Though The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Vineland (1990) and Inherent Vice (2009) are all set in California, each is a parable of the American nation. Together they form a mini social and political history of the culture as it devolved from an era of myriad social changes and expanding opportunities to one of conservative reaction. Each book is set specifically in Southern California: Oedipa travels south to San Narciso, while the generative action in both Vineland and Inherent Vice takes place in (or near) Gordita Beach (a.k.a. Manhattan Beach in South Bay). Thus in Pynchon's imagination Southern California is the place where the nation impinges upon the characters of his novels, the place in which his characters begin to think about their lives within the framework of the nation, as Oedipa does near the end of Lot 49 when she walks down a “stretch of railroad track” and realizes “she might have found The Tristero anywhere in her Republic,” that America itself is “coded in Inverarity's testament.” A search drives the plot of all three novels: for Trystero in Oedipa's case, for Prairie's mother Frenesi in Vineland, and in Inherent Vice, Doc Sportello's pursuit of Mickey Wolfmann and Coy Harlingen, among others.

Vargas Llosa has characterised himself as a ‘novelist intoxicated by reality, fascinated by the history being forged around us and by the past which still weighs so heavily upon the present’. This is an instructive description of the author of The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del Chivo, 2000), a realist novel depicting historical events: the assassination in 1961 of the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina and the legacy of his regime, which was still very evident in the Dominican Republic in the 1990s,when some of its scenes are set.

Trujillo, known as ‘el Chivo’, both owing to his reputation as an indefatigable stud and because of the word's association with the Devil, ruled that country in person or by proxy from 1930 until his death. He was one of the most cynical, sanguinary and absurdly histrionic of twentieth-century dictators, creating a police state, terrorising his subjects through a network of thugs and informers, and accumulating political, legal, military and economic power that turned the Dominican Republic into his and his grasping family's private fiefdom. Even more sinister was the control his propaganda machine and cult of personality enabled this lethal megalomaniac to exert over the minds of his subjects. Trujillo was the creature of the USA, trained by the Marines and ruling with the support of successive administrations in Washington, which he was careful to cultivate by presenting himself as a bulwark against communism while bankrolling American politicians and opinion-formers.

In Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon calls the colonial William Slothrop “the fork in the road America never took,” a road that would have been kinder both to people who were powerless and to the land. With Mason & Dixon, Pynchon explores that colonial period as the time in which the decisions were made that sent America down the wrong road. His symbol for these values, decisions and consequences is the surveying project carried out by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon (1763–67). To settle the rival claims of the Penns and the Calverts over the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, these surveyors cut a line eight or nine yards wide straight through the wilderness along latitude 39° 43′ 20″. This line created colony borders and ownership; damaged the plants, beasts and people whose territory it had been; and came to signify the divide between slave-holding colonies and those that banned slavery. Pynchon focuses on slavery more than the horrors of Indian-killing because Mason and Dixon's line defined the political oppositions of the new country and figured prominently in the Civil War a century later.

Mason & Dixon will seem highly fragmented, information-dense, and full of frustratingly incomplete lines in dialogues. A 773-page book that scorns coherence does make heavy demands on its audience, so in addition to wondering how to read it, one can ask why Pynchon should have constructed his storyworld in this fashion. This chapter will sketch one way to approach reading the novel – the how – by visualizing the text as layers of material and as networks of connected points. The why behind these images lies in Pynchon’s sense that layering and connecting amplify power – for good or bad purposes – and his way of amplifying power here intensifies non- material, spiritual reality. In Dixon’s words, layers accumulate force.

