In Line With All the Pynchon Fans at the Midnight Release of Shadow Ticket

It’s 10:30pm on a Monday, and a line a dozen deep has formed outside Greenlight Books in Brooklyn. A dapper employee in suspenders and fedora comes out to give instructions—we’re to “say we know Tommy” to secure admission. Why? Because tonight your friendly neighborhood bookstore is become a speakeasy. 

Hot jazz whispers from within. An excited guest who’s come straight from rehearsal frets about storage possibilities for her cello. A mustachioed fellow behind me expresses a faint worry about not having pre-purchased a ticket in advance. The mood is excited, just shy of giddy. The occasion is the release of Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon’s first novel in a dozen years. 

The midnight book release is a relic to me, tethered to a now troubled cultural property. In the summer of 2005, I stood online in a cape and carefully frizzed “Trelawney hair” to collect a copy of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince at the Silver Spring Border’s. Then as now, you could feel magic in the air. I remember the thrill when that brick of a book landed in my hands. How we set down our wands and started flipping pages right there in the street, while exhausted chaperones tried in vain to herd us back to the van. You bought the book at midnight, then you raced its contents to dawn so you could talk about it as soon as possible with your friends. This was the apex reading experience. Celebratory, communal. And the wait made it sweeter still. 

I’d deliberately shelved that other midnight memory—along with the actual books in that series from she-who-must-not-be-named. But waiting for Shadow Ticket, I remember how it felt to want a novel that badly. To binge it, as I do a mediocre sitcom. I rarely buy hardcovers now. But when I do, I let them collect into a stack on my nightstand. I let them acquire a guilty heft while telling myself, it can wait. 

*

The line moves quick. Our doorman interlocutor pretends to be intimidating, but can’t keep up the ruse when most of us forget the secret password we’ve just been told. Inside the store, the party is sane, formal, adult. The music swirls at a reasonable volume. A mute projection of The Public Enemy (1931), a Prohibition-era flick, holds a front wall captive. This pre-code feature stars James Cagney as what Rob Nixon of TCM once called “the essence of the ruthless, hair-trigger hoodlum.” Inquisitive guests are told it’s an easter egg, an inside joke connected to the book. Much like the cheddar cheese plate holding down the snack table. 

“His insanity matches how insane I feel the world is right now.”

A stand by the new releases invites guests to give themselves a Pynchonic nickname off a suggested list of goofy monikers. I spy a “Dr. Contra” and a “Curly Patella” before settling on my own nom de plume: Eustace Meander. I do as I’m called. As the room fills, I’m pleased to see that certain demographic assumptions were made in haste. Age and gender-wise, the crowd is especially diverse. A few game souls in moll and gangster get-ups announce intentions to enter the costume contest. While in the children’s section, a lively intergenerational debate kicks up about how the maestro’s last name should be pronounced. (“No, dude, it’s Pinch-ON.”). 

As I’m purchasing a furtive copy of Mason & Dixon—for unlike the average attendee, I’m a filthy casual, with only Inherent Vice and Lot 49 to my name—Matt Stowe, Greenlight’s operating manager, tells me this hootenanny has precedent. Sally Rooney, Haruki Murakami, and Emily Henry have all drawn midnight readers to the store in the last few years. But when I ask him to draw demographic distinctions between crowds, he laughs kindly, then says something I don’t quite catch. 

In 2005, we midnight readers were bound by one thing: escapist fixation. The people on line at the Silver Spring Border’s—most of us children—were the same people who’d waited in un-ironic vain for admissions letters to a fictional institution on or around their 11th birthdays. We weren’t bound by a craving for truth so much as pure delusion. We wanted to leave this dull world for a better place, on tides of easily binged prose. A Pynchon fan is a horse of a different color. 

Besides being—across the board—adults, the midnight readers I saw at Greenlight cited the appeals of dissonance and “maximalism.” They spoke of deliberately difficult reading experiences. Muscle and rigor. As Diallo Banks (aka Chase Malaprops) told me, “it’s very fun to be confused.” A classical experimental composer currently getting his Ph.D. at Columbia, Banks is a cheerful non-completist, having tapped out 80 percent of the way through Gravity’s Rainbow. But given world enough and time, he plans to tackle that masterpiece “7 or 8 more times” before he kicks. 

My friend Michael—not in attendance Tuesday, but a recently minted Pynchon fan—is fresh off forays into V, and Gravity’s Rainbow. When I asked him about the appeal of difficult wells, he also emphasized the physical reading experience. “I’d say the complexity requires a focus that is nice in our scrolling world.” 

