I have made some effort (though certainly not an exhaustive one) to read a fair degree of contemporary fiction. However, I don't really read such fiction randomly. I have little interest in many of the popular books, the ones that win the Booker Prize or that local book clubs seem to enjoy. I prefer to read weird books, books that have some quirky or strange element. I like writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and David Foster Wallace.
I particularly find the so-called idea of Encyclopedic Fiction interesting. This was an idea coined by Edward Mendelson in the 1970s and refers to books that attempt to render an exhaustive picture of a cultural milieu. These are books like The Divine Comedy, Ulysses, Infinite Jest, and Gravity's Rainbow. The thing about such books is that they are hard to make sense of; there is so much in them that as readers we are often overwhelmed. Most readers, even ones who consider themselves well read or avid readers, have fairly traditional narrative proclivities. We like stories, and we like them to be well ordered and relatively easy to follow. But encyclopedic books are not just narrative in nature (though they may contain one or a number of fairly well structured narratives at their core). Rather, I think it helps to think of these books as more thematic in nature. Most of us remember high school English classes in which we learned about literature's themes; like "man against nature" or "man against man" etc. But when I say thematic I am not necessarily referring to these basic themes. I simply mean that it is easier to make sense out of one of these difficult books if you read the events they contain as related to a theme rather than simply looking at how they might reflect the narrative.
I know that this might seem like a basic idea but apparently it isn't. I realized this when I read an article I found on-line called "The 50 Best One-Star Amazon Reviews of Gravity's Rainbow." The Reviews contained in this article are all authored by angry readers who couldn't make sense of Thomas Pynchon's novel, and many of whom seem to think that the whole thing was little more than a huge ego exercise on Pynchon's part. Well, I've read Gravity's Rainbow, and though it is a difficult book, it is written so much skill and style that I find it very difficult to believe that it is simply gibberish, or even an ego trip.
The fact is that a book like Gravity's Rainbow could easily appear almost nonsensical. But if you read Gravity's Rainbow through a thematic prism (and there are a number of such prisms you could choose from), you can easily make sense out of it. Someone may say that this approach to reading is disingenuous or overly wilful. However, our readings are almost always our own products in a sense. Whether you are reading a Fairy tale by Grimm or a novel by Henry James, you generally take from it based upon what you bring to it. Our readings are formed by our personal and cultural baggage, and though our reading might be influenced by, say, professional, critical, or educational discourse, it always amazes me the degree to which people formulate their own ideas and readings of even complex material. When presented with a work that seems particularly enigmatic or even nonsensical, it seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable approach to wilfully make sense out of it for ourselves. If a book is hard to make sense out of but not particularly complex or turgid, and especially if it is amusing, like, say, Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, people don't usually seem too bothered by the fact that it doesn't fit into a traditional narrative structure. But a book like Gravity's Rainbow seems to get on many people's nerves, perhaps because they struggle through it and expect a big payoff at the end. But if one looks at the events through some thematic prism such a book can seem considerably less complex and the reading becomes a lot easier. For example, if Gravity's Rainbow is read as an account of 20th Century paranoia in various forms, most of the apparently unconnected events and ideas come into focus. Pirate's relationship with Jessica, the professional efforts to understand Slothrop's apparently supernatural powers, Slothrop's reaction to his racial nightmares, most of the characters' reactions to the War, etc.: all of these are stories about the strange, schizophrenic, paranoid reactions that people have or have had to our twisted and troubled culture. This idea makes Gravity's Rainbow not so much a maze of vaguely connected events but a kind of monologue of our social relations and personal demons. It's not important to me if this is what Pynchon "wanted us to think." Given Pynchon's reclusiveness, we will probably never have any clear ideas about what he thought about his own work anyway. What interests me is whether we can make sense out of a book like Gravity's Rainbow in ways that are interesting an fulfilling.
Instead of difficult, books like Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest are interesting because they pictures not just of individuals, but of important aspects of culture with which we all struggle.
