Thomas Pynchon

(this is like the ten gazillionth pynchon thread on BOTH boards but who cares: he is the ROYAL TENENBAUMS of am lit and that is enuff)

someday we oughta do a group read of GR or something else. the pynchon list is good for that except that it's full of cranky knowitalls who have been on the list for 10 years.

(stab at ile suppressed ha ha)

oh, umm, classic, anyway.

I don't think I've ever reread a book. Is there enough time? I'd worry too much about the stuff that I was missing out on.

Now---

Took me 2 and a half years to get through GR. Bits of it were brilliant, bits of it were impenetrable. I persevered, but haven't managed to finish another novel since. I think it killed fiction as an enjoyable pasttime for me.

The Pinefox, do you like any PoMo fiction? I know you are a big Joyce fan (haha though a pal of mine wrote his thesis on Blake and has found him unreadable since, so maybe I'm wrong), and I have known some fans of Modernism's peaks who really dislike anything that's very Postmodern.

In general I don't like talking about things as PoMo; if I loved anything I would probably not call it PoMo. Nonetheless, there are some things that might get called PoMo that I like. I have a lot of time for CL49, and a lot of respect for DeLillo. I like at least a bit of Barth, though I am yet to be fully convinced re. the vaunted Barthelme. But you may be meaning sth much more way-out than that.

Although the line between Modernism and Postmodernism is hard to draw (Beckett is a rewarding study here, I think), there is an important difference in the attitude towards meaning, in particular. I've found that some admirers of the former are annoyed and frustrated by what they see as frivolity and emptiness in much PoMo fiction, in its abandonment of the search for and belief in suitable new metanarratives - I'm wondering if that might be how you feel, because combining that with Pynchon's encyclopaedic ambition and scale (partucularly in GR) might exacerbate the annoyance that might cause.

I think there is a smugness to Pynchon's writing too, something I see in quite a few writers of (more or less) his generation, a former-hippy-youth's overconfidence in the rightness of their reading of the world, particularly in ideological terms - it's an impression that has turned me away from Tom Robbins, for instance, who I used to really like a lot. Barth has some of this, but his obvious idolising of great past storytellers, an almost fannish, childlike adoration of and reverence for paradigms such as Homer and Scheherezade, soften that hugely, for me. Anyway, I mention that about Pynchon because these things, particularly in combination, might easily cause a very serious-minded Modernist to feel exactly what you expressed in your "awkwardly pretentious and horribly obnoxious" comment upthread.

this is a long term deal and more to my benefit obv. ha

Martin S: one (main?) thing I don't like about GR = too much sex. As I have said before, GR = post-hippy James Bond [etc etc, as I have said before, etc etc].

I think Pynchon can Write but I don't think I feel the gain in his relative unclarity.

yeah, other people who get it on in gr: roger and jessica, pirate and scorpia mossmoon, katje and blicero and what's his name, katje and BRIGADIER PUDDING even jesus, enzian and blicero, a bunch of people on thanatz's yacht, er leni pokler a bit I think (but does FRANZ POKLER ever get any? hmm), and uh...

of course all along (many of those happen sort of episodically), slothrop keeps on having secret agent sex after the london part of the book is over: katje, geli tripping, the actress, the girl on thanatz's yacht, trudi and whatsername at saure's place, and I'm sure there are more. plus he has uh amorous encounters with more people, incl some girls at the hermann goering, the spa where marvy chases him, the red cross girl or whoever, the PIG briefly...

This paper kind of deals with these issues, in a rather-too academic fashion.

This masculinist gigantism can is by no means self-evidently pro-feminist. Gravity's Rainbow often reads like a male fantasy gone out of control: the phalli are a little too large, the female characters too eager to bed down with Slothrop, the victims of sadists far too eager about their own pain.7 And because the narrative doesn't offer final readings, it is never quite clear how much really is mockery or disruption and how much is the residue of real assumptions about gender. These exaggerations self-consciously invite a feminist critique, from an outsider's perspective. But the novel itself does not supply that critique; it can only inflate or dislocate the discourses of its own crimes, and so at once gesture to a newly written self and reduplicate an old and tiresome one.

