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.