Inside the cult of the elusive Thomas Pynchon
As the legendary American author releases his long-awaited new novel, Martin Chilton explores Pynchon’s reputation as one of the most ‘reclusive’ writers working right now
The cult of Thomas Pynchon is powerful and will only be bolstered by Shadow Ticket, the 88-year-old writer’s first novel in 12 years and one that, as an admirer of much of his previous work, I found to be a rather mixed bag.
Firstly, however, let’s deal with the massive Pynchon elephant in the room: the tedious obsession with framing him as the “world’s most reclusive author” (a title once bestowed on The Catcher in the Rye writer JD Salinger). The description was first used in 1963, when New York Times critic George Plimpton wrote: “Pynchon is in his early twenties; he writes in Mexico City – a recluse. It is hard to find out anything more about him.”
It has subsequently been trotted out in thousands of profiles of the author of the novels V (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006) and Bleeding Edge (2013).
The basis of this reclusive reputation is that he has never given a full-length interview to a journalist or broadcaster and declines to attend book signings or literary promotions. He tries to avoid being photographed publicly. When he spoke to a dogged pursuer from CNN television station in 1997, the writer said, with much truth, “Recluse is a code word generated by journalists… meaning ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters’.” He apparently told one journalist in the 1990s to “get your f***ing hand away from me!” when he was offered flesh to press.
As a result, fewer than a dozen images of Pynchon are available. The best known is the black-and-white photograph from his Oyster Bay High School yearbook. There is also an image of him serving in the navy that does the rounds, showing him in a sailor’s uniform and with the protruding front teeth of which he was supposedly highly self-conscious.
Despite being reluctant to seek the spotlight (a rarity among ambitious writers), there is little to suggest the reclusive label is anything other than a cliche. In the introduction to his 1984 collection of short stories called Slow Learner, Pynchon recalled: “I spent a lot of time in jazz clubs… I put on horn-rimmed sunglasses at night. I went to parties in lofts where girls wore strange attire.” Pynchon has remained an avid jazz fan and a frequent concert-goer, attending gigs in New York clubs and at Carnegie Hall. His passion for the swing band era remains and descriptions of big band music – including references to luminaries such as Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie and trumpeter Jabbo Smith, along with the antics of his fictional clarinettist Hop Wingdale – are a charming aspect of Shadow Ticket.
There are also numerous accounts of the author hanging out with friends in New York coffee shops or being spotted on walks in Riverside Park. The outgoing side of the author’s personality was also demonstrated when he penned liner notes for the alternative rock band Lotion’s 1996 album Nobody’s Cool. According to drummer Rob Youngberg, Pynchon sought out the band and offered to write about them.
Pynchon is also no hermit when it comes to the workings of the publishing world. Since leaving his first agent, Candida Donadio, he has been represented by his wife, the powerful New York literary agent Melanie Jackson (who also looks after Percival Everett and Richard Powers), whom he married in the 1990s after the birth of their son Jackson Pynchon.
Literary insiders who have dealt with Pynchon also offer a portrait of him that is at odds with the trope of an elusive, secretive writer. Brazilian Reinaldo Moraes found Pynchon helpful during the translation process for Vineland and translator Paulo Henriques Britto told Brazilian journalist Natália Portinari: “Pynchon is extremely thoughtful, far and away the most solicitous author I have ever spoken to.”
Pynchon has simply assiduously guarded his privacy. Even though he was a fan of writer David Shetzline (he called his 1968 novel DeFord “original and important”), his daughter Andrea could not penetrate Pynchon’s domestic defences. “Whenever I wanted to write him a letter, he used to say, ‘Well, I can’t give you the address, because a tree is about to fall on my house and I have to move,’” she told Portinari.
The basic facts about Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr’s past are well established: he was born on 8 May 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York and raised a Catholic by his engineer father and nurse mother; he graduated from Cornell University in 1958 with a degree in English; he served in the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean from 1955 to 1957; he worked in Seattle as a technical writer for Boeing and travelled widely, including to Mexico, before embarking on a six-decade career as a writer that has earned him a devoted, obsessive fanbase. There is even a Pynchon Wiki that analyses each of his books, page by page, to identify the copious social, political and artistic references in his fiction. Shadow Ticket should keep them busy in that respect.
One of his biggest fans is the director Paul Thomas Anderson, who adapted Pynchon’s darkly comic detective novel Inherent Vice into a 2014 movie. “Any time a new book of Pynchon’s has come out – at least since I’ve been around – it’s like I hang the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door and don’t come out until it’s done,” Anderson said.
Anderson’s acclaimed 2025 film One Battle After Another is loosely based on Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland – “a terrible book,” according to the late critic Harold Bloom – although the director moves the action from the 1960s to set it in the present day. “Vineland was going to be hard to adapt,” Anderson explained in the production notes for Warner Brothers. “Instead, I stole the parts that really resonated with me and started putting all these ideas together. With [Pynchon’s] blessing.” Anderson said that the process drew him no closer to the writer, however. “I don’t know Thomas Pynchon; I don’t know who he is, I don’t know what he looks like. I didn’t consult with him on the script,” he wrote. “That’s all I’ve got to say. I really feel like he’s like B Traven. Remember B Traven? The guy who wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? He was this kind of shadowy figure who would come and drop pages on John Huston’s desk.”
