The Last Novelist Who Won’t Write About Himself

Late in Gravity’s Rainbow, his monstrous, sprawling 1973 masterpiece about rocketry, Thomas Pynchon spits that “there’s nothing so repulsive as a sentimental surrealist”. It’s not entirely clear what he meant by this. The line comes at the end of a long, strange passage in which Pynchon imagines that the Sun makes a sound, a constant furnace roar “so perfectly steady that generations of men have been born into it and passed out of it again, without ever hearing it”, but thanks to “eddies in the Soniferous Aether”, maybe sometimes, just for a few seconds, a tiny blip of genuine silence might descend on the world.