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.
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