In Vargas Llosa's literary world, unhappiness and suffering are as pervasive as the two responses with which individuals strive to prevail over their feelings of malaise: rebellion and fantasy. In the 1960s – as a committed socialist – Vargas Llosa was persuaded that human dissatisfaction was directly linked to the shortcomings of the same political and economic realities that inspire the most urgent works of literature. Conversation in The Cathedral (Conversación en La Catedral, 1969), a towering achievement, depicted the ripple effects of political corruption on individuals, communities and a whole nation. In the 1980s, Vargas Llosa abandoned his socialist convictions, and became an outspoken advocate of free market democracy. He no longer argued that revolutionary violence was a legitimate means to achieve the kind of political change that would eliminate the causes of human discontent. In fact, he began to make the counter-claim, that political unrest and instability could be traced directly to the same illusion he once held: that social utopias are possible. In this decade his novels were concerned with the fragility of societies assailed by fanatics, political opportunists or wellintentioned idealists. The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo, 1981), for example, explored the propensity of humanity to idealise violence with the visions of apocalyptic religious leaders, the patriotic fervour of military professionals, or the abstractions and intimations of intellectuals who fail to comprehend war for what it is: a devastating collective experience. In the 1980s, Vargas Llosa remained optimistic that our propensities to unrest and instability could be effectively diffused.

Given the seventeen-year interval between the publication of Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland, critics may well have reason to find major differences between the two phases of Pynchon's literary career. Whatever the value of this periodization, the usual association of late style and absolute mastery does not quite apply, since it is for the climax of his first period that Pynchon has become part of the literary canon. If his first phase is indeed crowned by the two accepted masterpieces The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, then Pynchon's first novel, V., assumes a somewhat awkward position. Is it still part of the learning curve (with the author reaching his peak almost immediately afterwards), or is it the first full-bodied illustration of the postmodernism that would become associated with his name, mostly on the strength of the two books that follow? Maybe this question is too determined by these books' later importance, or even by the classical notion of authorial growth, which Pynchon himself reinforced in the introduction to the 1984 collection of his early stories, Slow Learner. The genesis of V. does seem to indicate that he was struggling in his first attempt at long fiction. In an August 1961 letter, Pynchon went as far as telling his editor that he didn't “know dick about writing novels yet and need[ed] all kinds of help.” However, judging from the speed, initiative and efficiency with which he would rewrite the version of the book he had first submitted, both the statement in the letter and his later self-presentation in Slow Learner can be construed as instances of modesty – false or authentic .

Published within one year of each other, Who Killed Palomino Molero? (¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, 1986) and The Storyteller (El hablador, 1987) are superficially very different, the former focusing on a melodramatic small town murder mystery, and the latter delving into the myths and cosmology of a Peruvian Amazonian tribe, the Machiguenga. The town of Talara in northern Peru links the two stories, in that it is the scene of the murder of Palomino Molero and is the home town of Saúl Zuratas's mother in The Storyteller. Both novels have an identifiable biographical point of origin; Palomino stems from Vargas Llosa's involvement in the 1983 Uchuraccay Investigatory Commission, set up after the murder of eight journalists, and The Storyteller harks back to Vargas Llosa's visit in the mid-1950s to the Alto Marañón region of the Peruvian Amazon, which sparked his long-lasting engagement with the debate about the place of indigenous cultures in a modern, Westernised society. They have in common a concern with the problematic nature of concepts such as ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity’ within the context of specific racial and social tensions.

Who Killed Palomino Molero?

Who Killed Palomino Molero? is, as its title proclaims, a self-conscious detective-style narrative; for the setting Vargas Llosa returns to Talara in the 1950s, and to his ‘two most recurrent characters’, Lituma and Silva. The two policemen are seeking to solve the mystery of the horrific mutilation and hanging of a young bolero singer from Piura, Peru, recently enlisted in the air force.

Pynchon's engagement with alterity is thematized psychologically through paranoia, schizophrenia, and narcissism; politically through systems of control that attempt to destroy otherness; economically through monopolistic transnational corporations and cartels that supplant national governments; scientifically through determinism and theories of entropy; aesthetically through film and photography, storytelling and the “routinization” of language. Pynchon thematizes these various aspects of culture as the effort to substitute the randomness of nature with a perfectly controlled, and controllable, version of reality: what, in Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Pointsman describes as “a rather strictly defined, clinical version of truth.” This chapter considers how Pynchon's work has represented and complicated diverse contested understandings of identity and alterity by variously undermining and legitimizing them. Pynchon's narrative engagement with liberal humanist ideas of essentialized identities gives rise to much of his narratological innovation and complexity, particularly when his exploration of ontological identity categories takes place within the context of European colonialism and its New World legacies.

