New Pynchon Novel! Part 7

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.

I’ve been inundated with work, so this post was delayed a week, but unlike the news you don’t need it to constantly update to follow along. This week I delved into Pynchon’s philosophies, and philosophy is evergreen.

To catch up, start here:

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Day 37 of new Pynchon novel, yesterday I referenced “Pynchon’s essay on Luddites” and I already wanted to share it with you, but today I reread it just to refresh myself, and guys… it's like inhaling a concentrated dose of pure, uncut Substack memes.

IS IT O.K. TO BE A LUDDITE?

Everything people here are on about is included, from the jokes about “serious literary people” to the weird right-leaning nostalgia of the Age of Miracles counterbalanced by the weird left-leaning nostalgia for the Age of Reason; Substack fiction writers’ disproportionate interest in Gothic literature; the labor and creative class anxiety over AI and the rebellion act of “denying the machine” rule of technology and politics.

If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long.

There’s also a very interesting quote about

Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead. Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus that knowledge really is power, that there is a pretty straightforward conversion between money and information, and that somehow, if the logistics can be worked out, miracles may yet be possible.

I select that quote because I already discussed Pynchon's chilling “It’s like the 60s all over again. These kids really believe information should be free.” In the 80s, Pynchon foresaw the fascist implications in “information is money.” (In there he shares with Don DeLillo, particularly Cosmopolis, the ways in which financialization’s abstraction of material wealth erected new frontiers in class warfare). On the 2010s, he foresaw the same fascist implications in “Information should be free.” The issue being, of course, the use of information as a tool of power.

Y’all gotta read this shit. He published it in 1984, a symbolic literary year, when he had also published Vineland.

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Day 38 of new Pynchon novel, I wouldn't want to speak for everybody about why they love his work, but even people that don’t much like his books seem to acknowledge in their criticisms the quality of his writing. There’s something he does on the word sentence paragraph level that tickles the mind.

A colleague from the Soaring Twenties Social Club Discord called it “the musicality of his language.” And indeed Pynchon addresses his writing's debt to jazz and rock in the introduction to Slow Learner, as well as forwards one of the most useful pieces of writing advice I’ve ever read:

“In a symphony performed in C sharp, you can replace a note with a cannon blast all you want, but it better be a C sharp cannon blast or else it’ll sound awful.”

There are sentences he composes where the full stops land like cannon blasts. Boom. Frisson.

However, lovely prose is not enough. I enjoy heady sorts of things. Pynchon, like Sebald in one direction and Borges and Calvino in another, pulls off the sort of writerly shit other writers dream of. He packs his books with his entire world, and somehow it fits.

This skill is why the synopses and reviews of his work drop details like laundry tumbling out of a broken drier door. It's impossible to sum up the experience of getting from here to there, be sitting in the fear of German air raids in London and then deal with kaiju and tentacles before dancing with Bavarian witches during an epic sunset, while in between having your brain just overloaded with various references, puns, and Apocrypha.

Writers wish they could pull half the shit Pynchon does, and get away with it without editors murdering them, critics mauling them, or worse: audiences laughing at them.

Richard Linklater’s work to some degree revolves around the theme of struggling to do all of it, fit entire lives, feelings, shared experiences, memories and perceptions into single moments of stories. His movies yearn to compress all human experience into a pre-credit roll striking final image. I believe a great attraction of Linklater’s work, to artists, writers, and filmmakers in particular, is sharing that yearning.

Pynchon causes the same envy but in the completely opposite direction. His books are uncompressed versions of all a brain packs into itself, even the weird idiosyncratic associations individuals perhaps not so arbitrarily develop over time, particularly in mass mediated culture. Puns, paranoia, and pop culture are all the same cognitive operands. His talent is keeping all of his ideas in the same key and beat.

Let this stand as my pitch for his work for those who have not yet read it.

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Day 39 of new Pynchon novel, some more musical analogy of his work.

One of the best praises I’ve heard of his work is his ability to change registers. I don't remember where I heard it, but I think about it whenever Pynchon takes us through some fantastic collage of whimsical stuff then dumps us right in the feels. There are scenes that make you sad, scenes that are forlorn… scenes that disturb. And by the time you're in them, you felt you were there with it the whole time, the same way you feel when you’re in the silly or amazed or awed scenes. There are no real rug pulls between the book dancing with you and you finding yourself on the floor.

The other term that works is dynamic range. Luckily this term works for the idea of compression as well as music. Pynchon can go soft and he can go hard. He can go low and he can go high. He can ramp up and down smoothly, one could even say analog.

For all the banana cream pie fights against limerick singing Americans in hot air balloons, Gravity’s Rainbow has this other nearly perfect novel embedded in it about Roger Mexico and his lover Jessica, their forlorn knowledge that their relationship will not last, Jessica’s doomerist nihilism from being subjected to German air raids contrasted to Roger Mexico’s cope in seeking certainty in the pattern making of stochastic averages in statistics, balancing the appreciation of randomness and form, and his bemusement of what she even sees in him.

These scenes alone would make a fairly critically acclaimed war romance novel like The English Patient.

This is also why one of the Pynchon criticisms I do not accept is that “he’s too cold and distant from his characters.” People pull that criticism on Kubrick too, and often any cerebral works told in the third person mostly objective (Pynchon is actually third person limited). It also probably means they never read any of his books published after Gravity’s Rainbow because those ones are much more interested in characters’ inner lives, particularly Vineland and Mason & Dixon, which I would argue are his most sentimental words.

