New Pynchon Novel! Part 1
Musing Outloud about Thomas Pynchon's writing
On Monday, April 8th, Penguin Random House announced Thomas Pynchon’s new novel Shadow Ticket releasing Oct 7th.
I’m excited. I’m a huge Pynchon fan and reread one of his books every year.
Here’s the official synopsis from the link above:
Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.
I started posting my excitement on Substack’s Notes feature, and jokingly did a post per day for a couple-three days stating, “Day X of new Pynchon book coming out.”
Well, true to my hyperactive and annoyingly grinding mind, before long these Notes were becoming … long… and I started jotting things down to write about daily.
Now, I guess, it’s a project. At this point I have something like a memoirs of reading Pynchon article or two worth of content, and I decided to rewrap it into an actual post for posterity. The ephemeralness of Notes (and any feed-based social media) is not a good place to leave my writing on the subject to decay, and I’m starting to put a lot of work into them.
My solution is to share them with my subscribers as well as my followers, also so that they’ll be archived on my Substack page.
In order to pace them out I’m going to go back and forth between the Notes post and an image until I receive the “Near email length limit” alert.
I have no idea how long I am going to be able to sustain this. There are 182 days between when Shadow Ticket was announced and when it will be released. As of writing (April 29th), I’ve posted 21 days straight and have 12 more planned. I did make an annotation Note where I admitted these ideas tend to go on until my brain burns out and I crash hard.
So, here we go:
NEW MOTHER FUCKIN’ ***PYNCHON*** BOOK THIS OCTOBER FUCK YEAH AMAZING
Been literally grinning ear-to-ear all day, this news has me psyched.
New Pynchon not sorry no rules.
Day 2 of new Pynchon novel coming, my world has changed by which I mean the world hasn’t changed at all but in October I’ll finally understand it, Pynchon always dipping in with his world-not-as-it-is-but-with-a-small-adjustment-or-two-the-way-the-world-could-be and not a minute too late for my intellectual unprepared not-understanding-this-bullshit ass. YES. It’s not hope because the end will feel dire but it’s something to look forward to. Bring it.
Day 3 of new Pynchon novel coming out, three things I’m looking forward to from Shadow Ticket:
A terrible cover that pisses people off, here on Substack Notes particularly, including posts comparing its garishness to the classy designs of the covers of things like Mason & Dixon and Against the Day or the now retro elegance of the original Gravity’s Rainbow and V. covers. However, like both Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, the unliterary cover will attract the people it’s really for, which are people with bad taste in general.
Pynchon winning a ‘worst sex in literature’ award again like he did for Against the Day, and also like Against the Day, it won’t even really be a sex scene.
A friend of mine reading it as his or her first Pynchon novel ever, and getting back to me with, “Yeah wow, I see what you mean about his writing. I don’t know though, I guess maybe some of this went over my head because I felt like it was just an overstuffed gumshoe novel with no ending? I guess I should check out Gravity’s Rainbow eventually” and then never reading another Pynchon novel again.
Day 4 of new Pynchon book coming. Here’s the big thing I’m NOT looking forward to:
All of the reviews.
It’s not that I’m worried about things like spoilers. The experience of reading a Pynchon novel is always different for everyone so it can’t be spoiled.
It’s just that almost all the reviews, particularly if they’re published from any trad media upper middle class periodical, will all launch off with variants of “How does one approach reviewing a new Thomas Pynchon novel?”
This is an example of an action that is understandable, but not forgivable: the reviewer is trying to thread some space between his fame and his infamy, his density of details and changing registers of story, and 2x imagined ‘Pynchon’ readers, one of which is a stuffy high brow professorial type getting ready to pen a 30 page essay on how the review is wrong, and the other is some conspiracy-addled wingnut rotting away in a shack willing to solder together a homemade bomb if the reviewer says the wrong thing.
Neither of these are Pynchon’s market, but I’ll save that discussion for another day. The problem with the “How does one approach reviewing a new Thomas Pynchon” whelm and cope is that it makes the review about the reviewer trying to figure out how to review rather than just writing a damn synopsis of the main story you should expect, some commentary about what the experience reading it is like, and whether or not you think it’s a good book or even liked it.
I once wrote a tongue-in-cheek “How to read a Thomas Pynchon novel” for Wikihow that makes the same point: start at the beginning, go page by page, enjoy the journey, and you’re done. Reviewers way overthink their mission on this.
I’d even love to see more negative, critical reviews of Pynchon novels. People afraid of being the reviewers that tossed Gravity’s Rainbow in the trash, but those reviews weren’t even wrong.
Yeah, modern book reviews of Thomas Pynchon’s work suck. Just read the damn book and tell me what you think.
Day 5 of new Pynchon book coming. Yesterday I made fun of reviewers for thinking Pynchon’s audience were either philosopher historian professors who would catch the mistakes, or paranoid wing nuts that would resent the mistakes.
Here’s what Pynchon's audience actually is:
Nerds. This should be self-explanatory, but the amount of detail, research, and various rabbit-holes Pynchon can send you down on makes brain go brr. Nerds usually have one big thesis they assign Pynchon’s work and try to avoid talking about the parts of Pynchon that make them very uncomfortable but in a thrilling, seductive way (see: Crust Punks, below). I like to believe I am a Nerd in this case.
