A New Book from Thomas Pynchon

An old one speaks to the moment.

It was announced this week that Thomas Pynchon at age 87 will be publishing a new novel Oct. 7, his first since 2013.

Shadow Ticket is described at the Penguin website like this:

By this description we have Pynchon working in his noir-ish mode, which, for my money, is the most entertaining and accessible Pynchon and essentially where he’s been since 2009’s Inherent Vice. Though interestingly, he’s also injecting some of his historical novel mode on display in Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, but at much briefer length (386 pages) than those two doorstops.

I had two initial reactions to this news: Good for him, and good for me.

Good for him because it’s more evidence that Pynchon remains at work, even at an advanced age, joining the many other writers who are able to keep going until the wheels fall off entirely. As someone currently intending to keep writing until the wheels fall off, I’m cheered by the thought that writing may be something that keeps the wheels turning.

Good for me because I’m a Pynchon completist, happy to read whatever he puts into the world, even when (or maybe because) it can be confusing, enervating, and maybe even impenetrable.

Look, I’m not a Thomas Pynchon scholar. I’m not a literary scholar of any kind, so maybe people who know real stuff will think I’m talking out of my hind quarters here, but the news that Pynchon will be releasing a new novel put me in thinking mode, and what I’m thinking is that Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s 1973 masterpiece, is perhaps the book that most speaks to the present moment. Scattered, profane, insensible, menacing, silly, it’s as though the world has become what Gravity’s Rainbow represents.

While it is difficult to say that any novel as strange and sprawling as Gravity’s Rainbow has a center, if it has one, it is a doomsday device called the Schwarzgerät which is to be installed on a special V-2 rocket near the end of WWII. The post atom-bomb realization that mankind had developed the power to end itself in an instant hangs over much of Pynchon’s work, in combination with his apparent belief that we are just stupid and unserious enough to make it happen.

The characters of Gravity’s Rainbow, including putative hero Tyrone Slothrop, an Army intelligence officer, are magnetic and absurd, bumblers who explore bizarre notions of metaphysics and the uncanny as in a made-up secret agency that believes there is a link between Slothrop’s erections during sexual encounters and the location of V-2 rocket strikes.

In a senseless world, this makes as much as sense as anything, which is to say it doesn’t make much sense.

Don’t ask this novel to make sense because it doesn’t, and yet also, it does. It is a faithful reflection of the world from which it was born, the chaotic post-war era (rising prosperity mixed with political assassinations and sweeping cultural change), and also, apparently the world were trapped within today. The novel ends with the V-2 rocket with the Schwarzgerät installed and one of the characters (Gottfried) inside the rocket’s nosecone. The rocket does not land, but the final series of images, now drawn from times contemporary to the novel (including very obvious Nixon references) make it clear - to this reader at least - that even though it is not on the page, a final impact is both inevitable and perhaps even deserved.

Maybe fifty years on we’ve reached Gravity’s Rainbow’s conclusion.

There has been much talk lately of The Great Gatsby being the book of our time, much of that talk centered on this famous quote which has been making the rounds:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

I do not agree with this analysis because I think it is a passing of the buck, putting the onus on the “they,” the Gilded Age wastrels. The message of Pynchon’s work, particularly in Gravity’s Rainbow is not that they are careless people.

We are.

The danger of the intersection of human stupidity with technological power is perhaps more urgently relevant today than it was in Pynchon’s time when the overriding concern was nuclear weapons. We still have those, of course, but let’s add in threat multipliers like a degraded information ecosystem and a dysfunctional politics.

Prior to last week I had never knowingly watched even a second of the CNBC stock market coverage, but compelled by the spectacle of Trump’s tariffs I found myself watching for hours on end. It was very strange.

The anchors and guests clearly knew that the markets were in the grip of an erratic maniac, but they could not say this. To admit this is to obviate their own existence, because what good is a financial talking head against a backdrop of chaos and whim? Instead, the talk was of market strategy and risk and potential upside, just like always.

I lost count of the number of fund managers who got on and said they thought this was increasingly a good time to get into the market because the fundamentals were still good despite the maniac in charge getting into the guts of the machinery and ripping out the wiring. They didn’t say that last part because apparently we’re all afraid to tell obvious truths.

When an unfounded rumor on (what I will always call) Twitter stoked a belief that Trump was going to pause the tariffs, the markets shot up, only to crash back when it was debunked, only to then re-rise (somewhat) when Trump did the pause for real two days later.

It is more absurd than a Pynchon novel, but it is reality, and yet the people in charge of conveying reality refuse to do so. As Paul Krugman demonstrates at his newsletter, we are in the midst of a relentless “sane washing” of Trump’s economic policies, but the truth is, we’re in the grips of a crazy man.

Pynchon’s insistence is that we are all madmen, almost without choice, since the world is designed to make us mad.

