- 1 See Ted Underwood’s instructive Why Literary Periods Mattered (2013).
1Writing about the late style of a living writer of any age is a bit like writing about late capitalism: the phrase connotes a rather deterministic temporality that anticipates an ending and takes its approach from there. At least in the case of the former, it seems appropriate to avoid the morbidity that comes with that (not to mention the often desperate note of utopian hope of the latter), along with the fact that such approaches will eventually seem very dated, as the hindsight they presume actually catches up with them once the authors are, well, late themselves. But as with beginnings, there is a danger of imposing too rigid a framework by thinking through endings—and Edward Said wrote poignantly about the ambiguities of such impositions in the early and late stages of his career, both in Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975) and in On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (2009). Lateness is a risky and problematic category for a number of reasons. For one thing, it really overemphasizes and oversimplifies biography, and while aging and “the decay of the body” (Said 6) surely have an effect on all of us, they do not necessarily have an effect on the work. Linda and Michael Hutcheon convincingly demonstrate, in response to Said, how “a generalizing concept of late style (in the singular) is inevitably ageist” (68). Furthermore, the beginnings of endings are really vague; for example, do we count Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and its companion novel Stella Maris (2022) as his late work just because this was the last publication in his lifetime, though he has been working on it since the 1980s (Gonzales)? Finally, the concept of late style invites thinking in terms of ruptures that parallel the larger compartmentalizations of periodicity1 in literary studies, and while such thinking, in both cases, may have its uses as a method of understanding and constructing patterns, we must also acknowledge its limits. As Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles write in the introduction to their commendable volume Late Style and Its Discontents, the idea of late style is very much “a critical and ideological construct, the product of a certain kind of critical wish fulfilment” (1), and they rightly “recommend a certain wariness about ‘late style’ as a category” (2).
- 2 See Brian McHale’s “Pynchon’s Postmodernism” for a great critical take on these processes of defini (...)
- 3 I discuss these positions and critical tendencies at length in “Pynchon and Post-postmodernism,” so (...)
2Such wariness, paired with Linda and Michael Hutcheon’s argument that the concept is only helpful if it avoids generalization and accepts a plurality of late styles, is especially appropriate when taking this tool to Pynchon and postmodernism. Both his oeuvre and its most prominent categorization in turn provide evidence of this need to be skeptical, critical, and cautious about the idea of late style, as there is an all-too obvious hypothesis with regard to both. Pynchon’s work was famously instrumental in constructing literary postmodernism, starting already with his first novel V. (1963) and intensifying with The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), but then reaching full force with Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), a novel that came to define postmodernism as much as James Joyce’s Ulysses came to define modernism.2 The effect of this definition was (and still is, to a certain waning extent) so strong that Pynchon’s entire œuvre to date—nine novels published across more than six decades—has been routinely read as postmodernist by default because it was written by the postmodernist author. Scholars have challenged this default position at least since the 1990s, though Mason & Dixon (1997) was easily classified as historiographic metafiction, perhaps the postmodernist genre that outlived postmodernism most gracefully. The argument of Pynchon no longer being a postmodernist arose more prominently after the publication of Against the Day (2006), and by now the critical discourse on Pynchon has moved beyond that classification, for very good reasons.3 It is worth noting that this move did not entail a shift from one classification to the next, and especially not into “post-postmodernism”—a term so firmly in academic bullshit territory that Pynchon himself used it for comic effect in Bleeding Edge in 2013 when a filmmaker’s erratic zooming mostly out of boredom is interpreted by an NYU film professor to be “far ahead of the leading edge of this post-postmodern art form […], ‘with your neo-Brechtian subversion of the diegesis’” (9). While critics now routinely discuss Pynchon as no-longer-postmodernist (or, more significantly, don’t even bother to discuss him in such negative terms), they are quite comfortable not saying what his works are instead, which is exemplary of how literary studies work differently now than they did when Pynchon’s works were first received by critics.
- 4 Ickstadt mentions that Hanjo Berressem in 1993 considered Vineland the beginning of Pynchon’s late (...)
