for all the apparent candor of these remarks, buyers should still beware. Pynchon criticizes the young writer he once was on a number of counts: for having a tin ear for dialogue, for tailoring plots and characters to the design of abstract concepts, for using language as a form of showing off: "I will spare everybody a detailed discussion of all the overwriting that occurs in these stories, except to mention how distressed I am at the number of tendrils that keep showing up. I still don't even know for sure what a tendril is."

This statement, coming from the author of Gravity's Rainbow, is simply not credible. If he can absorb and then brilliantly embellish the scientific progress that led up to the development of the V-2 rocket, he can look up tendril in a dictionary. And Pynchon's stories are not as bad as he claims. The Small Rain rather artfully juxtaposes the tedium of peacetime Army service, a catastrophic hurricane and sex. The Secret Integration accurately catches the locutions of an alcoholic jazz musician. Under the Rose is an evocative spy story set in a kind of operetta Egypt, with all the local color lifted, as Pynchon admits, from a Baedeker guide for the year 1 899. From the germ of this story sprang V.

On the whole, Pynchon's early works are flawed but disciplined exercises by an apprentice who already senses the sorcerer he will become. Pynchon's attempt to dismiss himself as just a regular guy is charming but a little disturbing, suggesting a weariness with the task of being different. He even includes a sentence that implicitly questions the wisdom of remaining in hiding: "Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one's personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite." This might be taken to mean that Pynchon could pop up on TV at any moment, explaining himself to Donahue or Barbara Walters. But the best bet is that he will continue to let his books do all the talking. -- By Paul Gray