So begins the Lonely Planet travel guide to Los Angeles, California. From this description we are painted an idyllic view of a sunny paradise – the playground of the young and beautiful. The guide goes on to describe the temperate climate, the many shopping attractions, and the vast, sprawling freeway system, wryly commenting “the right car is to Angelenos what the right shoes are to Italians” (Schulte-Peevers 2010, 36). Postmodernist novels such as Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero (a loose re-write of Didion’s work), provide invaluable representations of Californian landscape. These representations include the widespread social sensations of disconnectedness, miscommunication and alienation present within the postmodernist canon. This thesis aims to emphasise the vital role of Californian spatiality and urban geography in the establishment of human miscommunication and disaffection, while discussing key thematic concerns such as nihilism and artificiality. The modern social spaces and physical constructs of California contained …show more content…
Pynchon’s fast-paced, multi-faceted plot and complicated, intertextual prose work to leave the reader not only with mere images or metaphorical descriptions of disconnectedness, but their own personal experience at the frustration of searching for clarity when complexity dominates and chaos reigns supreme. The physical geography of Oedipa’s Californian setting creates a wider sense of disconnectedness that transfers to the mental landscapes of individuals, all searching for answers and solidarity of truth. However, this search will be in vain within the pages of postmodernist fiction, whose tools are fragmentation, duplicity and a distrust of any overarching master