3At the same time, Heinz Ickstadt, the critic who most recently mused about what might constitute Pynchon’s late style,4 does so explicitly in reference to “three postmodernist masters” (DeLillo and Coover being the other two) and argues that “they represent different versions of what one might consider postmodernist ‘late style,’” identifying sufficient “continuity of theme and structure” (19) to retain the classification. Ickstadt argues rather cautiously that Against the Day (2006) “might be considered a watershed” (20) in Pynchon’s œuvre. Yet his more convincing argument is that, while in his earlier novels “narration is […] anchored in an obsessive search for deeper meanings” (22), his novels from Vineland (1990) onward, “although confronting the reader with enigmas and ambivalences in abundance, do not draw her into the enigma-solving process” (22). This sounds contentious at first, as most Pynchon readers will still feel like they are very much in such a process, but Ickstadt elaborates that this now occurs mainly in stylistic terms, being “mostly due to the dense linguistic texture Pynchon creates by drawing on the language of science and mathematics (in Against the Day), on that of Pop or media culture (in Inherent Vice), or on the new lingo of the digital and cyberspace (in Bleeding Edge)” (23). Ultimately, Ickstadt rightly keeps balancing his own argument by pointing out continuities that suggest that Pynchon’s works also resist the chronological segmentation he undertakes.
4My point here is that a consideration of Pynchon’s late style actually exceeds that framework entirely, as both valid positions outlined above suggest. Instead of thinking postmodernist late style through Pynchon, it is more productive to think of Pynchon’s late style outside of that box to realize that such a consideration can operate either firmly within the parameters of postmodernism or just as well entirely beyond them. This means that, in whatever direction you are coming off that fence, the fence itself is not what is at stake here: regardless of one’s perspective on the matter, it seems clear that Pynchon’s postmodernism is not the decisive factor in setting apart his late style from whatever preceded it. There is no shift in Pynchon that would parallel the one that critics have constructed in Joyce, who moved from the modernist Ulysses to the postmodernist Finnegans Wake (with some bad poetry in between), even though Pynchon arguably has a comparable categorical power in literary discourse. At the same time, his style naturally did change, as is to be expected in a career that spans well over six decades. This leads me, then, to argue that Pynchon’s late style is not postmodernist late style, as that classification is mainly based on the “postmodernist by default” position. Instead, his late style shows how much his œuvre generally resists such classifications.
5Perhaps ironically, I cannot entirely describe Pynchon’s novels outside of these categories, if only to reject them as fervently as I just did. In that spirit, then, I will argue that Pynchon’s late style is marked by a consistent shift into the genre of detective fiction with Inherent Vice (2009), Bleeding Edge (2013), and Shadow Ticket (2025), while still making it distinctly Pynchonian—not least because, as A. O. Scott points out, “a Pynchon novel is a genre unto itself.” Eric Sandberg, in the most extensive essay on this categorization, argues that Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge exhibit Pynchon’s “simultaneous exploitation and subversion of hardboiled convention” (135), as does Shadow Ticket. This dialectic keeps the novels from being strictly hard-boiled themselves. But then again, with Doc Sportello basically murdering Puck Beaverton; Maxine Tarnow being someone who once “[w]ent down to Grand Cayman disguised as a reggae backup singer, firebombed ten and a half billion in physical Swiss francs, and exfiltrated in the perps’ own Gulfstream jet” (Pynchon, 2013 252); and Hicks McTaggart having “picked up a certain notoriety as a corporate thug” (Pynchon, 2025 30) who only doesn’t kill a striker because the weapon in his hand mysteriously vanishes, these novels aren’t quite as “soft-boiled” as the title of Louis Menand’s review of Inherent Vice suggests. Medium-boiled, then.
6If I am being flippant here, it is also because I really want to consider Pynchon’s late style in a playful way (and thus explicitly not in the Saidian vein). The concept offers no more than the occasion to describe certain patterns in Pynchon’s works that happen to connect the last three novels he has published so far, but none of this merits the semantics of watersheds and ruptures. I do argue that Pynchon’s crime trilogy, if you will, is the best candidate for identifying any “late style” that is more consistently different from what preceded it than anything else in Pynchon’s œuvre, but I want to emphasize the quotation marks around that term to signal the aforementioned wariness. I have two specific reasons to believe that Pynchon’s “late style” can only be addressed playfully: first, Heinz Ickstadt already thoroughly weighed the issue and found the evidence inconclusive; second, I am still not even sure if The Crying of Lot 49 is really all that different from the crime trilogy. But more generally, Pynchon aside, playfulness seems to me the best way to avoid the generalizations Linda and Michael Hutcheon identify in their rejection of Said, and to explore the potential of the concept without really committing to it.
