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By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
Early in this chapter I had a sense of the special quality of Pynchon’s writing. I can’t put my finger on what makes his writing so magical. I will see if I can articulate it over the next few months.
When I first read this book in 1990, I found it utterly resonated with my politics. Born in 1962, I had lived through the Nixon and Reagan years, and I found myself saying “YES!” to how Pynchon characterized those eras in this novel. Reading this chapter again in 2025, I found that the politics still resonate for me. Perhaps his new novel Shadow Ticket, due out October 7 of this year, will help me make sense of our current political situation and of how we got here. I know Shadow Ticket deals with the 1930’s, Wisconsin, jazz, and Hungary, etc. I have listened to a bunch of Count Basie getting ready to read the new Pynchon.
Since 1990 I have gotten every new Pynchon novel right when it came out, and the internet has provided prepublication glimpses of each of these novels. Of course, the novels themselves have always defied my expectations.
Frenesi at the end of this chapter always makes me think of the Gang of Four song “I Love a Man in a Uniform.”
I recommend checking out Michael Johnson blog post “Pynchon, Wilson, and TV: Irony, Etc.” at https://substack.com/home/post/p-169809446
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