New Pynchon Novel! Part 2

Musing Outloud about Thomas Pynchon's writing

Welcome back to my round-up of Notes posts on Pynchon’s writing in anticipation of Shadow Ticket coming out Oct 7, 2025.

Originally I was just messing around. At this juncture my poor habit of quickly outputting walls of text took over.

Here is Part 1 in case you missed it:

My photograph of tree limbs from a moving train.

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Day 8 of new Pynchon novel coming out, my favorite Pynchon criticism of his own work is calling out The Crying of Lot 49 as “a short story with a goiter problem” in his introduction to Slow Learner.

It’s true, too, and it was relieving to see him say it. Some people consider it his best work. I really do think they feel that way just because it’s short and its details and references are… maybe they think “more straightforward,” I would say “less fleshed out.”

For a while it was the book of his that I had read the most, both because it was the first and because, y’know, short. To some degree my “re-read a Pynchon book per year” project was to catch the other books up to CoL49. By my third read-through I felt like the whole W.A.S.T.E / Tristero element that drives this entire novel would have been the sort of thing he’d have simply wrapped into a couple-three sub-chapter sections in, say, a novel like Against the Day. In fact I’m a little surprised the W.A.S.T.E. system doesn’t just appear as a regular Pynchon universe reference, though similar alternative underground postal systems appear in, at least, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, very briefly. And that’s about as far as that concept really has play.

There’s literally a scene in CoL49 where Oedipa Maas wanders around noting muted post-horns around various places that reads like Pynchon had a bulleted plot list for something bigger and just simply couldn’t find the other fun, crazy scenes to illustrate it with. This book probably taught him that “And then you see it everywhere!” doesn’t need to iterated on, you can have a character observe something and clock its message and move on to other story. Similar sigils appear in later works and aren’t pontificated upon longer than they need to be in the characters’ awareness.

I also think it does Pynchon a disservice to teach CoL49 in high school. It’s literally a book where you can see the author realize midway through, “Shit, this is going nowhere,” and then you're supposed to teach kids… what, exactly, about it? Maybe its historical references? (Arguably I would say V. would be the best for high schoolers, y’know, sailors, sewer crocs, and automata and all that, but having kids under the age of 18 reading about a woman fucking a gear shaft probably wouldn’t fly in most parent teacher association meetings.)

Anyway, I wish Paul Thomas Anderson chose CoL49 to adapt vs the other Californian stories. It fits PTA’s world more, record producers, beach music, LA real estate. Inherent Vice was good but mostly interesting in how PTA switched the plotting and characters from Pynchon vibe to PTA vibe. I honestly don’t see Vineland working out quite as well, which is probably why he changed the name… it’ll be better to watch it as an “inspired by” with some new plotting and details than a full adaptation. I’m okay with that, and am curious what he saw in that story.

But PT Anderson could elevateThe Crying of Lot 49. Such adaptation would have a lot of potential to be better than the source and reclaim the concept from its messy early career provenance.

So now I’m kinda hoping PTA has a “Pynchon trilogy” in mind and CoL49 will be its crown. And I hope he never touches Pynchon’s New York or globalism stories.

Photo by Jake Blucker on Unsplash

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Day 9 of new Pynchon novel coming out, let’s dig deeper into PTA x Pynchon.

Before Paul Thomas Anderson took up the challenge, the subject of Pynchon's “adaptability” was frequent debate. Now, I believe everything is adaptable as long as you respect the media you’re adapting between. You can “get in the head” of characters, for instance, in both books and movies, but in books you can literally just describe their thoughts and feelings, in movies you have to build feelings out of mis-en-scene and sound and inform the audience of a characters’ thoughts through dialog and close attention to their reactions and how you frame what they’re reacting to. Both media can do this in a variety of beautiful and engaging ways.

For this reason I prefer adaptations that are not as close to the books, instead using its story as the basis for a movie. Adaptations that merely seek to translate the book to film, I feel, are extremely expensive illustrations.

I have an example. Harry Potter movies 1 & 2 are illustrations. It wasn’t until visionary director Alfonso Cuarón took over that actual magic took place on screen. Then David Yates took over and used Cuarón’s established magic to make adaptations of Harry Potter books.

On the flip side there is only so much deviation from the story fans of the book can handle before the complaint begins that it's like the filmmakers didn’t even read the book at all.

Anyway, with Pynchon in particular, there’s actually very little he writes that can’t be translated fairly directly to screen. The problem of adaptability comes from the fact that so much happens that to fit all of it in would make the movie expensive and long; his quick flashbacks and flash forwards — sometimes in single paragraphs — seem hard to guide an audience through visually (fans of Nicolas Roeg and late era Terrence Malick know this need not be a fear); and his explicit and strange sex scenes might come across as pornographic.

Other than that, Pynchon’s work is relatively cinematic and VERY colorful and kinetic. So, primo adaptation material.