Pynchon vacillates between goofy and dire. He’s interested in archetypes and symbols—see the silly names, that anonymizing bag—which he enlists to gesture at the world’s true incoherence.

Circling the stacks at Greenlight, it strikes me that an author whose work is famously difficult seems to beg for a communal reading experience. But I guess some people don’t like to puzzle alone. And on top of this unique devotion sits another, specific to the Pynchon fan: delight to delayed gratification. Whenever I want something really badly, I always look to expedite the experience. I eat quickly, and get sick. But this is a room of readers who have cultivated patience. 

The Shadow Ticket—and its oh-so-deliberate, inscrutable author—would have us sit tight. Go slow. Wait. 

*

Around 11:45, we are ushered into a trivia contest, quiz-mastered by Mr. Stowe. Grumbly consensus says the questions are a little too hard—yet there are enough winners to spawn sudden death rounds. Most of the room gets the one about Pynchon’s cameo on The Simpsons. They also know his teacher at Cornell (Nabokov), and the name of the dismissed descendant (David Foster Wallace). Cheerful grousing sprouts over off-the-beaten-path referents, like one involving “the famous heiress” who confessed to being a fan in the pilot of The O.C. (A: Paris Hilton.) And a great injured roar covered the room when everyone realized they’d missed one about a name-checked Nickelodeon show in a later work. (A: Kenan and Kel.) 

For the costume contest, three guys with bags over their heads join a line-up of hep cats in period dress who’ve taken the assignment very seriously. A woman in a suit with a neckline hemmed to form a punctuation mark takes the cake, and we’re told the powers that be will brook no debate. “It has a question mark,” the judge keeps repeating. Like this is the project. Like this is the point. 

*

As Devin Thomas O’Shea observed on this very site yesterday, Pynchon’s appeal is manifold and slippery. He’s lumped in with the postmodernists, but his work is political, “interpretable as a body of left historical literature concerning antifascism.” Banks also admires the Pynchon canon for its agenda. He likes that the books poke holes in the “myths of American exceptionalism.” 

For many readers, tone seems to light a way into commentary. Across his novels, Pynchon vacillates between goofy and dire. (Or as O’Shea has it, “He’s a good mix of apocalypse and Looney Tunes.”) He’s interested in archetypes and symbols—see the silly names, that anonymizing bag—which he enlists to gesture at the world’s true incoherence. His best descendants and interpreters replicate the spirit that Richard Brody recently called “dialectical,” in a warm review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s buzzy new adaptation, One Battle After Another. 

Many fans I spoke to emphasized how that Pynchon-y tone marries the moment. “His insanity matches how insane I feel the world is right now,” Michael said. While Banks described picking up Gravity’s Rainbow the day before October 7th, 2023, and marveling at the confluence of world-historical violence in worlds real and dreamed. (Gravity begins with a scene of carnage, as V-2 rocket bombs rain down on London.)

Earlier, Banks and I had spoken some about mutual quibbles with the racial politics in One Battle After Another—a divisive subject at this hootenanny. And as the countdown approached, I wondered again what jokes and symbols sometimes let us get away with, or avoid. I suspect everyone at the midnight party would agree that it’s thrilling to hear insanity named around you. But what then do we do with our married moment? Our punctured myths?

Lucy Carpenter—aka Anodyne Lenderman—has one idea. She’s historically been drawn to Pynchon’s ability to capture the dissonant elements of late capitalism, but is less certain of the goofy’s future uses. “I don’t think we can continue on in a comic mode,” she muses, of the whole “postmodern thing.” When I ask what should replace it, she thinks for a minute before saying, “Seriousness. Taking life seriously.” 

*

At a minute to midnight, we count down. A polite line forms around the exit, where the end of this yarn is preordained. We’ll collect our Shadow Tickets and take our rides back home, all by our adult lonesomes. No yawning moms in sight. No true escape. When the timer’s up, someone launches into “Auld Lang Syne,” as at the end of that other era-appropriate flick, It’s A Wonderful Life. When the tune is over, people take their books outside and some start reading, right there on the street. 

I only spoke to one person on Monday night who showed any sheepishness about either the Pynchon project or the party itself. A shy fan, Rebecca, who told me she’d read ‘em all, “embarrassingly.” I wanted to ask, why so sheepish? When wasn’t it wonderful? To be in this room full of pure, unadulterated fans, waiting so patiently for something as pure and unadulterated as a literary novel? And anyway, what was so embarrassing about loving all of someone, in their many guises and contradictions? In short—what did she mean? 

I started to form a question. But the superfan slipped away before I got it out.