New Pynchon Novel! Part 5

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.

For a while I went off on a “how to adapt Pynchon” tangent.

Here are my previous daily posts:

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

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Day 25 of new Pynchon novel coming out, a little more about Vineland.

Much is made about the 17 year gap between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland (not counting Slow Learner), and I’ve already quoted David Foster Wallace’s “smoked pot and watched television” implied disappointment with the quality of the book after such a wait, but I do think the big reason Vineland “clicked'“ with me w/r/t Pynchon’s use of language is because he became a more mature writer, in two magisteria.

Most importantly, in the transition between his early work and his mid-career work ( Vineland through Against the Day in my measure), he became a family man. All of his later books are more personal about his characters. Now, I’ve always disagreed with the criticism that Pynchon's characters are “cold” or “distant” — that’s just readers struggling with the density. But their relationships are given a more primary, intimate significance.

A pretty good way of saying it is that V. launched his career and Vineland relaunched it. Both center on a missing woman.

But V. Is something of a semiotic mystery novel: V herself has been everywhere, seems to have something to do with everything. Perhaps is not one woman. Perhaps is not even a woman anymore. Perhaps has never been a woman at all. Her absence tears a hole in history.

Frenesi, however, is one woman, a definite singular character with personality, a past, and relationships to the characters. Her absence tears a hole in the hearts of a bunch of people in Vineland, California.

Seems “smaller,” no? This development seems to have disappointed some readers, as the DFW quote indicates (however DFW also turned against David Lynch after Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me so DFW has real “first album was better” issues). But becoming a family man seems to have opened up more heart in Pynchon's novels, and slightly adjusted the endings. The characters still disappear in a fog of confusion… but now one with silver lining?

Secondly, Pynchon seems to have earned his ambition out with Gravity’s Rainbow. He did the work, he managed to get it past a publisher, he won his awards. He wrote The Great American Novel. Now he could just write about things that interested him and not make it Genius©®. So his writing loosened, and therefore the musicality of it switched more from Captain Beefheart high intensity perfection musical session to jazz band local groove performance session. It’s always been jazz but now he could just riff.

This is true even for Mason & Dixon, which has an anachronistic dialect filter placed over the words. It only takes a minute before it’s more readable and flowing than even some parts of V.

And it’s a big reason why Against the Day is my favorite, because it has the historical scope of Gravity’s Rainbow and even more than Mason & Dixon, but it flows like melted butter.

Photo by Abi Baurer on Unsplash

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Day 26 of new Pynchon novel coming out, another thing that the Vineland / V. “missing woman” motif (that also shows up variously in his other books) makes me consider is that Christopher Nolan could make a pretty solid adaptation of a novel or part of one (I feel like Nolan is the type to make an adaptation of only one section — likely the first — of Gravity’s Rainbow, for instance).

Reasons:

• Missing woman / dead wife motif in his work.

• Complete comfort with midstream flashbacks and -forwards.

• An engineer’s sensibility for information delivery, background detail, and scene crafting.

My caveats are that Nolan’s movies lack color, which is important to Pynchon's work; and whereas he isn’t entirely humorless (I wouldn’t watch his movies if he had no sense of humor), he’d probably strip Pynchon’s work of much of Pynchon’s jokes, leaving it dour and turgid.

Still, it would be a really interesting movie, and I’d be interested in seeing Nolan fan-bros discover Gravity’s Rainbow and lose their goddamned minds.

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Day 27 of new Pynchon novel coming out, I hope Shadow Ticket gets a book trailer like Inherent Vice did:

This still remains one of the most charming Pynchon artifacts. And I love how it’s shot. It makes me wish the filmstock-obsessed Paul Thomas Anderson shot the movie in handheld Super8.

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Day 28 of new Pynchon novel coming out, if I ever had the opportunity to adapt a Thomas Pynchon novel, I would love to adapt V. or Against the Day.

I mean, I’ve already cited them as my favorites, but one reason why they’re my favorites is because they are topically about stuff I am interested in.

V. I could make into a feature. I just love the concept of a directionless crew of New York “human yo-yos” dealing with the post-war crisis of meaning while hunting a symbol when not shooting sewer alligators for gig rates. There’s cyborgs, toy companies cum weapons dealers, people changing appearance and identity, a different sort of “auto” erotica, and ironic commentary about Boeddecker tourism and ambassadorship offset by sober history of colonial carnage.

Against the Day would have to be a miniseries, or a three season series. It was almost perfectly placed in my interests when it came out: the rise of modernity between the Chicago’s World Exposition and the coming “general European war” we now know as World War I. Held together by a revenge tale of three brothers and their sister dealing with the assassination of their Coloradan anarchist father, the story nevertheless is like Oppenheimer in its takes on the emerging scientific and mathematical paradigms while keeping Mason & Dixon’s magical realism of “untouched” territorial whimsy. Where else would I get to shoot a Frankenstein offshoot cosmic horror in the Arctic AND have characters avoiding ethnic conflicts and claims of espionage in Yugoslavia? A team of boy adventurers in an increasingly expanding and invisible dirigible and a hollow earth sequence? And protracted sequences of old tinkerers developing film and electrical technologies? A Western AND an Venician thriller?

