Review: Tracy Daugherty on Thomas Pynchon
Stranger even than his fiction
It’s too easy, but still astonishing, I think, to point out how much America in its current state resembles the fictional world Thomas Pynchon has delineated for us since 1963, beginning with his novel V. A president suggesting that people swallow bleach to beat off a frightening pandemic; rumors of political leaders eating babies in the back of a pizza parlor; a would-be golf-course assassin, indignant and proud, quibbling in court about whether he’d chosen the fifth hole or the sixth hole for his deed; the slaughter of schoolkids in their classrooms, using weapons of war; above all, the rampant spread of paranoia funded by high-tech disinformation cadres tied to centuries-old international cabals: all of it fits neatly under the heading “Pynchonesque.”
Pynchon is now eighty-eight years old. He has been observing and reporting on America’s insanity for over sixty years, and he has just published a new novel, Shadow Ticket, after a twelve-year silence. Its publication coincides with the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie One Battle After Another, inspired by Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. Anderson understood how readily the trials of an imagined Reagan-era countercultural underground battling untethered federal agents might seem all too contemporary. The result is perhaps the most trenchant, certainly the most entertaining movie of the year.
