Still Got It

ON OCTOBER 7, Penguin Press published Thomas Pynchon’s ninth novel, Shadow Ticket. Typical of a new Pynchon release, the novel’s effect on critics was polarizing. On the one hand, Jacob Brogan of The Washington Post described it as “bonkers and brilliant,” and Christian Lorentzen, writing for Bookforum, praised Pynchon as a trickster figure who reveals an America “more sinister or more perfect than the Union we inhabit.” On the other hand, commenting on the book’s ideological opacity, Kathryn Schulz of The New Yorker complained that “meaning that is sufficiently cryptic becomes indistinguishable from no meaning at all,” while Mark Sanderson flatly dismissed the novel in the London Times, writing that it “fizzles out in a sequence of tall stories and narrow escapes.”