Friday Reads: Richard Fariña

This week I was still making my way slowly through Gravity’s Rainbow. (I find I’m reluctant to carry the novel around in public; it feels like the kind of intellectual flex I would have pulled in college, but at the same time, I want to read it when I get a chance. It’s a dilemma.) Thomas Pynchon dedicated the book to his college friend Richard Fariña.

I once had a theory that Fariña’s novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, was a secret key to Gravity’s Rainbow. The main (only?) piece of evidence I can recall for this was how Slothrop’s drug-induced trip through the sewer —spoilers, I guess— corresponds to a toilet incident in Fariña’s fictionalized account of his time at Cornell. I read Been Down So Long… over and over one summer while working as a banquet waiter at a resort. The book is unrestrained but carefully thought-out, short but containing heavy implications for everything happening off the page. It’s a coming-of-age novel that’s also a quest novel. I read it while I was still trying to figure out how to be a writer, and Fariña seemed to have lost the fear of uncapping his pen and letting the words spill out onto the page. I was still looking for a way to do that.

And, embarrassing as it is to admit now, I also read it looking for clues about Pynchon, which were hard to find in the days before the Internet. Instead, I mostly learned about how much Pynchon liked and admired Fariña.

Fariña was outgoing, popular, and charismatic. Once, at a costume party, Pynchon went as Fitzgerald, and Fariña as Hemingway. If you want to get even more unnecessarily literary about it, Fariña was the Dionysian rock star to Pynchon’s Apollonian slow learner.

After dropping out of Cornell, Fariña went on to the New York folk scene, and became a minor celebrity and promising musician. And then he died too young, at 29, in a motorcycle crash near Carmel, California.

Pynchon, of course, puts it much better than I can: “Death, no idle prankster, is always, in this book, just outside the window.”

I’m no longer sure it’s a secret key to anything but itself. But if you can find a copy of Been Down So Long… it’s worth a read for any Pynchon fan.

Other books:

• I read the first volume of I Hate This Place by Kyle Starks and Artyom Topilin. It’s about a couple that inherits a ranch house in the middle of nowhere, and discovers it’s plagued by a whole host of paranormal problems, from UFOs to monsters to ghosts to a demon. It’s funny and scary, but the main draw is the protagonists’ dedication to each other even as things around them are literally going to hell.

• Picked up The Biography of X by Catherine Lacey, a fictional biography of a writer in an alternate America that split into two countries after World War II. It’s a hell of a concept and I’m looking forward to reading it.

And as always, your reviews and suggestions are welcome in the comments.