New Pynchon Novel! Part 3
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. You can catch up with my previous notes here:
New Pynchon Novel! Part 2
Welcome back to my round-up of Notes posts on Pynchon’s writing in anticipation of Shadow Ticket coming out Oct 7, 2025.
At this point I started getting some daily interaction with my Shadow Ticket anticipation posts so more and more of my writing turned to responding conversations I was having about them.
Day 14 of new Pynchon novel coming out, a couple days ago I mentioned readers who treat Pynchon’s books as some sort of encrypted guidebooks to finding The Truth. This cohort, moreso than Pynchon’s writing or himself, is detailed in an actual documentary that came out in 2002 called Thomas Pynchon: A Journey Into the Mind of P.
Listen, this documentary is worth a look, it’s very interesting, but you’re not gonna learn a heck of a lot about Pynchon himself from it. It mostly follows some of his fans as they trace his movements through California and Mexico and history and try to track him down in New York. It even gets creepy, with one dude camping out with a camera trying to grab some video of him.
There’s a degree to which I think these fans actually didn’t want to find him and be confronted with his quotidian real personhood. For one thing, I told my wife about how people would track him down once, and she spent five minutes Googling and found his address (no, I’ve never gone, even though he’s a 30min train ride away). For another thing, the idea of “a reclusive artist” is a bit overmuch — homeboy has friends and a network and by all testimonials is a genial and open guy, he just chooses not to be photographed or interviewed and his friends are respectful and protective about that.
It’s actually sort of funny to consider an author refusing interviews to be conflated with paranoia and reclusiveness. It’s not a wrong association, however, considering the content of his work. I will say that making it this long with only a couple-three photographs of you in circulation does require some work.
Anyway, I think A Journey into the Mind of P. is a great sister documentary to Room 237, the fan-theory Shining documentary, in revealing how sometimes cerebral texts send overactive brains into rabbit holes constructed of pareidolia of their own choosing. It’s sort of heady seeing people get too heady, and how far they will go.
One useful, actually informative part of A Journey into the Mind of P. is how much of his work has been read in context to Timothy Leary, Ted Kaczynski, and the mind expansion v. mind control track that ran sort of parallel / underground to the 70s backlash through 90s War on Drugs. Again not so much in detail about what Pynchon is about, but in what context many fans were reading it. If I recall correctly, the documentary even suggests Pynchon was involved in some way on the tests on subjects like Kaczynski! Or at least was privy to / observed them, before fleeing to Mexico.
Speaking of Kaczynski, if you want a really “Pynchonesque” documentary that isn't just about Pynchon, check out Das Netz, a 2003 documentary that explores the relationship between the global networking of the Internet and Ted Kaczynski, who exchanges letters with the filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck. This movie used to be available through Other Digital, the indie label run by San Francisco experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin, but is now out of print. I am not sure if it’s available online. Regardless, it’s among the movies I always kick myself for not securing a personal copy during the peak of DVD distribution, when I really believed that the long tails would keep even the most obscure movies in constant circulation.
And if you want any real fun silly Pynchonesque playfulness in docu-world paranoid media, you could do worse than checking out Baldwin’s own movies such as Spectres of the Spectrum and Mock up on Mu.
Day 15 of new Pynchon novel coming out, I need a brief rest from walls of text so here’s the number of times I’ve read each of his already published books:
Slow Learner - 2 times
V. - 2 times
The Crying of Lot 49 - 3 times
Gravity’s Rainbow - 3.5 times. The .5 isn’t because of failing to finish it but rather because I have the copy I want reading to a friend who was curious about it, and by the time I got myself a new copy I decided to start over.
Vineland - 2 times
Mason & Dixon - 2 times, though once I casually flipped through and read passages just for fun, so it could be called 2.25 times.
Against the Day - 3 times.
Inherent Vice - 2 times.
Bleeding Edge - 3 times. It was last year's reread.
I reread a Thomas Pynchon book each year in May, in observance of both Pynchon’s birthday and May Day.
This year's reread was going to be Inherent Vice, and then I was going to start rereading in chronological order. Instead I’ll read Shadow Ticket in October and then start in chronological order in 2026 — I’m not really that eager to revisit Inherent Vice at this time in my life and resetting to most recent creates a pleasing loop.
Day 16 of new Pynchon novel coming out, so why reread Pynchon every year?
I could keep it simple and say because his books tend to be dense and it takes a few reads to take it all in.
However, I don’t think there is a point where you can have taken it all in, at least for his books before Inherent Vice. Honestly, I doubt Pynchon himself remembers everything about everything he writes, and not just because he’s 88 in May. I’ve forgotten half the gigs I’ve worked on and I’ve only been in the film and media production industry for about 14 years.
I could also just say they’re my favorite books and therefore I enjoy reading them over and over again, but they aren’t exactly comfort food.
