This story contains minor spoilers for Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another.
As reading comprehension plummets, it’s become a status symbol to read “girthy” books, the kind of dick-measuring classics written by talented, reclusive wizards. Length is important. They have to be phallic; riding them has to be an accomplishment. Earlier this year, Federico Perelmuter dubbed this phenomenon “brodernism,” citing books like Schattenfroh, Septology, and Infinite Jest as well as writers like Vladimir Sorokin, Thomas Bernhard, and László Krasznahorkai. Let it not be said that I have not read many of these books. Such a Freudian gauntlet laid at the feet of women makes me competitive. I first read Thomas Pynchon to impress a man— not unlike my first brush with Dostoevsky or Hemingway.
Now Pynchon has delivered a new novel, his first since 2012’s Bleeding Edge. Shadow Ticket follows his recent spate of noirish, mid-length detective novels full of puns, as if Inherent Vice was set in 1930s Wisconsin. It’s a year for Pynchon-mania. Paul Thomas Anderson has released his second adaptation of the recluse’s work—this time it’s One Battle After Another, his take on the picaresque Vineland. The new novel and film share more DNA than it would appear first glance; whether the Cold War or World War II, paranoia and creeping authoritarianism are Pynchon’s bread and butter. It’s only fitting he returns to us with a new byzantine riddle as Trump tries to consolidate his power.
Can anyone absorb a Pynchon novel, or does one merely become entangled in his web? Read too much and you’re lost in a sea of words—sea shanties, math equations, hyperlinks, noirish asides, puns, and recurring characters. In Pynchon’s work, as in Gravity’s Rainbow, either everything is connected or nothing is. Neither is comforting. But such is postmodern life. It’s bizarre then that Paul Thomas Anderson is allegedly trying to create the Pynchon Expanded Universe through multiple film adaptations. There are so many labyrinthian connections in Pynchon’s oeuvre that they end up losing their coherence. Whether the V-2, Gabriel Ice, or the mysterious identity of “V,” the object of a Pynchon novel’s obsession is often a red herring. Perhaps his real theme is the breakdown of communication, the rise of paranoid thinking. These are not books one can master–or even perhaps ever truly understand. They are encyclopedias of collapse. They do not always make for pleasurable, straightforward reading by the beach or on the subway, nor should they. Books are allowed to be hard, to be difficult. Many reviews express their confusion over the plot, the way his work tries their patience. While writing about his debut novel V, Alexander Nazaryan puzzled: “I should confess that I have no idea what V is about–and I have read it twice.” These are texts to be wrestled with. As Roland Barthes once said of Proust: “From one reading to the next, we never skip the same passages.”
As Christian Lortenzen put it in Bookforum, drawing on the idea of the “systems novel,” there remains “the dream of an artwork that encompasses the whole world; of a novel that tells everybody’s story.” Such works attempt to marry math and literature. An engineering graduate of Cornell before moving to Seattle and writing for Boeing, Pynchon was primed for such technical writing. Richard Poirier, reviewing Gravity’s Rainbow, noticed a similar impulse: “the additional comic horror of the Faustian peculiar to this century is that it can no longer be located in the mad heroics of individuals.” Perhaps because of this, Pynchon’s interests have always sprawled across the desolate wasteland of the United States. In his review of Vineland, Salman Rushdie wondered what happened to his many other disparate rumored projects:
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