I think it's a good thing that, although I have seen mention of, I have never read about pynchon here.

"well, no, i usually, uh-" this is embarrassing for perdoo, it's like being called on to, to justify eating an apple, or even popping a grape into your mouth- "just, well, sort of, eat them... whole, you know"

I finished Gravity's Rainbow yesterday. I wondered exactly how to express my reaction, or opinion. The more I wondered, the more my reactions threatened, or promised, to alter.

I shouldn't exaggerate that last point, though.

Some day I would like to take, or make, some room to say, and possibly also discover, some of what I think of the book.

Haven't clicked the link yet but yay!

Just last weekend I was thinking: "Pynchon must already have passed. We just won't find out until months after the fact like with MF Doom" so this thread being bumped gave me a slight panic lol.

Let's throw a few RIPs in for the lateclickers eh

Return Imminent of Pynchon

🙃

I am so down. Sounds like the link between Against the Day and Gravity's rainbow, period wise.

Heck yeah! Needed some good news this morning!

!! really surprised, I also thought that he was done at this point.

maybe Pynchon books will continue to arrive for dozens of more years

He wrote the great Wisconsin novel, apparently. Some friends and I were joking today about putting on cheeseface.

xpost
https://i.imgur.com/gmdbqqL.jpeg 🤔

We’re thrilled to share the jacket for Thomas Pynchon’s highly anticipated new novel Shadow Ticket, coming October 7, 2025! https://t.co/ZiSarTIIh7 pic.twitter.com/uVkbjnuc6v

— penguinpress (@penguinpress) July 16, 2025

Getting excited!

The more novels he does now, the more Against The Day becomes a mid-period work and the more likely it is that it gets its flowers

https://ia800808.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/16/items/olcovers32/olcovers32-L.zip&file=325994-L.jpg

So who is reading this now? First page is ok.

Page-by-page liveblog?

I'm curious about the Wisconsin angle but it sounds like it might be a bit on the nose.

Mine just arrived, gotta finish the Kubrick bio I'm reading first.

bought a copy yesterday, haven’t started yet but will soon

next up here

read the first chapter. it was hard so i read it a second time. enjoyable so far.

i don’t really know why, but i struggled with the difficulty of the prose. i lost the thread of some sentences. some paragraph structures were arranged in a convoluted way, with a logic i couldn’t grasp. i’ve been reading a fuckton of social science research articles lately, and i wonder if their style conventions make TP seem digressive.

i was also very tired when i started reading.

i might have has this problem with Mason & Dixon, and also with Vineland, but i don’t remember slowing down during GR or ATD. (although the density of internal references did jam up the brainworks)

ha I am the exact opposite there

GR/ATD - slow/hard (but I still love ATD even tho I had to slog through that bizarre balloon boy timeflip or wtf ever)
M&D was a bit slower for me but I read it through in one go pretty much
Vineland might be my fave and I have read it multiple times but I remember absolutely devouring it the first time

Mine just arrived, gotta finish the Kubrick bio I'm reading first.

Kubrick: An Odyssey by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams. First book about him I've read, so not sure how this might compare to others, but I'm enjoying it so far (up to where he just wrapped production on 2001).

There's some knotty sentences and paragraphs, yeah. The paragraph-long one on page 2 seemed really harsh, kinda. So far it seems like a style and not a flaw, but even if it's a flaw, I'm just happy that we got a new Pynchon novel.

