Thomas Pynchon is fucking nuts. I read Gravity’s Rainbow last spring and yet I came back for more. Pynchon is a rulebreaker provocateur and I know that turns some people off because it’s like he’s deliberately trying to be obtuse and difficult, and for all I know that may well be the case. The total English major nerd in me, though, finds some kind of perverse appeal in the literarily insane.
So it took me about two weeks, mainly in the form of hours and hours of mass transit commuting every day, and I think I understood most of it. Not all of it, of course, because I’m a B-average English major nerd at best and there are (I’m sure) deep hidden meanings that would only be apparent if I re-read the book and did some research on the more esoteric topics Pynchon touches on, and even then I know I still wouldn’t get the whole thing because there probably are flat-out impossibly opaque stretches where Pynchon is just amusing himself. Understanding the whole book is kind of beside the point, though. Parts of it made me laugh, parts of it made me think, and maybe I ended up on the same page as Pynchon and maybe I went off on my own arc-tangents but ultimately it served the purpose I was looking for, a little entertainment and a little brain-exercise. (I’m terrified of developing Alzheimer’s someday, which is why my commute-reading is only 93% trash, because those few times I slog through a book that makes my neurons feel the burn I hope I’m doing my brain some long-term good. Check back in about 9,000 posts to see if it's working.)
So there’s a lot going on in Mason & Dixon, partly because it’s a picaresque novel by design and partly because Pynchon throws in as much of the fantastic as possible at every turn (small sample: self-aware mechanical ducks, were-beavers, Jesuit conspiracies, talking dogs, spectral pocket dimensions of time resulting from leap year calendar realignment) and as I was reading along I assumed it was going to be a parade of the bizarre for seven hundred pages and then stop. I was pleasantly surprised by how satisfying I found the ending. There really was a sense of closure to everything that had been building without my even being aware of it. (And I know it sounds like I’m being coy as if I’m avoiding spoilers, but really I’m just hoping you’ll take my word for it because if I were to get into the details, again, we’d be here all day.) I think good endings are rare and valuable so I’m always happy to come across one, especially where I wasn’t expecting anything of the sort (acknowledging again that my expectations have to be considered in the context that, really, I’m not that bright).
Speaking of endings, I’m a big believer in blockbuster endings for role-playing games like D&D. And when we’re talking not just “like D&D” but “yes, in fact, D&D” I think that there should be a dragon at the end of every dungeon (It does what it says on the tin!) … at least metaphorically speaking. The D&D game I’ve been running once a month or so has not gotten far enough along to see any dragons yet (the why’s and wherefore’s may very well constitute an entire separate post in the future, as this is something I could babble about for days, probably much longer than I could spend analyzing Pynchon) BUT I thought I had come up with a pretty good Big Bad:
The Enormous Carrion Crawler. Yes, this is basically a giant bug, but it’s a giant bug that I have vast nerd-powered reserves of affection for, because it’s a version of one of the monsters that became an instant favorite when I was ten years old and got my hands on Dungeons & Dragons for the first time. My friends and I have been running role-playing games for each other for nearly half our lives, and sometimes being the one running the game can feel more like work than pure joy (but we suck it up and take turns being in charge and it all works out) but this time I was GEEKED. Because I got to be the Enormous Carrion Crawler.
The danger of getting really emotionally invested in an idea for running a role-playing game for your friends (or maybe not YOUR friends, but unquestionably for MY friends) is that you have no guarantees how the game is going to go. I love role-playing games because they’re essentially collaborative storytelling in genres I really dig. I like reading stories about wizard and elves fighting giant bugs (see “93% trash” above) and writing a story like that on the fly with the help of my friends is sweet, sweet brain candy. Assuming my friends are on board.
When I was in, I don’t know, seventh grade or so, we had to memorize definitions for literary terms like “exposition” and “denouement” and I will always remember that the definition of “climax” was “the moment at which the main character’s fate is most in doubt.” So clearly the Enormous Carrion Crawler represented the climactic moment in my game – but what would my friends do at such a pivotal moment, with their fates hanging in the balance? Would they be underwhelmed and laugh at my attempts to make a hypertrophied garden pest a threat? Or would they be overwhelmed, think the risk of being killed by the monster was too great, and run away?
Well, there was a hookah joke inspired by the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland but by and large my friends thought it was a worthy foe, and they braved the fight, which still could have sucked because role-playing games incorporate a lot of randomness by design and that can turn a potentially thrilling scene real ugly real fast, but I’ll spare you the dice-driven mechanical details and just say it all went down pretty groovy and a good time was had by all.
In other words, this weekend I finished a book that I thought would have a disappointing finish, and it ended better than I had expected, and I also ran a game that I hoped would have a climax that didn’t fall on its tentacled face, and it ended better than I had hoped. In my world, that is a win-win.
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