- 5 Salman Rushdie also favorably called Vineland “light” in a review contrasting it to Gravity’s Rainb (...)
7My argument about the crime trilogy being sufficiently different from Pynchon’s other novels to merit their grouping together is not even all that new, only it has been made in the ambiguous terms of “Pynchon lite.” Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor discuss the phrase and its implications in the conclusion to their 2013 study Thomas Pynchon, published just before Bleeding Edge. They state that this label “identifies the widespread sense among commentators that Inherent Vice is a more accessible and less complex novel than its predecessors, and that, although it contains many recognizably Pynchonesque elements, it marks a retreat from the sheer ambition, difficulty and range of his earlier work” (212). Their assessment accurately captures the ambivalence of the underlying aesthetic judgment, as critics used it to both dismiss and welcome this change. While the phrase does not seem to have one particular origin (at least to my knowledge), it has now spread among reviewers, critics, and amateur readers online and offline beyond its first references to Inherent Vice and the later ones to Bleeding Edge as well. One strong beginning is surely Michiko Kakutani’s review of Inherent Vice in The New York Times, in which she states: “Compared with Gravity’s Rainbow or V. or Mason & Dixon, this novel is Pynchon Lite,” later adding that “it feels more like a Classic Comics version of a Pynchon novel than like the thing itself” (Kakutani 2009). Her review of Bleeding Edge strangely both echoes and somewhat contradicts this statement: “And yet, for a novel concerned with September 11, Bleeding Edge is weirdly Pynchon Lite, not as breezy as his 2009 novel, Inherent Vice, perhaps, but an uncomfortable hodgepodge of genres […]” (Kakutani 2013). Other reviewers used the phrase less dismissively, such as Theo Tait in The Guardian, who wrote that “[a]t first glance, Bleeding Edge seems like Pynchon lite,” still evoking a negative connotation of lightness to show how the novel actually exceeds it. The German critic Wolfgang Schneider exemplifies how the phrase was deployed semi-ironically and more positively, as he compared the novel to Against the Day’s one thousand and six hundred pages (in the German translation) and wrote that “only” four hundred seventy pages and “hardly a hundred characters” are “accessible Pynchon, Pynchon light!” (my translation). The tone suggests that accessible Pynchon is still relatively inaccessible, and that such comparative lightness may not be everyone’s cup of tea.5
- 6 Think of how Gravity’s Rainbow is used as a marker of intellectual distinction and arrogance in the (...)
8The phrase “Pynchon Lite/Light,” bouncing around the walls of the international old-and-new-media echo chambers, certainly caught on. Yet it notably never seems to be used to describe Pynchon’s shortest novel with the fewest characters and least intricate plot (yes, I said that), The Crying of Lot 49, so it has become a temporal designation as well to describe much of Pynchon’s work in the twenty-first century. In its negative usage, it smacks of both high-literature and pop-cultural gatekeeping, of the undying modernist celebration of difficulty as a criterion for good art, and of the elitism that mistakes accessibility for consumability; in its positive usage, it signals that such accessibility is actually quite a welcome antidote to Pynchon’s reputation as a challenging writer, to say the least.6 When, for example, Dan Geddes calls Inherent Vice not just “Pynchon-light” but “perhaps Pynchon’s most mainstream novel” in a review titled “Pynchon for the Masses,” he does mean it as a compliment; it says more about the reader’s modernist attitudes to art if they automatically consider “mainstream” and “for the masses” to be negative labels.
