Untitled Thomas Pynchon

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Sean at 12:13 pm, July 20th, 2006

Post horn The rumors are apparently true: Thomas Pynchon has a new book coming out, scheduled for release on December 5 of this year. We know they’re true because the book already has an amazon.com page where you are welcome to buy it. As Slate notes, an intriguing aspect of the story (you knew there would be one, didn’t you?) is the appearance — followed soon thereafter by the disappearance — of an “author blurb” on the amazon page. Here it is, rescued from the amazon discussion board.

“Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.”

–Thomas Pynchon

Did Pynchon really write this blurb? Why did amazon remove it? (I’m guessing that it was written by an overly enthusiastic publicist, and that’s why they removed it.) Is it true that Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya will play a prominent role in the new book? What is the title, for crying out loud? Wondering is half the fun.

The notoriously reclusive Pynchon is fond of sprinkling science throughout his works, and scientists are fond of reading them in turn. Gravity’s Rainbow, his masterwork, has a well-deserved reputation for being somewhat intimidating. But I would encourage anyone to read Mason & Dixon, his most recent book and arguably his most entertaining (not that it’s a breeze, mind you). Admittedly, there are scary parts:

“Gentlemen,” advises this ominous Shadow, “— you have fallen, willy-nilly, among a race who not only devour Astronomers as a matter of habitual Diet, but may also make of them vile minature ‘Sandwiches,’ and then lay them upon a mahogany Sideboard whose Price they never knew, and then forget to eat them. Your only hope, in this room, is to impersonate so perfectly what they assume you to be, that instincts of Predation will be overcome by those of Boredom.”

My most important contribution (to date) to literary scholarship is the discovery of the subtle deployment in M&D of the collapse of the wavefunction as a metaphorical theme for the progress of the surveyors over the hills to the West, observing as they go and reducing Probabilities to Certainties.

Update: according to a followup article in Slate, the title of the novel is Against the Day, and the blurb is really written by Pynchon. Shows you what I know.

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12 Comments on “Untitled Thomas Pynchon” rss feed

spyder on Jul 20th, 2006 at 3:11 pm

The blurb is almost too Pynchonesque; it seems likely he would do something like this, then ask for it to be removed, so that later he can do it again. But Tesla as a cameo in a work that dances on the early days of the global egalitarian hope inspired by electricity seems pretty damn inticing. And no, of course this book would not be in anyway metaphoric or allegoric with reference to anything happening today in the 21st century, never.
Sean on Jul 20th, 2006 at 3:34 pm

It seems precisely too Pynchonesque, which is why I’m guessing that it’s not him. If you read his essays, e.g. the intro to Slow Learner, he doesn’t really sound like that at all when he’s not writing fiction. “The author is up to his usual business” seems especially fake to me.

Of course, it would be just like him to play a joke by writing in the style of someone who was trying to write like him. An object lesson in the self-justifying logic of paranoia.
Hmmmm on Jul 20th, 2006 at 7:00 pm

and is the graphic of a well known postal conspiracy?
Jack on Jul 20th, 2006 at 8:12 pm

Ah, good old Py, author of the most pretentious pile of crap since Finnegan’s Wake. Takes me back to my grad student days, when everyone played bridge, pretended to read Proust and to be connoisseurs of fine cigars…..
Allyson on Jul 20th, 2006 at 9:21 pm

Did you forget the part about Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead changing people’s lives? Or was that just in my college’s pretentious crap pile?
NoJoy on Jul 21st, 2006 at 9:39 am

I’ve only made it a quarter of the way through GR, with a concordance. When I started reading Pynchon, someone recommended the following order: The Crying of Lot 49, V, then Gravity’s Rainbow (this recommendation was before Vineland and M&D). I haven’t read Vineland yet, but I would insert M&D after V, with the caveat that if you don’t like V, you should read M&D anyway, as it’s completely amazing.

While I’m giving out unsolicited literary advice… If you like M&D, I also recommend Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
Pingback from enthusiasm » Blog Archive » The New Thomas Pynchon (further) on Jul 22nd, 2006 at 10:46 am

[...] Also via Kottke, I checked out a post called The String Theory Backlash on a blog called Cosmic Variance. I like to keep an eye on debates about string theory because I have a homegrown cosmological hypothesis (with which I will not detain you here) which borrows a concept or two from string theory, and I’m waiting for someone to come along and shoot a hole in it. Anyway, I had this page sitting in a browser tab for several hours before I noticed that the previous post title was Untitled Thomas Pynchon, which speculates along much the same lines I did a few posts back, and points to a Slate article which does more or less likewise. Also, the CV post boasts a handful of comments, which of course is a handful more than mine has so far attracted. There’s more discussion in the Amazon Customer Discussion page for the book-to-be - nine hundred and ninety two pages! Wheee!) and of course there’s much threadage on pynchon-l, which I must admit I haven’t yet waded through. Pynchon-l has been all over the story since the 10th. Looks like they had a round of “get over the book blurb already” about a week ago… [...]
seebee on Jul 23rd, 2006 at 1:06 am

According to the wikipedia article on Pynchon, the new books is entitled Against the Day. The source is of course questionable, but better than nothing, no?
Matt Austern on Jul 23rd, 2006 at 11:04 pm

Dear me, a mention of Mason and Dixon on a physics blog that doesn’t mention the name of the boatswain? It’s a vile pun, but I’m fond of it anyway.
James Duckworth on Aug 4th, 2006 at 4:43 am

I’m just glad he is back with a formidable sounding posthorn of a book! December should be fun reading time! Roll on Pynchonalia, I say! James
Trackback from Cosmic Variance on Nov 20th, 2006 at 11:20 pm

The Perfect Literary Storm

Broadly speaking I have two great literary loves. Sure I enjoy plenty of grand historical fiction, and certainly I won’t argue the objective worth of any literary giant with you. But when I’m browsing in a bookstore, or sitting at home in …
Pingback from Not Even Wrong » Blog Archive » Media and Other News on Nov 25th, 2006 at 4:17 pm

[...] On the way in here I stopped at a bookstore and took a look at the new Thomas Pynchon novel Against the Day. Over at Cosmic Variance, Mark Trodden and Sean Carroll are Pynchon fans and have postings about this. I was quite fond of Vineland and enjoyed some of Pynchon’s earlier books, but he lost me with Mason and Dixon, and this new one doesn’t look promising. From flipping through it, one important topic seems to be quaternions and their relation to 4d space-time geometry, and a group of characters are called the Quaternioneers. I almost bought the book, thinking that it was my duty as a chronicler of the nexus of math, physics and popular culture to read the thing. But when I picked it up, its sheer heft caused an immediate feeling of discouragement, so I put it back down and will wait for reports from others. [...]

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