Stefan Mattessich

Fox is the teenage son of a single mom who has grown up poor and transient until he arrives in Orange, California, with his first chance at a sense of belonging. There he meets Axel, an eccentric loner with a hyperactive imagination who introduces him to the fenced off no-man's land of a riverbed that winds through the suburban neighborhood where they live. There fantasy and reality collide in the stories they invent, the games they play, and the powers they resist. When Axel gets into trouble with the authoritarian pastor of his church, he runs away both for real and into his own fantasies. Fox goes looking for him in more ways than one, accompanied by his friend Angel, a Latin-X girl with a critical mind and a lot of experience in adult hypocrisy. What they all end up finding is the courage to be themselves and to care for one another in a world that doesn't much value either. The Riverbed tells the story of three intelligent young people coming to learn about the darker sides of the suburban dream they call home. Written in a fabulating style but with a realist's eye for the details of place, history, and nature, it combines the playfulness (if not the largeness) of a Salman Rushdie novel with the moral seriousness of J. D. Salinger. It will be loved by readers of all predilections - those with their heads in the clouds no less than those with their feet on the ground.

Nick Moran is an English literature PhD who cannot find a job. Even when he does, years later and after a second career as a hack Hollywood screenwriter falls apart, the department at a university in Auckland, New Zealand, turns out to be a hornet's nest of paranoia, arbitrary power, and guilt by association. When a consensual affair with a student leads to tabloid-style scandal and public disgrace, he convinces himself that the world is a kind of limbo, where human dignity has no meaning and people live in denial of the ways their actions have lost any purpose, their words and feelings any substance or value. His path back to normalcy takes him to New York, where he falls into another limbo of drugs and sex, and then to Paris, where he helps his old friend Haley, caught in a scandal similar to his own, back from an edge of madness.

East Brother, a literary novel, tells the story of Jess Cooper, a Navy seaman gone AWOL, and his uncle Milo, the last hippie in East Brother, a fictional beach town in Southern California, as both struggle for moral purpose at the end of an era. It offers a realist sense of place as well as the pleasures of the tall tale, character-driven lyricism, and an elegiac social vision of an America that is slowly unraveling its myths.After dropping acid on leave and landing first in the brig, then in a psychiatric ward, Jess takes refuge with his uncle Milo, thinking he might be able to help figure out what to do next: return to face the music or run away from a pointless life...and from himself. Milo knows a lot about running away. He's been doing it for a long time. Both of them feel trapped between escape and belonging, fantasy and commitment. Looking for a little more self-knowledge over the next three days, they get help from characters like Jack the Cat, a heroin addict who thinks he may have been an international drug lord; Harry Contento, a Machiavellian real estate mogul; Olive Moll, a street kid living on the edge; and Gaspar Zuniga, a forger of Francisco de Zurbaran paintings. By the end, both come face to face with the lies they tell themselves and a truth that is finally much stranger than fiction.

For Thomas Pynchon, the characteristic features of late capitalism-the rise of the military-industrial complex, consumerism, bureaucratization and specialization in the workplace, standardization at all levels of social life, and the growing influence of the mass media-all point to a transformation in the way human beings experience time and duration. Focusing on Pynchon’s novels as representative artifacts of the postwar period, Stefan Mattessich analyzes this temporal transformation in relation not only to Pynchon’s work but also to its literary, cultural, and theoretical contexts.Mattessich theorizes a new kind of time-subjective displacement-dramatized in the parody, satire, and farce deployed through Pynchon’s oeuvre. In particular, he is interested in showing how this sense of time relates to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Examining this movement as an instance of flight or escape and exposing the beliefs behind it, Mattessich argues that the counterculture’s rejection of the dominant culture ultimately became an act of self-cancellation, a rebellion in which the counterculture found itself defined by the very order it sought to escape. He points to parallels in Pynchon’s attempts to dramatize and enact a similar experience of time in the doubling-back, crisscrossing, and erasure of his writing. Mattessich lays out a theory of cultural production centered on the ethical necessity of grasping one’s own susceptibility to discursive forms of determination.

For Thomas Pynchon, the characteristic features of late capitalism-the rise of the military-industrial complex, consumerism, bureaucratization and specialization in the workplace, standardization at all levels of social life, and the growing influence of the mass media-all point to a transformation in the way human beings experience time and duration. Focusing on Pynchon’s novels as representative artifacts of the postwar period, Stefan Mattessich analyzes this temporal transformation in relation not only to Pynchon’s work but also to its literary, cultural, and theoretical contexts.Mattessich theorizes a new kind of time-subjective displacement-dramatized in the parody, satire, and farce deployed through Pynchon’s oeuvre. In particular, he is interested in showing how this sense of time relates to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Examining this movement as an instance of flight or escape and exposing the beliefs behind it, Mattessich argues that the counterculture’s rejection of the dominant culture ultimately became an act of self-cancellation, a rebellion in which the counterculture found itself defined by the very order it sought to escape. He points to parallels in Pynchon’s attempts to dramatize and enact a similar experience of time in the doubling-back, crisscrossing, and erasure of his writing. Mattessich lays out a theory of cultural production centered on the ethical necessity of grasping one’s own susceptibility to discursive forms of determination.