I’m a big fan of revisiting work that impacted you in general, because the work changes as you change. Sometimes your relationship to the work changes entirely. When I first saw L’Eclisse, my mind was completely blown, and I wrote more than a few essays about personhood disappearing into modernity. The last time I rewatched it I couldn’t help rolling my eyes at how much Antonioni made about a woman going on a few bad dates. It’s about as interesting to change a book or a movie with your experiences as it is for the book or movie to change your experience.
Then you wrap that up with Pynchon’s books’ density and it’s basically like reading a brand new book, particularly for the doorstoppers. I can legitimately say that every read of Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day felt different, like as if he had published a new novel in the same series in between.
You return to the characters, you return to some of your favorite places, but it’s crazy how often the big grand scene you remembered now feels like an afterthought, and this big grand scene appears that you couldn’t possibly have not noticed before but there it is. Characters and their motivations subtly shift and warp (anyone who says Pynchon is too cold and distant from his characters is definitely reading only superficially at best).
Sometimes the reread is so different, it makes one wonder if Tommyknockers don’t tunnel in from the sixth dimension and swap your copy out sometimes. Because of this, I don’t think I could handle the stress of digital copies and wondering if certain agents, including Pynchon's own, aren’t updating the texts periodically.
If your favorite author published a new book every May, would you make a holiday to read them? Thus how I reread Pynchon novels.
This is particularly true of Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon. Both are picaresque enough that one way to see them is of elaborately interconnected short stories. You don’t even necessarily need to read them in order, but pop in on the adventures hither-tither, when you feel like browsing.
So I actually kinda don't like The Simpson’s joke where Lisa goes to visit a college and sees someone, “You’re reading Gravity’s Rainbow?” “Well… rereading.” Like Finnegans Wake, Gravity’s Rainbow has no end. There’s no “getting it,” there’s just experiencing it however long you choose to keep flipping back over and starting again.
Day 17 of new Pynchon novel coming out, Shadow Ticket will be his tenth full-length book, so if I reread one Pynchon book a year, then I will read each once per decade.
Originally I was going to read Inherent Vice this year, then start next year with Slow Learner and read his books chronologically by publication (although Slow Learner as a book came out later, the short stories contained within were published before V., so I count it as first).
Feasibly I should then read Inherent Vice next year, then start the chronological rotation. But I don’t wanna. If I read Inherent Vice next then rotate, I’ll read Inherent Vice twice before revisiting Shadow Ticket for the first time. Something feels right starting over in a new half decade, one of my “big O” years (what my family calls when you turn 10, 20, 30, &c.), and from the very beginning after having read the very latest (and possibly last).
Besides, I’ve already read Inherent Vice twice, as often as some of the books I was more eager to reread, and it’s not high on my favorites list. Counting watching the movie as a “revisit,” I've engaged with the story more than V.
It’s funny though, now realizing that each reread cycle would take exactly a decade, it makes me wonder how many rereads I really have left? 3? 4? 2?
And which will be my dying year book? Likely, considering my genetic heritage, I’ll lose my brain several years before I die: every adult in my Mom’s side has died of cognitive diseases. I could look to my father’s side to save me from that, but that’s cancer country.
I am, however, enjoying the idea of being a terribly old man shakingly turning the pages of Gravity’s Rainbow, reading it through a magnifying glass and giggling lecherously in the middle of some old people’s home, a nurse asks wouldn’t I prefer an audiobook or big print edition (could you imagine?) and I shake my head, and she takes a look at the page I’m reading to get an insight of what I’m on about, maybe there could be some way to arrange someone to read it aloud to poor nearly sightless Mr. Benko, and lo’ but I’m on a Katje or Bianca scene, and the scandalized nurse decides maybe it’s better to leave old Mr. Benko to his own devices.
Or if they take it from me, I’m burning the entire elder care home down.
Day 18 of new Pynchon novel coming out, how I discovered Pynchon was actually through this webcomic, Cat and Girl:
How to describe Dorothy Gambrell’s work? Calvin & Hobbes for exhausted grad students? It’s hilarious but only if you’re the sort of person who tries to explain to someone how the term “Pacific War” is an oxymoron.
Anyway I read webcomics religiously in college and Cat and Girl was in regular rotation. One day it referenced some book called Gravity’s Rainbow. I don’t even remember what the comic or joke was (I just tried a brief search but no-go), but the joke immediately caught my attention for the following things:
Girl was being sarcastic about how dense and difficult it was to read;
and the title was beautiful.
Like guyz, fame aside, “Gravity’s Rainbow” is top-tier poetic titling. Distinctive, memorable, already gives you a feeling, you just don't know what, and pretty. Technically it gives you an image, but an absurd one: what would a rainbow made from gravity look like? A phenomenon invisible to the naked eye, but what may bloom on a scientist’s visualizer somewhere in rich magenta and green.
