The Last Postmodern Novel

Like Gravity’s Rainbow, Shadow Ticket—the latest, and possibly the last book we’ll get from Thomas Pynchon during his lifetime—begins with a bang. At a distance of half a century, this new novel reads like an aftershock, images of fireworks looping on a screen, announcing nothing. It’s tempting to suggest that the fervor around Gravity’s Rainbow was at least partially aided by the superior attention spans of the 20th century. This was Pynchon’s third novel, and his freakish promise was still largely unfulfilled. The book’s self-indulgence would be excused by the eventual proof of its clairvoyance; Pynchon’s defects could be chalked up to raw talent, of which critic James Wood remarked: “It may be that he has too much.” In 2025, Pynchon contends with a culture that has caught up to him.