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Thomas Pynchon is a great inventor of names. From "The Crying of Lot 49" alone, we have: Oedipa Maas Wendell "Mucho" Maas John Nefastis Stanley Koteks Mike
by cgh 11y ago
Thomas Pynchon is a great inventor of names. From "The Crying of Lot 49" alone, we have:
Oedipa Maas
Wendell "Mucho" Maas
John Nefastis
Stanley Koteks
Mike Fallopian
...and so forth. Granted, the humour in "Lot 49" is a little more juvenile than, say, "Against the Day".
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoI loved the names in Bleeding Edge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Edge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Edge
- happy4crazy 11y agoMy favorite Pynchon name is Carmine "Two-Ton" Torpidini, from Vineland.
- cafard 11y agoA couple of years ago, I happened to think about the baseball player Al Kaline, and it struck me that I would have rolled my eyes had I seen his name in one of Pynchon's novels.
- dang 11y agoHe is indeed a brilliant namer. I love Reverend Cherrycoke from Mason & Dixon. It's so perfectly 18th century a name. But if we're talking about The Crying of Lot 49 let's not forget Genghis Cohen, subject of a public spat at the time! http://dangerousminds.net/comments/thomas_pynchon_punctures_preposterous_plagiarism_accusation_1966 http://dangerousminds.net/comments/thomas_pynchon_punctures_... While Pynchon's smackdown is devastating, I can't help but feel that he would have written a better one in later years. Actually it would be better if he had simply stopped at "that is another problem entirely". "Perhaps more psychiatric than literary" is clever, but at that point he's bludgeoning.
- cgh 11y agoThanks for posting this. I had no idea this even happened. As you're surely aware, in 1966, Pynchon was still only 29 (an incredible fact, at least to me), so that might explain the lack of subtlety. Another great namer was Mervyn Peake, author of the fabulous "Gormenghast" series. From it, we have: Lord Sepulchrave Groan Fuschia Groan Titus Groan Steerpike Swelter, the enormous chef Dr. Alfred Prunesquallor Mr. Flay ...and too many more to mention. Any lovers of literary, surrealist grotesquerie should read this series.
- dang 11y agoOh yeah, Peake was brilliant too. I always lump him in with Edward Gorey. The best namer by far, I think, is Dickens, at least for the comic style of naming, which all these examples are. I wonder if it's harder to come up with names for sad things.
- tlb 11y agoIn "Inherent Vice", the VC firm is Voorhees-Krueger (think 80s horror movie characters).
- progressive_dad 11y agoI was reading a reddit post the other day that looked like it was produced by a markov chain using martin amis and michel houellebecq as source material. Unexceptional except they used the name, "Gortibole Blubbet" for a fat old prostitute. My immediate thought was, "That MUST be from a Pynchon novel."