We learned this week that some company “resurrected” the long extinct dire-wolf, except they hadn’t done anything of the sort, but never mind says the U.S. Department of the Interior, we can get rid of that endangered species list because we now have a genomic reset button. In truth, those wolves are just lightly edited gray wolves mixed with a soupçon of dire-wolf DNA, turning them into big gray wolves with lighter coats. This news was reported credulously by Time, the New Yorker, and the New York Times.

Every single one of us is being treated like a sucker and I am as big a sucker as anyone, slurping up CNBC, and sitting here tippy-tapping on my screen because what else is there to do?

Pynchon’s warning was that science, in the hands of man, will inevitably destroy us, and perhaps the not-dire-wolf is not the most urgent example, but consider the implications of a faith in genetic resurrection when it comes to the values of sustainability and conservation, values which may actually give us hope? None of that jazz is necessary anymore, we can just consume, consume, consume. Thank goodness because isn’t that conservation stuff a bummer?

Who gives a fuck about the disappearance of bees? Sure, they’re absolutely necessary to maintaining an ecosystem that allows stuff to actually, you know, grow, but why can’t we just create an infinite army of tiny, pollinating, AI-controlled drones to work in the bees’ stead? Someone could make a fortune on that!

I made that last bit about the drones up, but it would not shock me if someone already has this idea.

Thinking about bottomless consumption brings to mind a recent haunting article from the New York Times that I’ve been referencing lately in all of my talks about AI and writing as I travel to spread the gospel of More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.

The article is a deep dive on the new era of computer chip that is driving the development of artificial intelligence (gift link), but it is the material on projected energy use that is particularly disturbing to me. Presently you will hear arguments that AI-related activities are no more energy intensive than common activities like streaming Netflix. Which is true, for now. But this is the projection of the future.

That is an eight-fold increase in energy usage by this technology in the span of three years, energy which will be significantly powered by coal and oil. I do not know how we rationalize this away while living on a warming planet experiencing the consequences of this warming in real-time.

Pynchon’s message is that we are perhaps helpless against ourselves.

The Bible says so too.

The Pulitzer Board famously refused to award Gravity’s Rainbow the 1974 prize after it had been recommended unanimously by the jury, calling it “‘unreadable,’ ‘turgid,’ ‘overwritten’ and in parts ‘obscene.’

Welcome to 2025, 1974 Pulitzer Prize board.

I can’t claim that there is solace for the present moment to be found in Gravity’s Rainbow, but at least we can’t claim no one warned us, or that we have no idea what’s happening, for surely we do.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I explore Joe Dunthorne’s Children of Radium a quasi-family memoir that may have thing or two to say about the present through the lens of the past as well.

At my Engaged Education newsletter I made the fairly obvious point that seems to get ignored often lately, education thrives on human connection:

Education Requires Human Connection

I thought I’d grown tired of the whole “white men can’t catch a break in publishing these days” debate, but Naomi Kanakia managed to deliver a piece that broke through my weariness, which is no small feat.

Anne Trubek has some helpful, but not uplifiting insights on Trump’s tariffs and book publishing.

Pen America has announced its finalists for its various literary awards and I’m surprised and perhaps ashamed to say that I have not read a single nominated book in any of the categories.

My friends at McSweeney's Internet Tendency continue to lead the way on the keep laughing so you don’t start crying front. This week I recommend, “Forget the Ten Plagues and Escaping, The Pharaoh and His Rich Friend Say They’re on Our Side,” by Louie Aronowitz.

Recommendations

1. The Knockout Queen by Rufi Thorpe
2. Sandwich by Catherine Newman
3. Amerikaland by Danny Goodman
4. Zorba the Greek by Nikoz Kazantzakis
5. Good Material by Dolly Alderton

Julie Z. - Modiin, Israel

For Julie, I’m recommending another novel that speaks to the moment, even though it is almost 15 years old now, Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart.

Chicago-area readers, I’ve got a couple of events coming up, and in both cases they are free and open to the public (though you may have to register). One will be held at Maine South High School May 7th and 5:30pm. Details and registration are here.

The other is an appearance as part of a Northwestern University Symposium on AI, Education, and the Learning Sciences, an all-day event on May 8th with some participants, (including Dan Meyer, that I highly recommend. Those details are here.

Thankfully, I am not nearly so despairing as I sometimes sound in these dispatches. Writing is a good way to flush some of this angst. I cannot say that I feel hopeful for positive outcomes at this point, but I am not hopeless. I fundamentally believe that humans are nothing if not resilient. I’d just like a world where we don’t have to see how resilient we have to be.

How are you all feeling these strange days?

Please consider coming to see me at those Chicago-area appearances. It’s one of the great pleasures of doing this newsletter to be able to meet readers in person.

Until next time,

John
The Biblioracle