A Brief Encounter with an Elusive Author

Thomas Pynchon hasn’t given an interview or appeared publicly in years, but one New Yorker encountered him twice in a month and is left puzzled.

From a piece on the Daily Beast...

Trying to understand readers’ mania for meeting authors, Gaddis once asked, “What is there left when he’s done with his work, what’s any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?”

Once intermission began, I grabbed my fiancée’s hand. “Let’s go,” I said, “you’ve got to introduce me.” Whatever the wisdom of Gaddis, I was thrilled to be so close to the shambles of Pynchon. We climbed a flight of stairs and suddenly I heard myself being introduced.

As we shook hands, the abstraction of a Great American Author quickly resolved into the details of a particular individual. He was about six feet tall with curly white hair and a nervous habit of swaying slightly as he spoke. He seemed, in fact, to be almost as nervous as I was. I stammered something about admiring his work and the conversation somehow lurched into motion. We talked about books (he’d been re-reading Borges’s short stories) and music (he went to a lot of the jazz concerts at Carnegie). The whole time we spoke I was searching for some Pynchonian essence, some sign that this was the same mind that produced Gravity’s Rainbow and V. But before anything revelatory could emerge, I heard my fiancée telling his wife how it had been great to run into them again and to enjoy the second half of the concert. She told me later that maybe five minutes had passed. It seemed much shorter.