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:

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.

Photo by Twinkling Lights on Unsplash

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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.