Lit Bros. I have to admit I thought long and hard about whether to separate Nerds and Lit Bros. Pynchon can, in fact, turn a Nerd into a Lit Bro singlehandedly. But the big difference is that any “Bro” is really attracted to “control” over art so Lit Bros are more attracted to the fact that Pynchon gets away with it, gets away with the elaborate ornateness, the embedded smut and political incorrectness, the mix of high and low brow, and fancy that Pynchon pages a path forward to their stupid idea of what publishing and literary effort should be. So yeah they might start with a Nerd’s one big thesis but they quickly devolve into discussions about “What Pynchon here is doing.” I try not to be a Lit Bro but even writing this post sort of undermines my Nerdery. Right now is a very good time to mention Nerds and Lit Bros in the context of Pynchon are always male. Only the next two categories contain women.
Crust Punks: let me make clear, nobody reading this fits this category, even if you're a Nerd that secretly admires and yearns for the crusty frontier sailor elements of Pynchon’s work or the Lit Bro that secretly believes you are at base anarchist but rational and worldly too (which really just means you have money). No, Crust Punks aren’t on Substack. If you were to tell a Crust Punk what a Substack is, they’d squint, spit on your leg between their missing teeth, and tell you, “That’s fucking stupid. You bore me,” and then go punch a wooden fence down. I know this from experience because in New Mexico I’m friends of friends of Crust Punks and have attended their parties, and in New York in the train occasionally I’ll be reading a Pynchon book and be tapped on the shoulder only to look up and met with a big toothless grin and a thumbs up from a guy who looks 80 years old and is probably only 34, having somehow lived well beyond a Crust Punk’s golden retirement age of 27. Anyway, Crust Punks LOVE Thomas Pynchon. They’re all about him. It’s not even themes or theses or publishing prowess or anything. I’m not even sure they consider him fiction. They’re just like, “Yep, this is right.” And yes, Crust Punks read. Largely because they live in heroin dens without electricity (no one paid the bill and anyway nobody knows who owns the house) so don’t have TV access or charge on their very spiderwebbed phone. I can never be a Crust Punk, I’m a fucking vanilla ass tightwad afraid of drugs and getting into trouble.
Women: the only people who have fully discussed with me Pynchon’s story and characters and how they’re realized without trying to tell me “what he’s really about” are women. I’m not going to try to answer for them why they like Pynchon but the women I know who don’t like Pynchon never have said he’s a bad writer or the stories aren’t for them so much as told me something about the Brock Vonds in their life and how painful it is to see Frenesi get with him, either they were Frenesi in a previous relationship or had a friend who was or might still be entangled. Or they recognize Pynchon themselves, “yeah, that guy,” and handwave away his lechery as just coming with the package of dudes like Pynchon. Why can’t women be Nerds or Lit Bros or vice versa? Because women discuss what’s actually in his books versus what they “get” from him.
Day 6 of new Pynchon novel coming out, I want to divert a little bit and call attention to The Exegesis of Thomas Pynchon, a Substack publication where Andrew reviews Thomas Pynchon books chapter by chapter weekly.
He started with Gravity’s Rainbow and is now doing all the books by historical chronological order, starting then with Mason & Dixon. It’s a good time to catch up, then, as he’s only 7 chapters in.
Trust me, you can read a chapter a week if you haven’t read the book to follow along, or you can just read his posts if you read the book before.
Day 7 of new Pynchon novel coming out, my all-time favorite criticism of Thomas Pynchon is when someone sez he needs an editor.
Reader, she married him.
More to come next week. The individual days get longer….
To read my previous Musing Outloud essays:
Ted Hope's Challenge: 5 Tenets for Running a Movie Studio
Ted Hope sent a challenge to various film writers and filmmakers on the platform to write about what five tenets they would follow if they inherited a film studio. In his initial Notes post before the article was published, I commented five things I would do, but I do have to alter them slightly because the actual article specifies:
Home Cooking is the Thing
Home cooking is the thing. If there is one place in your life to orient yourself around, to find a stable, robust foundation for anything else in your life you want to take action and do, home cooking is an incredibly strong starting place.
Stop the Lists! 2024
I started tracking the movies I was watching again in 2023 just to see what would come from it, and to be honest it didn’t do much for me. What it taught me is that there’s a distinction between remembering you’ve seen a movie and wanting to remember movies, and the more movies you see the harder it is to do either.
To read more about books:
Bookreading Memories
Two weeks ago I posted Moviegoing Memories, a roundup of personal experiences I’ve had at the cinema that I originally posted to Facebook about four years ago and decided to transfer to Substack.
Living in Dark Psyches
I started alternating reading an unread book with re-reading a previously read book off my shelves somewhere in the midst of the pandemic lockdowns. It started largely as a question of how to organize shelves:
Independently Published Books I Own
My mother used to buy books of poetry from her friends. She even once bought the mystery novel of a daughter of a friend of hers. I, a judgmental teen, once snootily asked her, “How do you know the books are good?”
