TOM LECLAIR

Since the publication of V. in 1963, when Thomas Pynchon was twenty-six, he
has been the reigning, if now aging, prodigy of contemporary American fiction,
the gifted author of two prodigious novels, the 492-page V. and the encyclopedic
Gravity's Rainbow. Reviewing the more modest Vineland in 1990, Richard Pow-
ers addressed Pynchon as a composer of bed-time stories: "So tell us another one,
Pop, before it gets too dark" (698). Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster
Wallace all admit within their novels their filial debt to "Pop" Pynchon. A major
character in Powers The Gold Bug Variations has Pynchon as his "favorite liv-
ing novelist" (468), several references to Gravity's Rainbow appear in Vollmann's
You Bright and Risen Angels, and a major character in Wallace Infinite
Jest is constructed from the obsessions of Pynchon's biggest book. ¹ Of the three
younger writers, Wallace is the most ambivalent toward Pynchon: Wallace prais-
es Gravity's Rainbow as generous in its gift-giving but also calls Pynchon, along
with Nabokov, "a patriarch for my patricide" (146). Though still alive, Pynchon
seems to have retired from novelistic mastery to become the grandfatherly pro-
prietor of an amusement park called Vineland. As we head toward the millenni-
um, Powers, born in 1957; Vollmann, born in 1959; and Wallace, born in 1962, are
our new prodigies.

By age thirty-three, Powers had published three novels -- the V. -like Three
Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Prisoner's Dilemma, and the 639-page The
Gold Bug Variations, which reviewers frequently compared to Gravity's Rain-
bow. At the same age, Vollmann had published a travel book, a collection called
The Rainbow Stories, and four novels, two of which exceed 600 Pynchon-dense

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