One of the best parts of Against the Day is that I genuinely like the characters, even the baddies in their slimy evil way. I believe the actors would genuinely have so much fun with it, and I can attest working with actors is really exciting when they’re having fun.

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash

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Day 29 of new Pynchon novel coming out, Gravity’s Rainbow would seem like the Holy Grail of all adaptions, but I actually wouldn’t want to do that myself. Having read the book 3.5 times, there’s a huge array of sequences I like and a bunch others I don’t.

However, I want to draw your attention to an adaptation that already exists:

Zak Smith’s Pictures Showing What Happens on Every Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow

Zak Smith is a punk / street artist and the book is what it sez on the tin. He illustrated a picture per page of the standard 760 page edition of Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s an excellent book, I own a copy and flip through it sometimes.

Zak Smith also has a fun introduction where he describes delving into Pynchon subculture, meeting people and asking questions for research before ultimately starting a second career, through a fellow Pynchon fan, as a porn star.

I bring this up because writer Davy Rothbart, editor of Found Magazine, once wrote an article about a pro-intimacy porn production featuring Zak Smith. Rothbart also wrote a movie called Easier with Practice that just happens to be the first feature film I production assisted.

This all falls just short of Pynchonesque because I don’t run into these people in dark bars in Venice. Sadly.

Anyway, when I was in college, I considered starting a project called “One Minute of Footage for Each of Zak Smith’s Pictures Showing What Happens on Every Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow.” I would simply look at the image on the page and invent a one minute clip to shoot from it, rather than try to adapt Gravity’s Rainbow in its image. An adaptation of the illustrations, not the book itself, resulting in a 12hr40min long experimental film.

Maybe still will.

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Day 30 of new Pynchon novel, when I first read Gravity’s Rainbow, I was knee-deep into alternative animation such as the Brothers Quay and their Czech New Wave antecedents, and I put it to my head that “strange + strange = correct” and that the Brothers Quay should make a Gravity’s Rainbow adaptation.

To some degree, that was a misread. I think people start off seeing Pynchon as dark and shadowy. It doesn’t help that Gravity’s Rainbow literally starts out in pitch black, a tunnel underground during a London blackout, even though it’s not that many pages before characters are appreciating a nice sunrise and then people are prat-falling and singing and slinging bananas around. The Brothers Quay simply don’t use color the way Pynchon does in a difference that is meaningful and profound.

But, there’s still a there, there. The Brothers Quay can do paranoia, and they can do mythopoetics. Their adaptations are loose to the point of almost being trolls: I’ve watched their Epic of Gilgamesh, This Unnameable Little Broom, more times than I can count, and have read the Epic, and I can't assert the moth skeleton bird thing is even Gilgamesh. I’ve read Bruno Schulz to try to understand their Streets of Crocodiles better, and no. I mean you understand Quay Brothers films immediately, but you don’t get the plot points, characters, or themes of their referents.

And so actually, yeah. I think the Quay Brothers could make a mighty fine Rainbow Filtered from the Paranoid Preterition of Gravity, and it could be anywhere from 8 min to 8 hours long, and I would love it, and would not be able to cite any single frame as how it relates to the book, but know somewhere inside that it does.

By the way, as it happens, the Brothers Quay have a new feature film called Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, also adapted from Bruno Schulz (and the second feature-length adaptation of the story after Wojciech Jerzy Has’ The Hourglass Sanatorium, which embarrassingly for a few years I thought was a perennially unavailable Quay Brothers feature like Institute Benjamenta, which apparently is on Prime Video now [!]). So, like, it’s been a big year for me.

Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash

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Day 31 of new Pynchon novel, yesterday was his 88th birthday.

Happy birthday Ruggles.

No better proof of an artist truly doing his own thing in complete disregard to commercial concerns than sporadic, sometimes decade+ distances between releases, and yet still cranking away decades above the “retirement age.”

[Note, this was posted on May 9th. Pynchon’s birthday is May 8th.]

Photo by Tim Umphreys on Unsplash

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Day 32 of new Pynchon novel, a colleague at work and I were sitting there refreshing browser pages.

She said, “Waiting for new Pope?”

“Nah, the cover to drop for the new Pynchon novel.”

In the end she didn’t have to wait that long. Could you imagine the drama if the conclave took 180 days?

Still no cover reveal.

That said, anticipation has been shown to be more fun than actually receiving the thing and there’s a strong chance I’ll enjoy these dailies more than the book!

Photo by Anton Shcherbakov on Unsplash

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