9Given this aesthetic and chronological correlation, then, Pynchon’s late style is Pynchon’s light style. All other impactful categorizations of Pynchon’s works operate in terms of content and setting, most notably the “California novels” (Scott McClintock and John Miller) or “California trilogy” (Ali Dehdarirad) and the “global trilogy” (Tore Rye Andersen), but “Pynchon light” truly is about style, and regardless of the value judgments behind that phrase, it is more immediately relevant to a consideration of form than the other classifications. Furthermore, this is the most persistent change in Pynchon’s œuvre, as it produced three novels that are more stylistically similar to each other than even any two before (although Shadow Ticket does seem like an outtake from Against the Day at some point when it shifts gears away from medium-boiled mode). In this regard, I would take issue with Ickstadt’s claim about the “dense linguistic texture Pynchon creates by drawing on the language of science and mathematics (in Against the Day), on that of Pop or media culture (in Inherent Vice), or on the new lingo of the digital and cyberspace (in Bleeding Edge)” (23), as I do not consider these three operating in similar ways.
- 7 Nina Engelhardt convincingly connects Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow as what she calls “math (...)
10Against the Day deploys scientific language in ways that have been quite conventionally Pynchonian ever since his short story “Entropy” (1960), most prominently by literalizing its metaphors and turning its literal meanings into metaphors, transferring them to non-scientific contexts on the level of content and having them playfully inform the structure without becoming full-blown “structural principles.”7 This is different from mere “lingo,” though: Pynchon’s novels are not difficult to read because they contain references to, or the vocabulary of, pop culture or digital culture. They are difficult to read because they often (seem to) require a conceptual understanding in order to make sense of the text, not just to gain an abstract understanding of its content but really in the cognitive process of reading alphabetical signs. This difference can be framed in terms of Googleability: unknown vocabulary and many references can easily be looked up online and will only briefly impede the reading process, as they follow the cognitive logic of the dictionary. We speak of an “encyclopedic range of references” (Malpas and Taylor 225) because these references can be handled with an encyclopedia in the genre of “annotations.” As an academic practice, this used to be good for some honorable Ph.D. work but is now best crowdsourced online; Steven Weisenburger’s renowned Companion to Gravity’s Rainbow (1988-2006) and the online Pynchon Wiki (pynchonwiki.com) are both fantastic resources in their own right that do this encyclopedic, annotative work (and the fact that more of it is done on “Inherent Vice Diagrammed” [inherent-vice.com] shows that even Pynchon Lite can do with some external help).
11For example, Pynchon’s anachronistic Latinate jokes in Mason & Dixon work that way; once you realize that Dixon “coprophagously a-grin” (427) is him wearing a shit-eating one, you will probably never need to look up that word again. However, the conceptual work not just of scientific language but of science requires a different kind of cognitive effort that requires not a dictionary or encyclopedia but a textbook: looking up entropy, integration, or the problem of determining longitude at sea will not provide a concise match but rather expansive, branching, and non-trivial explanations that demand more attention, time, and thought. Pynchon novels have always been referential rabbit holes that could send readers off to learn about, say, Pavlovian behaviorism in order to make sense of some parts of Gravity’s Rainbow, and parts of that novel are literally rocket science. To make things worse, sometimes the rabbit hole has a red herring in it, and the narrator makes fun of the readerly impulse to create patterns and make meanings: “Ha, ha! Caught you with your hand in your pants! Go on, show us all what you were doing or leave the area, we don’t need your kind around” (Pynchon, 1973 695). At other times, the rabbit hole is far, far deeper than it first seemed, for example in the case of the light-bulb cartel Phoebus, which may seem like one of Pynchon’s most fantastic inventions but is, as Markus Krajewski has shown in a number of publications, quite historically real (except for some details such as secret headquarters underneath the Alps, as far as we know). Part of the fun in reading Pynchon has always been trying to tell one from the other and indulging in the paranoia of determining meaningfulness in the first place, and his novels have tended to foster such pattern-making in order to “not only reflect contemporary reading practices, but also lure their readers into imitating the very practices that the novels describe” (Meinel 452).
