Paul La Farge
Pain is private, and its privacy has long been a subject of interest to philosophers. Wittgenstein famously compared pain to a beetle in a box: “No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.” When we talk about pain, we have to take one another’s word for it—that we are talking about the same thing, or indeed that we have beetles in our boxes at all. But what if there were a way to look into a stranger’s box and actually see his suffering? Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s seventh novel, follows so quickly on the heels of his sixth, the massive Against the Day (2006), that the teams of specialists who go over the fuselage of every Pynchon text as if it were a spy plane forced down by mechanical difficulties, identifying the probable origin and function of each part, writing up the results in Pynchon Notes or on the Internet, must be gnashing their teeth with weariness. The red telephone again? Aw, sheesh. If only there were some way to persuade them not to worry! Inherent Vice is by far the least puzzling Is Tintin literature? It’s a good question, and one that launches novelist Tom McCarthy’s book-length study of the Belgian artist Hergé’s masterwork, the adventures of the boy reporter with the comma-shaped hairdo. The French have already made up their minds about Tintin’s literary merit: McCarthy’s bibliography lists works by the playwright and academic Jean-Marie Apostolidès and the psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron, as well as the philosopher Michel Serres’s multivolume Hermès, a chapter of which is devoted to Hergé’s 1963 album, The Castafiore Emerald. (One might add to this list Thomas Sertillanges’s odd La Vie quotidienne à Moulinsart, which considers Tintin less As someone who played Dungeons & Dragons obsessively from age nine through fourteen, I have my share of regrets, but they are as nothing when compared with those of Mark Barrowcliffe, an English novelist and ex-gamer, whose memoir, The Elfish Gene, chronicles a D&D habit the likes of which few people have known, or at least survived.