So I looked it up, learned about its and Pynchon’s famous resistance to interpretation and paranoia, reclusiveness, so forth.
This was nearly 20 years ago, back when the Internet was actually fun, so much more was made about Pynchon as conspiracy theorist — I think one of the first pages I ever read about him, it argued that he was actually Deep Throat. I found it all subversive and dangerous, the same way you read The Anarchist Cookbook and Johnny the Homicidal Maniac in high school, and lastly I was in the midst of my “read all the bricks called unreadable!” era, so obviously I was gonna check this out first.
I used Christmas money to buy it later that year, but in the interim I had found The Crying of Lot 49 used at the Hastings I worked at, so that was my actual first foray.
By the way, Dorothy Gambrell wrote this keen Exhausted Millennial (I think she’s Gen X but I’m talking about vibes, not age) response to AI and finding out it took her artwork.
For a while I recognized her work also in the pages of, of all periodicals, Bloomberg Businessweek. Gambrell is among many artists whose voice and worldview has subtly run on the backend of my cognition, rendering how I perceive things, and I owe her a lot. I think she lands the real “fuck you” of Sam Altman's greedy fecklessness, that nostalgia many of us elder Millennials have for the time when the Internet seemed to promise opportunity instead of now, when it explicitly and outspokenly and remorselessly is being designed to take your content and your data and throw you, the person, away entirely.
Please check out her work and consider getting something from the store.
Day 19 of new Pynchon novel coming out, I was going to talk about “How to Read a Pynchon Novel.”
No, I wasn’t going to give instructions here. I was going to link to the WikiHow I created with that name, but it seems to finally have been removed.
Which makes sense.
Anyway, the story behind the article is that I was taking a studio art class called InDIY Culture which combined the plastic arts with DIY, indie, and culture jamming ideas: how do artists make things and engage with audiences outside the commercial and institutional corridors? One of our assignments was “Make a WikiHow to teach people something you know how to do.”
Now. I probably should not have taken that class, as I had zero studio arts classes behind me and didn’t really have any materials, plastic arts, engineering, or tool experience. I found it pretty difficult to keep up with the other students, who often really knew their shit (and the professors, “Mary/Berry”, Steve Berry and Mary Tsiongas, a famously popular duo in the studio arts classes of the time).
However, I had that undergraduate student sense of doing whatever I wanted anyway, and I had just finished reading Vineland for the first time. Vineland is when Pynchon’s language clicked and I realized, “Oh, this isn’t just ‘serious literature,’ this dude is actually often just fucking around and having fun.”
Around that same time I was at a party where I had mentioned Gravity’s Rainbow and this girl went off on how obsessed she was by it, how she created character lists and charts to track all the plotlines and stuff. She has a whole Gravity’s Rainbow journal.
Reader, take two things away from the previous paragraph: 1: don’t read Gravity’s Rainbow like that. 2: to illustrate how completely dense and girl deaf I am, I didn’t ask her out because I figured she wouldn’t be as impressed by my Gravity’s Rainbow knowledge as I was of hers. Let it be known that to this day, my friends STILL rag me about times they watched me talking long and intimately with a girl at a party, only to then say, “Welp, nice to meet you!” and walk away, only to complain about not having dates the next day.
Anyway, so I decided to write “How to Read a Thomas Pynchon Novel” as a WikiHow. Mostly tongue-in-cheek, the upshot of it largely was, “start on the first page and go page by page until you’re done.” A few things about being willing to go back a few pages, being patient, but above all having fun.
I got an A. Mary/Berry thought it was a really interesting “new way to approach literary criticism.” Steve Berry chided me for using the famous Pynchon Navy yearbook photo, and told me that’s not actually him. I hadn’t added it. WikiHow editors had, in the few days between when I submitted the post and it was published. Above all they laughed, which was the effect I was going for.
Over the years I’d check back on the posting, but as I mentioned, it’s gone now. Even if it was still live, within a year or two it has been edited by so many WikiHow editors that it lost all my personality and basically just said, “be patient, take your time, and enjoy yourself.”
More to come…
To read my previous Musing Outloud essays:
New Pynchon Novel! Part 2
Welcome back to my round-up of Notes posts on Pynchon’s writing in anticipation of Shadow Ticket coming out Oct 7, 2025.
Hope for Film Challenge #2: 5 Ways to Improve the Moviegoing Experience
Ted Hope is turning out challenges to “FilmStack” writers at what looks like will be a monthly rate, starting with 5 Tenets for Running a Movie Studio. The second challenge is “5 Ways to Improve the Moviegoing Experience.” I enjoyed my first foray, and of course can pontificate upon nearly any subject about movies, so I’m in.
New Pynchon Novel! Part 1
On Monday, April 8th, Penguin Random House announced Thomas Pynchon’s new novel Shadow Ticket releasing Oct 7th.
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?”