Another Gravity’s Rainbow example in changing registers, Gravity’s Rainbow chosen because it’s arguably his most mechanical novel, is the relationship between half brothers Enzian and Tchitcherine, as they hunt each other across half of Europe in an attempt to have the last say of the significance of their father’s influence in the early century Herrero genocide. It’s a high stakes war espionage thriller that could have also been a great book on its own terms.

Pynchon can switch modes whenever he wants to, his key skill set is doing it without disrupting the reader and also keeping the book a cohesive whole. Everything belongs. It makes you wonder what, possibly, didn’t.

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Day 40 of new Pynchon novel, when I first learned the word “preterition” from Gravity’s Rainbow, I learned the rhetorical device before I understood the Calvinist context.

In rhetoric, preterition is an ironic device where a person brings attention to something by claiming not to bring attention. One common structure is anything to follow “not to mention…”: you clearly just mentioned it!

“I won’t bring up my opponent’s drinking problems, we’re just here to discuss whether liquor licenses being expanded would affect the character of our community.”

It’s surprising preterition the word for that device is less known because once you learn it, you see it quickly and you see it everywhere. It’s a very easy device to catch because it makes you aware of the thing by claiming not to. It wouldn’t work if you didn’t become aware of the thing.

If you want a real example, on Friday while I was working on other things, a colleague who committed from New Jersey was following Gov. Phil Murphy’s comments on the NJ Transit strike. Even half-listening / overhearing, I caught at least three different points where Gov. Murphy would say something like, “We wouldn’t be in this situation if [the strikers / the federal government / the previous administration / the Dept of Transportation / whatever] didn’t [do thing]. But, we are not here to point fingers or cast blame…” Smooth, ya preterite.

You can see it here if you want homework.

“Preterite” the term doesn’t really work to describe a user of the rhetorical device called preterition, but it sounds like a curse, so purposefully misusing it could arguably also be called preterition.

Anyway, knowing preterition as the rhetorical device made my first read of Gravity’s Rainbow more confusing. I kept looking for examples of how Slothrop is “a preterite.’ Figuring that I didn’t understand the novel deeply enough, I figured it had something to do with the people of the White Visitation bringing Slothrop an agency over history he shouldn’t have by insisting on his relevance that Roger Mexico, for one, points out is pure pareidolia.

And I wondered if Pynchon’s use of conspiracy theory subplots was also a form of preterition: “I’m not saying it happened this way. I’m just saying it’s interesting to think if it happened this way.” This feeling becomes acute in Bleeding Edge.

It is, however, a misreading, which I’ll get into more clearly tomorrow.

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Day 41 of new Pynchon novel, I finally grokked “preterition” the Calvinist concept when I asked members of the Soaring Twenties Social Club, some of whom have more religious and theologic backgrounds than me, before my 3rd (.5) read of Gravity’s Rainbow.

In the end I don’t know why I had a hard time with it before, since it seems relatively straightforward: there are the elect of best religious principles chosen for salvation and then there are the preterite, the left behind.

First of all there’s the verb tense (which anyway in English we call the “simple” past tense to make it more, well, simple). But secondly, back whenever I’d look, usually the religious sense of the word was always on pages that wanted to explain it holistically. Lots of reading about debates of predestination and stuff in a vocabulary I don’t know well.

Anyway, once preterition is grokked, Gravity’s Rainbow quickly follows. And the theme sustains Pynchon’s writing overall. He really opened up a window to his own work with his self-written synopses to Against the Day, “It may not be the world, but with a minor adjustment or two it’s the way the world could be.”

That is to say from a larger perspective, the reason Pynchon and I vibe so well is because I fucking love thinking about retrofuturism, the beliefs and imagination we held for the future in the past, and Pynchon’s work is basically applied retrofuturism: showing pivot points in history where we may have broken away to some imagined, perhaps even glorious, future, but rather were held to our current course mostly from the magic-destroying industrialism and fecklessness of greed.

(For example, there’s this really fun chapter of Mason & Dixon that posits what would have happened had they continued surveying their line well past their project’s historical end and even past the land geography of the United States’ future Western territories as well, building into the ocean and eventually separating themselves from terrestrial concerns entirely… And if, say, history followed them, then what?)

This is actually why my rhetorical device reading of “preterition” was a misread. Applied to Bleeding Edge, it makes the novel a Loose Change Theory book. Applied with the Calvinist preterition, it’s important to note that 9/11 doesn’t appear in the book. It happens, but it’s not observed… “off-screen,” in cinema lingo. What Bleeding Edge actually describes is a sudden transition of awareness from a burgeoning surveillance tech state to when it gets turned on. If it wasn’t 9/11, it’d’ve been something else. It was 9/11, but in the Pynchonian reckoning getting overly concerned with the alternative possibilities of any given historical moment misses processes and systems of the periods in between.

And that’s why he’s always setting his stories in weird in-between times. Gravity’s Rainbow is often considered a WWII novel, but it begins when WWII ends. New world old world time of monsters stuff, except the monsters are agents of magic and salvation left behind by the decisions we make.

John Calvin from Wikimedia Commons

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That’s it for this week. We have a couple more roundups coming, but as of time of writing, I ran out of Pynchon dailies a few days ago. There should be a couple-three more round-ups and then we’ll see if there’s much more I think to talk about before Shadow Ticket actually releases.

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