NOW EVERYBODY--.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: MUSIC - Now Everybody: Visit Interprets Songs by Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon's reputation as a "difficult" writer may be exaggerated--some of his shorter fictions are pretty accessible--but it isn't exactly undeserved. Books like V. and Gravity's Rainbow are rich, encyclopedic, and frequently funny works of anti-authoritarian literature, but they're also dense, complex, experimental, at times deliberately confusing, and prone to extended tangents. Pynchon's postmodern doorstops are about as far as you could get from the spare simplicity of a Hank Williams song.

But what if you could experience him as a Hank Williams song?

Pynchon has always been prone to inserting verses into his novels. With Now Everybody--, the alt-country band Visit has set a bunch of those ditties to music. The group experiments with different genres: There's a calypso number, a psychedelic...