Clocking in at a comparatively short 384 pages, it apparently is another detective novel, taking place in the 30s and exploring locations as disparate as Milwaukee and Hungary.
It will be his ninth novel and comes 12 years after his most recent, Bleeding Edge (2013).
Really looking forward to this! It will be the first new one published since I started reading him several years ago.
Now to get through the next seven months!
I love Thomas Pynchon. (Seems like only yesterday that Bleeding Edge came out, though I remember thinking on a couple of occasions, it’s been a few years.)
I finally finished reading this!
The good news is, this is a solid second-stage Pynchon novel. Let me explain, for those unfamiliar.
Pynchon made his reputation with his first three novels: V. (1963), The Crying Of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). From these—especially Gravity’s Rainbow—he developed his reputation as a forbidding and difficult writer, which is somewhat overstated if you ask me, but whatever.
Anyhoo, after the seminal Gravity’s Rainbow, he took an almost 20 year break from publishing, and his next new work of fiction was 1990’s Vineland, the reaction to which was decidedly nonplussed (though recently it was rather loosely adapted as a film—One Battle After Another—which seems to have been proven rather popular).
There is a cranky lot of Pynchonistas—we’re generally a cranky lot anyway—who view his post-Gravity’s Rainbow work as “Pynchon-lite.” This book will not satisfy them. But I would rank it above Bleeding Edge and maybe Vineland in his later period, though I must still admire Against The Day and Mason & Dixon as the most ambitious of his later period books. (Mason & Dixon is probably my favorite of his books—you have to get used to its fake period language, but it’s easier than you might expect).