“From Faraway California”: Thomas Pynchon’s Aesthetics of Space in the California Trilogy

Offering a transdisciplinary journey across Thomas Pynchon’s California trilogy, “From Faraway California” addresses the representation of (city)space in the Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice through “geourban” lenses. Drawing on specific concepts in urban and regional studies, the book provides a thorough examination of Pynchon’s spatial imaginary, where the reader comes to understand how his fiction tackles the socio-political and cultural consequences of urban restructuring in the contemporary city and the lives of its citizens. Pynchon’s depiction of California is further analyzed from mythical and environmental standpoints to shed light on his planetary vision and (post)postmodernist poetics in the span of nearly half a century.

More broadly, the book’s geocritical and urban analyses of Pynchon’s fiction indicate what might take place concerning the future of urbanism, toward “planetary urbanization” and the formation of the “city region.”