I find it a bit counterintuitive maybe - the style is at first glance very boilerplate detective novel, you're expecting it to fly by, but instead...

i struggled with the difficulty of the prose. i lost the thread of some sentences. some paragraph structures were arranged in a convoluted way, with a logic i couldn’t grasp

this could be said about any pynchon book TBF

true! maybe this is more of a reflection on my own state of mind. age, tiredness, distraction, changing frames of reference… are making the task of baseline comprehension more challenging than i remembered. a couple of times (at the end of the chapter) i lost the thread and had to backpedal by a graf

I think Pynchon is an interesting writer because word for word he's not difficult to parse, but for some reason you can absolutely miss his point when reading a few pages. You'll be chugging along and then wonder 'wtf is even going on here?'

i never finished either V or Mason and Dixon for exactly these reasons (likewise never even started Against the Day)

'gravity's rainbow' is probably one of the most difficult novels i've read? i was proud i finished it. but i'm dum with words. i have a hard time with .. i feel like there's a term for this .. shifting points of view? where it's never explicit whether words are in someone's head or in the narrator's head or just leaping into another time and space completely. for similar reasons i have a hard time with a lot of poetry.

anyway i think i'm going to pick this up and give it a go over the weekend.

the only pynchons that felt relatively easy for me were crying of lot 49 and inherent vice, partly due to their length. i tried against the day but never got past the initial balloon boy stuff with the song lyrics etc. i don't like reading the words of the songs that people are singing for some reason. i like the comedic effect in theory but my eyes just glaze over and i lose the thread. pynchon does that a fair amount.

“ i don't like reading the words of the songs that people are singing for some reason.”

Me too, and I tend to glaze over this stuff in Pynchon books

it's funny I feel the difficultly in this and have felt it in other Pynchon novels but Gravity's Rainbow (which I've read twice, to be sure) somehow seems to glide by much easier.

I've read the first 100 pages or so ... it took some effort to tune in to his style again, and his use of the present tense doesn't make it any easier, but now we're moving right along

Mine got delivered a day early 🤫📯 so I felt obliged to read the first couple of pages, my initial response as far as the prose was “fuck yeah he’s still doing it” (also his epigraph game is still strong)

I’ll read it when I’m done with bleeding edge. I wasn’t sure I would carry on with my accidental TP readthru after 3 months with V —> 3 days with slow learner but I picked up BE and was just immediately hooked, no idea what the rep of this one is (I skipped it at the time out of a vague sense that he was copping wm gibson’s act which wasn’t what I thought I wanted from tp) but this narrative voice is like catnip to me, I think I like it more than iv so far. 150pp in and no songs, tho a Russian hip hop artist has been mentioned

Will see how I feel after shadow ticket but I think now that I will reread CoL49, GR, AtD for the set. The Pynchon victory lap moment is too strong

Yeah, I'm beginning to think he'll get the big prize in a couple of hours. This fall is his fall.

ah Lazlo got it

at least Tom's latest ends up in Hungary

2scoops as Bruno "Al Capone of Cheese" Airmont

Just got to the chapter where Stuffy vanishes on the mysterious U-boat and already enjoying this more than any Pynchon joint since Mason & Dixon. Have also relished the wiki detours through the careers of Goldwyn Girl Toby Wing, Hungarian grandmaster Arpad Elo and the young Les Paul.

Loving it so far

i struggled with the difficulty of the prose. i lost the thread of some sentences. some paragraph structures were arranged in a convoluted way, with a logic i couldn’t grasp

I think of myself as a bright person but whenever I need a reminder that I'm not that bright I remember that I can't read Pynchon

I was wondering if he mimics a kind of German-American syntax in this one? There were sentences that seemed wrong to me in English, but made more sense if I translated them directly into Danish.

The regional references are so deep, in particular card game Sheepshead, which I played a ton of the one year I went to college in Wisconsin, a game I've never heard of or seen played before or since, very unique and odd rules, I guess maybe Buck Euchre meets Hearts but at the same time way different, I've forgotten most of it other than there was a predetermined hierarchy of suits and I believe jacks were Bowers like in Euchre

I learned Euchre in Indiana, yeah

shadow docket

Finished Shadow Ticket last night and really dug it, definitely more than Bleeding Edge and a second reading might reveal more than Inherent Vice too.