12This practice is neither limited to Gravity’s Rainbow nor did it end with that novel, though: Both Mason & Dixon and Against the Day explore how our ways of representing and making sense of the world are ways of making sense in the world, whether through astronomy or mathematics, and both contrast dominant ways with minor, marginalized, and alternative ones. They leave no doubt that, at times quite literally, the map is not the territory, whether we draw it in language or on paper or in pure concept. The crime fiction Pynchon published after that, however, shifted its focus to a different kind of readerly engagement, which also explains the different assessment of accessibility—something I want to playfully call a difference in what-the-fuckness, or WTFness. By this I mean the reasons why readers are confronted with something in the text that is so puzzling that they do not even know how to formulate a question about it, a state of mind best captured in that acronym. Unsurprisingly, Pynchon’s novels are full of characters that have such moments themselves, including a narrator here and there as well; Forrest Wickman has compiled a useful overview of plentiful examples to make the compelling argument that Pynchon is indeed “our premier poet of WTFs.” In parallel to realist writers creating Barthesian “reality effects,” Pynchon creates WTF effects, but his ways of doing so have changed over time. This arguably results in a marked difference between the crime trilogy and earlier novels, and it also corresponds to a shift in accessibility and difficulty that underlies the conceptions of Pynchon lite.
13Malpas and Taylor provide an important insight into this shift in their argument that Pynchon’s early work “challenges critical interpretation by continually shifting narrative register between reality and fantasy, rational cognition, dream, delusion, madness and deliberate disinformation” (216), and so do Vineland, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day as they mess up their ontology through the Thanatoids, Eliza Fields, and the Chums of Chance, respectively. Malpas and Taylor convincingly identify Inherent Vice as really the first Pynchon novel in which the “attitude of the narration and the relation between textual world and reader is clear […]” in order to maintain a consistent boundary between drug-induced, dreamy, or otherwise hallucinatory fantasy and “sober reality” (217). In other words, while earlier novels were such that, as the narrator of Gravity’s Rainbow has it, “it is difficult to perceive just what the fuck is happening here” (504), Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, and Shadow Ticket do not make such perception difficult in quite the same way. For example, chapter 3 of V.—“In which Stencil, a quick-change artist, does eight impersonations”—is such that readers may not even identify one of these impersonations despite this titular framing, and it most likely takes a deliberate re-reading to perceive what is happening. In Inherent Vice, however, readers occasionally perceive more than the focalizer-protagonist, though not because of any narratorial framing but because of its absence. For example, Doc Sportello was asked by Hope Harlingen to find out whether her husband Coy is still alive, but when he talks to Coy not soon after, he seems to have no memory of said conversation and tells Coy he will check in on his family, which he had already done in talking to Hope in the first place (Inherent Vice 87). This is Doc Sportello’s doper’s memory, of course, and the conversation never gives us reason to question whether he talked to Hope in the first place (as earlier Pynchon novels might have).
- 8 This classification must instantly be qualified by expanding Tony Tanner’s verdict that Gravity’s R (...)
14Such ontological and textual twists and turns would have been instrumental to the creation of WTF effects, probably with the infamous Kenosha Kid sequence in Gravity’s Rainbow as its pinnacle, but they no longer substantially inform the style and narrative mode of the crime trilogy. There is considerable uncertainty as to the exact nature of the software called “DeepArcher” in Bleeding Edge, and it seems to range somewhere between Second Life to Grand Theft Auto, but the demands it makes on the reader’s imagination are firmly compartmentalized within the reality of the narrative, perhaps in keeping with the genre conventions regarding cyberspace in William Gibson’s Neuromancer. However, this does not mean that Pynchon’s crime trilogy lacks in WTFness, only that its effects are now produced differently and, while still Pynchonian in their playful allusiveness and sheer expansiveness, more conventionally. These conventions are not those of radical textual play or messy ontologies but those of genre—of crime fiction. While Pynchon writes, without fail, historical novels;8 while crime, enigma, and conspiracy certainly play a role in all of them as well; and while he routinely used crime fiction in his blend of generic pastiche, only Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge and Shadow Ticket so consistently deploy the generic mode that they merit that broad label. One might say, perhaps a bit too simplistically and ungenerously, that while earlier Pynchon novels drew on crime fiction, this crime fiction now draws on Pynchon novels. This should not be taken as a version of Kakutani’s verdict that Inherent Vice “feels more like a Classic Comics version of a Pynchon novel than like the thing itself,” as this sets up a dichotomy of fake and authentic Pynchon’s novels have always sought to dismantle, and it also ignores how much earlier Pynchon novels were like Classic Comics. Instead, I mean to emphasize that there have always been strong affinities between Pynchon’s novels and the mode of crime fiction—a point that many critics have reiterated time and again, as summarized best by Sandberg in his own contribution to that argument. Therefore, embracing this genre as a framework for more pastiche and play is neither inauthentic (whatever that even means) nor a major rupture in Pynchon’s writing, but it is a step further nonetheless.
