Cow Country by Adrian Jones Pearson

Cow Country is not only a satire of America in the tradition of Gulliver’s Travels but also an allegory for human life in the tradition of Moby Dick.

As satire, the reader discovers the Cow Eye Community College campus and the surrounding Cow Eye Junction to be populated by individuals who self-identify within binary factions: carnivores versus vegans, old timers vs. new comers, town vs. gown, beer drinkers vs. wine imbibers, tenured faculty vs. students (and adjuncts), faculty vs. administrators, Native Americans vs. settlers’ descendants, men vs. women, domestic truck owners vs. foreign car owners, manual typewriter traditionalists vs. electric typewriter progressives, and on and on. Each Cow Eye resident can and does self-identify as an oppressed member of a minority faction in perpetual conflict with an apparent oppressing majority faction. Thus, CECC and environs stand for America now and throughout its history. (The American flag is described throughout as having a varying number of stars at different points in the narrative that spans a partial academic year: at least 15, 23, 24, 25, 28, 34, 44, 46, 47, 48, and 49 stars at different narrative points.)  Pearson satirizes contemporary America as surely as Swift did the United Kingdom of his time in Gulliver’s Travels.

As allegory, the protagonist – call him “Charlie” – grapples with the fundamental human conflict between the temporal (the unimportant-but-urgent demands of deadlines, separate mortal beings, sex, time) and the eternal (the non-urgent-but-important facets of life, the source of one’s ultimate being, love, timelessness). Melville’s Pequod sets sail on Christmas day on her ultimate and doomed voyage; with allusion to that same event on the Christian calendar Pearson’s Charlie climaxes his tenure at CECC at a Christmas party where his own acts of commission and omission doom his educational administrator/special projects coordinator professional standing.

In Cow Eye the educational administration passages enlighten and entertain readers ignorant of that calling as surely as the whaling passages do in Moby Dick.

Throughout Charlie draws inspiration from the excerpted book within a book, The Anyman’s Guide to Love and the Community College, detritus from his predecessor Special Projects Coordinator who likewise failed at that calling despite her “...Degrees from two Ivy League colleges. A sparkling curriculum vitae. Experience up the ying-yang. Countless awards and commendations. References from the Queen of England and Archduke of Canterbury. You know the type.”  

“The human desire for love,” according to the Anyman's Guide, “is as old as the community college itself…. In fact, love is even older – tracing its lineage back to the days, long before community colleges, when the heart was still an untamed beast like the many undomesticated cows that once roamed the world. These were the days of wandering and wonder, of vast unconquered lands that encouraged diaspora and discovery. For the history of humankind is the history of man’s quelling of his own desires. Or, rather, of their pursuit. Across continents and through time. With a diligence that knows no parallel among other beasts of burden. More than any force of nature, it is love – of self, of family, of god and country, of great ideas – that has been the constant catalyst in the making of the world as it is. Without love there would be no religion. No art. No philosophy. Without love we would not have saints or martyrs or prophets. And of course, without love we would not have community colleges.

“It is said that for a thing to exist it must live side by side with its opposite. Day cannot be day without night. Nor can the flow exist without the ebb. In this way there can be no joy without despair. No enlightenment without ignorance. And no passage of time without the final resolution of death. But before there was a community college there could be none of this – nothing at all but a very dark void. And then came God and the universe that He created which in turn begat time and space, such that over the many billions of years and the many billions of miles, the lineage of learning came down from its timeless ancestors:

“From God came the universe and from the universe came time and space. And from all of this came the community college where love itself is nurtured just as the sky nurtures the stars in her embrace. For surely there can be no truer love than the love of learning. The teaching of an idea requires the transfer of knowledge from one mind to the next, just as the birth of a child requires the transfer of seed from one mammal to another. This is why, among institutions of the world, the community college is the cradle of all that love aspires to be, and it is why, among lovers of the world, its faculty are a chosen people. And for this reason, the community college has always been, and will always be, the breeding ground for love. Its eternal source. The place it always returns to and whence it always comes. For to know the world in its entirety is to know, in a very small way, your local community college. And vice versa.”

Does not the author of The Anyman’s Guide wax poetic upon her subject as Ishmael does upon the whale and the sea?

Cow Country came to wide attention  when Art Winslow of Harpers opined “Did Thomas Pynchon publish a novel under the pseudonym Adrian Jones Pearson?” (See the September 9, 2015,The Fiction Atop the Fiction, by Art Winslow | Harper's Magazine via @Harpers https://harpers.org/2015/09/the-fiction-atop-the-fiction/).

It is true that Ruger firearms appear in the novels of Pearson and Pynchon --"a Ruger Blackhawk in thirty carbine” and "a Ruger .38" in the former and ".44 Magnum, a Ruger Blackhawk" in the latter (Inhernet Vice, pg. 250) -- however, that coincidence alone is insufficient to conclude the former to be a penname for the latter. (See a YouTube video demonstration of the Ruger Blackhawk 30 Carbine here 06:02 mm:ss.)  That coincidence is not “specific evidence if one were searching for a smoking gun (‘closure’) linking Pearson and Pynchon” (Winslow, 21st paragraph). [Note 1]

Cow Country by Adrian Jones Pearson is thoroughly enjoyable as a work of art itself. One need not have any acquaintance with novels by Pynchon to be entertained, enlightened, and motivated by Pearson’s, which I recommend.

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A note about editions:  For about two-thirds of the novel’s text I listened to the Audible version that credits Therese Plummer and LJ Ganser, and I endorse their performances. (Hear a sample of the Audible version on the Amazon site here.)

Cow Country Paperback – April 8, 2015 (Above graphics and excerpts from this edition.)
by Adrian Jones Pearson

Paperback: 540 pages
Publisher: Cow Eye Press (April 8, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 099091500X
ISBN-13: 978-0990915003

Audible Audio Edition
Listening Length: 20 hours and 50 minutes
Program Type: Audiobook
Version: Unabridged
Publisher: Audible Studios
Audible.com Release Date: February 9, 2016
Whispersync for Voice: Ready
Language: English
ASIN: B01AO5H4HW

Note:

1. It is true that a prose master may write in a variety of styles (cf Pynchon’s novels Mason & Dixon and Against The Day where the Pynchon-brand literary style from, say, Gravity’s Rainbow is eschewed for other styles). That is to say that it is feasible that Pynchon could have masked himself and could have adopted the style of a Pynchonian derivative if he so chose, but being merely possible does not render something actually so. The two literary styles in Cow Country – the novel itself and The Anyman’s Guide within that novel -- demonstrate that Pearson has mastered writing in multiple styles, a skill necessary to any novelist since Joyce’s Ulysses to be counted a member of the novelists' guild, IMHO.