Alterity names the process by which an “Other” is constructed. It carries the double sense of both the subject position of “Otherness” in which someone is placed and also the adoption of that subject position as the Other's perspective. Alterity is then a double process of placement and perception. In narrative, consequently, alterity affects the construction of character and also the treatment of narrative perspective or focalization, spatiality, temporality, causality, and truth or authenticity.

A total novel

The novels published by Mario Vargas Llosa in the 1970s marked a significant turn in his writing. Unlike those of the 1960s, arguably the most complex examples of high modernist literature in the Latin American canon, the novels of the 1970s – Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (Pantaleón y las visitadoras, 1973) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (La tía Julia y el escribidor, 1977) – are characterised by their deft use of humour, their storylines filled with narrative incident and pastiche, and their overall accessibility to general readers. These novels, despite their commercial success, had raised questions among a significant minority of critics, including some of the most influential, about a possible decadence of the Peruvian novelist or a commercialisation of his literature.

The publication of The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo) in 1981 signalled for many a return to the ambitious novelising of Vargas Llosa's first period. For instance, Peruvian critic Antonio Cornejo Polar found that ‘with The War of the End of the World, Vargas Llosa again shows his ability to propose extremely vast and complex narrative projects and to develop them with unusual efficacy and ingenuity’. The Uruguayan Angel Rama, another great Latin American literary critic of the period, was even more enthusiastic, proclaiming the novel ‘amasterpiece’, and predicting that in ‘one hundred years … it will be mentioned as one of the key novels of this second half of the twentieth century. Rama even declared Vargas Llosa to be ‘our greatest living classic [writer]’. The doubts that, at least for some, had been generated by the turn in Vargas Llosa’s writing had been answered by the publication of a work that equalled the highest achievements of his earlier period.

Mario Vargas Llosa is the most widely discussed – and debated – public intellectual in the Spanish-speaking world; his commentaries are read across the globe. To many he has become – in a phrase that he used with intentional irony to describe his long-term ideological sparring partner, Günter Grass – ‘the ‘conscience’ of an era, for he is a writer ‘who has opinions on and debates everything’. He has been commenting on politics since the early 1960s, though his conviction that a writer of fiction can play a decisive role in the political arena waned considerably after his own failed candidacy for the Peruvian presidency in 1990. His publications, on politics and on broader cultural issues, are more extensive than his works of fiction, and are so inextricably linked to his intellectual biography that they are best understood in the context of developments and changes in his views about politics, the arts and culture. Indeed, his collections of essays often include open letters and documents that attest to his ongoing participation in public affairs in Peru and elsewhere.

He first gained employment as a sixteen-year-old cub journalist in Lima for La Crónica newspaper, in early 1952, while still at secondary school. In his evocation of Peru in his Nobel Prize Lecture in December 2010, he talked with affection of his early days in the dusty newspaper offices, remarking that journalism, along with literature, had been a constant throughout his life that allowed him to ‘live more fully, know the world better, meet people from all walks of life, excellent, good, bad and execrable people’.

With Against the Day (2006), Thomas Pynchon sets his readers their largest challenge yet to process multiple plotlines, histories and genre traces. Throughout his novels Pynchon has experimented with mixing genres, writing parodies and pastiches, and creating multi-voiced texts, but with Against the Day he pushes the boundaries of his tendencies toward encyclopedic fiction. Summarizing fully and accurately the plot of Against the Day would be a daunting task, and even then the numerous intersections of plotlines are likely to end up a tangled mass. The novel spans some thirty years beginning in 1893, includes some 170 characters, and covers the globe from the west coast of America to inner Asia, locating many historical events in new juxtapositions – yet, the text repeats the mantra found in many Pynchon novels: “everything fits together, connects.” Many of the plotlines nod toward a specific genre that allows Pynchon to contextualize his narrative within an array of intertexts while simultaneously maintaining a reasonably consistent narrative voice. That consistent narrative voice is one familiar to Pynchon readers as it is based in the genre of Menippean satire, which he has used before to shape his various texts' political substructures. The Menippea's features are “stylistic multiplicity (and the philosophic pluralism it implies), fantasy and philosophy, intellection and encyclopedism, an ‘anti-book’ stance, a marginal cultural position, and carnivalization.”

