Many readers can't bear whimsy and never make it far into books containing cute animals and characters with funny names. I'm not wild about whimsy myself, and a first glance at Thomas Pynchon's new novel had me worried. I could scarcely be surprised by the funny names or the animals, since Pynchon's early fiction had people called Dennis Flange, Rachel Owlglass and Emory Bortz, and in Mason & Dixon there is a considerable speaking role for Vaucanson's mechanical duck. But here on page 1 is a group of boy adventurers called the Chums of Chance, heroes of a series of jolly books with titles like The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit and The Chums of Chance Search for Atlantis, not to mention The Chums of Chance and the Curse of the Kahuna and The Chums of Chance in the Bowels of the Earth. The narrator addresses us as 'my faithful readers' or 'my young readers', adopts a verbose and patronising diction to match, and presents us with a dog who appears to be reading Henry James. Well, surely is reading Henry James, because when asked what his book is he says, 'Rr Rff-rff Rr-rr-rff-rrf-rrf', easily scanned as The Princess Casamassima. I never heard a dog joke I didn't like, but those chums were looking tiresome already, and I sneaked a glance at the later pages. Was Pynchon going to keep up the pastiche? Was someone going to take over from these wretched boys? I was not consoled to see the chums (and their dog) still there on page 1085, and at many stations in between.

LRB 4 January 2007 | PDF Download