When Inherent Vice movie was announced, it seemed sort of like, “Well of course that book would be the one adapted.” It’s relatively simple, brief, and straightforward for Pynchon's ouevre. But still I was uneasy about PTA doing it because

.. I don’t know. His movies are relatively talky and intellectual and though he has a great sense of humor, it’s not Pynchon’s sense of humor, y'know?

But I found the result actually very interesting. Just short of brilliant. It was interesting because it’s 100% PTA’s movie, he just used the story from the book. It’s almost brilliant because PTA completely flipped how I would have expected a Pynchon movie to look.

I like to say that “Pynchon writes through a kaleidoscope, Paul Thomas Anderson shoots through a telescope” to describe the difference between Inherent Vice the book v movie. What I mean like that is when I read Pynchon, I imagine cutaways, rapid editing, people coming in and out of scenes, stuff happening in foreground and background, tons of parallax and parallels. But PTA just fixed the camera on Joaquin Phoenix and let all the rest of the stuff happen around him. Characters wander in and out of frame, you no longer have to have them arrive or leave the scene. You see what the character sees but you don’t have to overload with a ton of cutaways. And how elegant! Super smoothe way to do it all but compressed, literally, through a long angled tracking shot.

It’s just short of brilliant because PTA loves long tracking shots, so it wasn’t like he grokked an innovative way of thinking of how to collapse kaleidoscopic storytelling into a one point perspective story. No, he just applied his own way of envisioning things to Pynchon's story.

It’s still super smart because he didn’t let the “How do you adapt Pynchon?” debate distract him, and he has the confidence and skill to know how to do it. It’s good that he did it later in his career than earlier. Boogie Nights and Magnolia era PTA probably would have tried a few cinematic relishes that may or may not have worked but definitely made his adaptation more fragile.

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

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Day 10 of new Pynchon novel coming out, surprised I didn’t even think about this before but lists! Obviously everyone must know my rankings of Thomas Pynchon novels:

Against the Day

V.

Gravity’s Rainbow

Bleeding Edge

————Appreciate but don’t love line————

Mason & Dixon

Vineland

Inherent Vice

————Genuinely bad book line————

Crying of Lot 49

My rankings change around a lot, depending on what I’ve recently revisited. Once upon a time Vineland was my favorite Pynchon novel because it’s when his language suddenly clicked for me and I started enjoying rather than analysing his books (helped me with literature in general too). And at one point Mason & Dixon was my least favorite Pynchon novel because I didn’t think the archaic “filter” he put over the work was a joke worth the effort, until a reread got me into the flow a bit more.

Somehow in this latest ranking, all of his California-set novels landed at the bottom. Huh.

I don’t include Slow Learner in this list not because it’s a short story collection and not a novel, but rather because I don’t really know how I feel about the short stories inside and was waiting for a revisit.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

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Day 11 of new Pynchon novel, so over the past few days I've derided The Crying of Lot 49 a lot, but one of its most useful and attractive attributes is that it’s very memeable, and from memes comes shared recognition and inside jokes. Often mentions of Thomas Pynchon will quickly be followed by someone grinning and saying, “We await silent Tristero’s empire!” or someone will scrawl a muted post-horn on a wall or whatever.

Pynchon certainly had his pulse on the memetic nature of iconography and graffiti and comic books alike. V. has a really amazing visual pun about Kilroy (the long-nosed fellow peeking over a horizon line beloved of US military personnel) slowly being implemented into electrical engineering.

But his other books are slightly harder to meme. The bananas of Gravity’s Rainbow end up not looking much different from Andy Warhol / Talking Heads iconography and what are you gonna do, scrawl a man crawling down a toilet somewhere? (Besides, Irvine Welsh took that imagery for Trainspotting and I imagine most people associate it with the Danny Boyle film).

Sigils, icons, graffiti, secret messages feature throughout his work (sometimes “the appearance of written text trying to say something in an alien language” [paraphrased from memory] appear out of things like hanging links of sausage in Mason & Dixon and other twisty natural phenomena throughout his work) but nothing tends to be as peculiar and specific as the imagery of The Crying of Lot 49. Mason & Dixon has a weird star that shows up on gun stock but that’s not specific (I think it’s a reference to the Rev’d’s host family, arms dealers by trade). The Chums of Chance have an icon in Against the Day but I can't even remember what it is after reading it three times. Vineland, what, a breaking window? “Golden Fang” is mostly visualized by a building in Inherent Vice.V. is a whole question of what V. looks like. Etc.

So The Crying of Lot 49 wins out as the most iconographic Pynchon novel and gives his fans something to signal to each other. You can wear a muted post-horn on a tee-shirt or whatever. For that reason alone it’s going to remain in competition for one of his most well-known works, and the memes are the most fun aspect.

For my part, the first painting I ever commissioned was a muted post-horn from my college friend Cree Myers. She did a little of her own research and learned about the whole stamp thing, so brilliantly added some paper margins to the edges to create a stamp-like effect. The back has “W.A.S.T.E.” in block letters.

