i work at B&N and we have the books in the back but the computer won't let me check out until tuesday it was so cruel holding a copy last night and not being able to take it home :(

read the first page though.......... seems like this is going to be a fun read. more of an inherent vice and vineland type beat. still hoping he's been working on one last crazy complex mason & dixon gravity's rainbow type classic but i mean i'm just glad he's still alive

i really hope one day we get an oral history/biography on who this guy actually was

Lovely Pynchon day.

« Soon as they could figure how to bring their thumbs out of their mouths and into the wind, the girls fell into a practice of hitchhiking over to Baraboo every weekend, hanging around the circus people who wintered there, feeding the menagerie critters, hopelessly mooning after knife-throwers, acrobats, and mind readers, wondering just what was supposed to happen to them between now and whenever it got to a choice between run away some first of May with one of the shows or join the relentless spiral drain down to Milwaukee and find some city work, which is eventually what happened, and how Grace met Eddie McTaggart and Peony met Detlef Flaschner and got married, a double ceremony in fact, and not a day went by afterward that one or the other didn’t wonder if she made the right call. »

10 chapters in and the plot/mystery is slowly but surely starting to gain steam. Very enjoyable read so far, haven't read the larger Pynchon books, so if I had to make a comparison it would be Inherent Vice, but with all the film/book noir trappings of the 1930s.

Also the Pynchon wiki for Shadow Ticket is live, so if you wanna make sure you didn't miss any references, def check it out: shadowticket.pynchonwiki.com/wiki

there's a rumor going around that Pynch has completed one more book

Give him his Nobel Prize

I’m a fake fan. Didn’t know this dropped two weeks ago. Drove to my nearest Barnes and Noble. It’s interesting so far. I can’t put my finger on it yet, but something feels off?
Ive only read CL49, IV, and half of MnD and like a quarter of GR. So not a ton, but I’m getting the feeling of a later season TV show where all the characters are playing caricatures of themselves if that makes sense.

where has this rumor started?

can't people just enjoy the one he just put out?

Exactly how I feel

Glad he’s still around and writing but yeah this for me is far and away his weakest. Crazy because he’s clearly still capable of killer lines and incredible prose. It’s just the characters and the substance and the message— what is it trying to say, really? Feels like self parody.

And yes, rumor is he finally finished his Civil War novel which has been in the works for decades so I expect it to be much better than this one.

Powerful stuff Bruce, I especially agree with your first part. Self parody perfectly explains the feeling I’m getting.

I’m curious as to when or if we’ll get that novel. What information do we have on it?

Can’t even imagine how immense that one could be.

I've yet to read any of his big doorstoppers, but comparing this new one and Inherent Vice to something like Lot 49 and Vineland, I think he's slightly inched towards more of a dialogue-heavy prose in his later work.

I get what you're saying with the flanderization of the characters, but I sort of attribute this to everyone's preconceived notion of what these settings and the characters that they inhabit entail (noir prohibition era detectives in Ticket and the zany hippies of 70s California in Inherent). Combine this with the fact that Pynchon seems to revel in pop culture and enjoys dropping references to both obscure and famous films, books, music, genres, tropes, whatever, its done on purpose, I think. Idk if im making any sense, but compared to some of the earlier works, the general setting seems to be more overt this time. I've yet to get to the Hungary sections in Shadow Ticket, but hopefully those shakes things up in a cool direction.

A critic said their publisher told him:
reddit.com/r/ThomasPynchon/s/elXmbjXq16