Biographical and historical contexts

In November 1970, Thomas Pynchon took a sheet of quadrille paper and wrote Cornell English professor and F. Scott Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener. Then living in Manhattan Beach, California, Pynchon was well into writing Gravity's Rainbow (1973). About that work he volunteered: “the further I get into this wretched profession the clearer it is I am doing very little consciously beyond some clerk routine – assembling, expediting – and that either (a) there is an Extrapersonal Source, or (b) readers are the ones who do most of the work, or all of the above. Which is not a bringdown to realize.” Option (b) describes what Roland Barthes had just named the “writerly text” – a fiction that invites readers to actively engage with and thus in a sense to write the text. Option (a) playfully attributes his work to some paranormal process, though again there is nothing unusual about it. Historians commonly remark that following a broad and deep research effort one's narration of past events, things, places, people and their expressions will spill from one's notes onto pages. Thus the Archive seems to write itself into narration, hardly “a bringdown” because it frees the writer to concentrate on what lies beyond the “clerk routine” – the analytical and critical work of historiography.

Best known as one of the major novelists of the last five decades, Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936, Arequipa, Peru) is also one of Latin America's leading public intellectuals, a critic of art and culture, and a playwright of distinction. Vargas Llosa came to prominence in the 1960s as a talented short-story writer and a masterful practitioner of the novel. His early novels were considered innovative from a technical standpoint, and politically engaged. He was concerned with the theme of corruption and its effects on individuals and communities, and he found a literary means to express it: the crossing of spatial and temporal planes. In the 1970s he reconsidered his admiration for the Cuban Revolution and other leftist causes, and reoriented both his literary and his cultural concerns in line with anti-authoritarian democratic free market liberalism. In his novels of the period he adds humour, irony and a new kind of literary complexity to his repertoire and becomes interested in the theme of fanaticism, and his new literary technique involves alternating between a realistic register and one that is clearly imaginary, based on dreams and fantasies. After his unsuccessful bid to become president of Peru in 1990, Vargas Llosa returned to literature with a more circumspect view of political action. With The Feast of the Goat (2000), he finds a synthesis between the theme of corruption and the theme of fanaticism, and begins to develop a new literary procedure, which informs The Way to Paradise (2003), The Bad Girl (2006) and The Dream of the Celt (2010): the creation of a literary register that can be read simultaneously in a realistic register or as a fantasy. This mixing of registers is a form that is appropriate to conveying his new theme: reconciliation.

Even relatively early in his career critics compared Pynchon to writers like Rabelais, Swift and Melville. Like Cervantes or Sterne or Joyce (who died only four years after Pynchon's birth), Pynchon takes naturally to grand, comedic visions of the culture that has shaped his imagination and sensibility. He has affinities with the great epic poets as well. His catalogues – of disasters, of trash in a used car, of stamp anomalies, of pre-war British candies – link him to Homer, to Spenser, to his countryman Walt Whitman. Like Milton, he can recount a creation story fraught with sexual politics (Eve, Lilith and Adam become, in Vineland [1990], Frenesi, DL and Brock Vond) or imagine history's omega (the descending Rocket in the closing pages of Gravity's Rainbow [1973]). In Mason & Dixon (1997), like Virgil chronicling the mythic genesis of the fatherland, Pynchon imagines the moment at which the disparate ingredients of the American nation first came together. Like Swift, Pynchon can imagine a flying island (the tumescent airship of the Chums of Chance in Against the Day [2006]). Like Dante, he can evoke hellish abjection (Brigadier Pudding) and even conduct readers on a tour of the infernal regions, as announced by an epigraph purporting to come from the doubly apocryphal Gospel of Thomas (“Oxyrhynchus papyrus number classified”): “Dear Mom, I put a couple of people in hell today.”