Here’s an old photograph taken on a shitty early era smartphone camera. The colors are brighter in real life. This painting is currently in storage at my mother’s house.

Commission your artist friends, people. It results in art you like and keeps them paid doing what they love.

My photograph of Cree Myer’s painting of the muted post horn from The Crying of Lot 49

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Day 12 of new Pynchon novel coming out, I’d like to share my two favorite, not-even-wrong criticisms of Thomas Pynchon’s writing.

“He’s Dan Brown for Masters degree students.”

Exquisite! My friend Esteban popped that one off in a chat once, and it helped that this was in the midst of The DaVinci Code frenzy, after it became a sensation, before it was adapted into a movie, during when people were legit trolling Internet and sometimes real museums (often the wrong ones, since the book was not that accurate) for “symbologist” clues of secret traps and hidden passageways.

A not un-Pynchonian passtime, really. There is a significant cohort of “Pynchon’s books are encrypted instruction manuals to find the Real Truth” readers that more or less matched the “No really this book is real” fervidness that Dan Brown briefly set off in the late Aughts.

“He’s just a William Gaddis parodist.”

10/10, no notes. It’s funny because it’s true. The “bad sex in literature” award that Against the Day won was in fact a direct parody of a scene from The Recognitions (and the book’s title is drawn from the same source).

The original Gaddis moment involved a man waiting for a woman he hoped to woo, but was lassoed instead into dog sitting her lap dog. The dog keeps jumping on his lap, getting in between him and her even when she’s around, such that he begins to get frustrated with the dog in some way replacing what he would really rather his '“lap” be doing. In other words, the dog’s a cock-blocker.

In Against the Day, Pynchon one-ups Gaddis by making Frank Traverse suspect that the papillon dog Mouffette is not just a barrier to conquest but interested in Frank sexually, until out of boredom Frank decides to see where this will go, resulting in a SECOND literary parody in the same sequence:

“Reader, she bit him.”

Poking both Gaddis and Charlotte Brontë in a single passage, Pynchon, nice.

This fun criticism was part of a private exchange I had with a user on Mubi, which back in the day was a webforum for stodgy, humorless cinephile before it was bought by Sony and turned into a streaming service.

Photo by Chad Greiter on Unsplash

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Day 13 of new Pynchon novel coming out, Jordan Orlando got to talking to me in the comments yesterday about Bleeding Edge and the experience of living through events Pynchon writes about. Indeed there was a lot of anticipation around its release about what it means for Pynchon to write for Millennial contemporary experience.

Taken as a 9/11 book, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. Pynchon plays with Loose Change Theory in a way I initially found displeasing (but understandable, since Pynchon plays with conspiracy theories), but upon revisit and reflection I think the problem with Loose Change as a conspiracy theory is that it’s just about as lame as the Bush 2 administration. Not a lot of play there except “for money and power.”

No, the reason Bleeding Edge shook me to the core is when Maxine’s friend March, a former hippy and radical documentary filmmaker, sez “It’s like the 60s all over again. These kids actually believe information should be free.”

And on a single line, Pynchon informed me the digital revolution would fail. He had the same sort of sympathies, with doubts, for the hippies, appreciating some of what they were trying to to do but seeing it's death in their fixation on youth culture.

In 2013, I was still relatively pro-tech industry and hopeful that the hackers, digital creators, Anonymous advocates, whatever would preserve the shores of the new frontier to keep the big businesses and the power elites away. It’s how it’s structured, right? It’s a distributed “world wide web,” so no agency would take it down without shutting down the web itself (like the Chinese firewall).

Sure I was quaint and naive, but, like, Facebook was only half a decade old and iPhones and the Obama administration felt fresh and new, and I was in my early 20s just starting off my career. Sue me.

But anyway, to me Bleeding Edge is imminently adaptable but not right now. Any filmmaker taking on the story would feel driven to make Gabriel Ice out as some sort of Elon Musk, possibly smart enough to make him a Peter Thiel character, but he’s more like that Blackwater goon that perpetually shows up on the news every few years.

Either way, that sort of stuff doesn’t matter. Bleeding Edge should be adapted when the next overeducated young people revolution takes place, and Gabriel Ice conceived as more of an archetype or metaphor for the sort of sociopath invariably attracted to driving history away from its potential and more towards his grasp — if only he can hold on to “his” woman, who represents the last element of humanity he can't control by sheer force.

They’re always there, starting out as true believers until the elite take an interest in them.

The only reason to adapt Bleeding Edge these days would be to get Rachel Weiss to play Maxine, since Pynchon “casted” her in the role by describing Maxine as looking just like her. Writers, don’t do that, that’s obnoxious. Even Pynchon didn’t pull it off.

Photo by Jeffrey Blum on Unsplash

More to come next week.

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