Although Vineland has a more accessible structure than some Pynchon novels – the 1,085-page Against the Day can baffle with its hundreds of characters across three continents – the complexity and knottiness of Pynchon’s fiction is what delights fans. I enjoyed V and his short novel The Crying of Lot 49 – which is only 155 pages and crammed with jokes and enticing tales of conspiracy and paranoia – and was enthralled by his intricate, cacophonous masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow. Even that novel divides authors, critics and readers. It is a book Anderson admitted he “never got through”, despite it winning the 1974 National Book Award. The novel was rejected by the Pulitzer Prize committee as “turgid, overwritten, obscene and unreadable”.
Salmon Rushdie has hailed the “genius” of a writer he calls “the old Invisible Man,” and Don DeLillo believed that “Pynchon, more than any other writer, has set the standard.” In the opposing camp stands the late John Updike, who wrote in 2009: “I don’t like the funny names and I don’t like the leaden feeling of the cosmos that Pynchon sets for us… clearly, the man is the darling of literary criticism in America now, especially of collegiate criticism. I am just no expert but all I can say is I have not much enjoyed the Pynchon I have tried to read.”
Reading Pynchon is challenging work. There are shifting narrative perspectives and a tendency to swamp the reader with a character’s passing memories and fantasies
Perhaps enjoyment gets to the nub of the difference of opinion over Pynchon. His admirers love the complexity, ambiguity and sprawling nature of his fiction and are untroubled by the enormous cast of characters and settings. They eat up Pynchon’s conspiratorial worldview, still apparent in the pro-Nazi leagues and fascist paramilitary groups in Shadow Ticket.
Reading Pynchon is challenging work. There are shifting narrative perspectives and a tendency to swamp the reader with a character’s passing memories and fantasies. Sometimes this gels – as in the panoply of stories contained in his brilliant historical novel Mason & Dixon – and sometimes it simply overwhelms. His long-awaited 2013 novel Bleeding Edge – a story that takes in the New York of the 1990s dotcom boom-and-bust, the start of the internet and events leading to 9/11 – is a wearisome read.
Shadow Ticket, his ninth novel and the first since Bleeding Edge, features the usual Pynchon zany shenanigans and shadowy syndicates of financiers, this time in a Great Depression-era tale about a strike-breaker-turned-private eye who is sent to track down the missing heiress of a Wisconsin cheese baron. The protagonist of this pacy noir caper is Hicks McTaggart, who becomes entangled with the mob, sex workers, Nazis, Soviet agents, British spies, musicians and practitioners of the paranormal.
The novel displays some of Pynchon’s finer traits – including his debunking attitude towards institutions – although I feel out of step with the glowing critical praise it has received. The novel is extremely dialogue heavy and those who love the book love the dialogue. The boiler plate conversations and quips lack the verve and authenticity of Raymond Chandler’s detective fiction of that era. To me, it sometimes felt as though Pynchon had continuously raided a dictionary of 1930s slang for wordplay. Perhaps I missed the humour; perhaps lines such as “you packing any heat?” or “what other kind of dame is there?” are simply homage to the detective story genre.
Although the novel is enjoyable enough as a “private dick whodunnit”, complete with red herrings, bombs and sinister enemies, the story lacks Pynchon’s wildest turns of humour. Shadow Ticket features a running joke about the “Al Capone of cheese” which begins to grate after a while. He describes an American diner which sells “pies in glass cases slowly losing their a.m. allure,” a phrase that to me sums up the difference between Gravity’s Rainbow and Shadow Ticket.
Pynchon once admitted that he would like to “keep scholars busy for several generations” and he has already sold his collection of drafts, notes and letters to The Huntington Library, an archive that comprises 70 linear feet of materials created between the late 1950s and the 2020s. In addition, a collection of more than 120 letters from Pynchon to Donadio, held presently by a private collector, will be made public after the author’s death. Light will eventually be shed on his own romantic life and the supposed rifts in his personal life.
For now, it is both lucrative and alluring for Pynchon to remain to many an almost mythical figure, rather than the dedicated, painstaking writer who has spent so much time constructing novels. In any case, the mythical persona is hard to square with a man that agreed to poke fun at himself in two episodes of The Simpsons, when he appeared in cartoon form with a paper bag over his head and voiced himself shouting at a passers-by in the street: “Hey, over here! Have your picture taken with a reclusive author! Today only, we’ll throw in a free autograph!”
Pynchon defies simple classification. At his best, he helped redefine the postmodern novel by capturing the zeitgeist of his warped times. Although I would be reluctant to wholeheartedly recommend Shadow Ticket to anyone unfamiliar with his work, his latest (and perhaps last) novel has some very good moments, including Hicks’s reflections on the appeal of the lost Milwaukee of his youth. In one moving paragraph, Pynchon reveals again the yearning of a masterful writer for America’s lost ideals and a man still worried by his nation’s contradictions and political chaos.
‘Shadow Ticket’ by Thomas Pynchon is published on 7 October by Jonathan Cape, £22
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