- 9 Brian McHale’s essay “Genre as History: Pynchon’s Genre-Poaching” makes an excellent argument about (...)
15It is important to note that this larger generic shift is not parodic or ironic, and it is not even pastiche in the sense of imitation. Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, and Shadow Ticket take their crime fiction framework very seriously even as they play with its conventions and give it the Pynchon treatment of oddball names and acronyms, insanely convoluted plots, unclear focalizations and narrative perspectives, sentences that stretch across a page and test the limits of how many subordinate clauses they should contain, rabbit-hole references, songs, and so on. Furthermore, they maintain it consistently instead of making it part of a larger process of “genre-poaching” to assemble, as in Against the Day, “a massive anthology of popular genres—a virtual library of entertainment fiction” (McHale, 2011 18).9 Sandberg shows convincingly that Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge really operate in that generic mode instead of just tapping into it (and also why The Crying of Lot 49 doesn’t). I understand this overall generic faithfulness in the spirit Pynchon described in his introduction to Slow Learner, where he quotes Spike Jones, Jr. as saying: “‘One of the things that people don’t realize about Dad’s kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful’” (20). That is, you need to know the rules and take them seriously enough if you want to really play, and in literary terms it means that the Pynchonian quirks, replacements, distortions, and amendments must still be in tune with the genre, otherwise they read awful.
16This generic consistence is what sets apart the crime trilogy from the generically much messier works of the earlier Pynchon, and it is a strong factor in making these later novels more accessible through their conventionality—though less gatekeeping still means that anything can happen once you are inside. On the one hand, this reduces the fundamental WTFness of Pynchonian genre-blending by anchoring it; on the other hand, it finds in this anchoring the fertile ground for a different kind of WTFness, as the genre of crime fiction is naturally prone to mystery, enigma, red herrings, and a general lack of information that resonate well with Pynchon’s stylistic blend of semantic oversaturation and narrative suggestiveness. Compared to the previous novels, Inherent Vice has arguably the most reduced narratorial presence. In stark contrast, the best literalization of the narrative voice in Gravity’s Rainbow, if one wants to reduce it down to a single one, is that of a manic stand-up comedian with both a short attention span and a nerdy obsession with anything and everything, recurrently taking what Shadow Ticket calls “another jingle-bells excursion out onto the ski-slopes of commentary” (160). Furthermore, Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, and Shadow Ticket all heavily (but not exclusively) use their main protagonists as narrative focalizers, so that there is even less narratorial framing that would provide readers with a detached perspective on the “reality” of the world that is narrated to them. The very first paragraph of Bleeding Edge insists on this when the narrative voice comments on Maxine Tarnow taking her sons to school: “Yes maybe they’re past the age where they need an escort, maybe Maxine doesn’t want to let go just yet, it’s only a couple blocks, it’s on her way to work, she enjoys it, so?” (1) and Doc in Inherent Vice even talks to himself as a focalizer at some point:
Was it possible, that at every gathering—concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, wherever—those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?
“Gee,” he said to himself out loud, “I dunno...” (130)
17This peculiar focalization is a major source of the WTFness of the crime trilogy: it does not question the ontological reliability of the storyworlds themselves but rather creates an epistemological unreliability through a curious blend of detached and involved perspective that reflects its own limitations without ever turning into the tiresome and elusive narratological trope of “unreliable narration.” Furthermore, the reduced narratorial presence also means an expansion of dialogue to an extent that is also uncommon in earlier Pynchon: Bleeding Edge has conversations stretching across multiple pages (for example in parts of chapter 2) with minimal comment as to how these words are said and what might happen as they are said, at times just alternating voices so much that readers might be excused for losing track of who is speaking what (especially when, as in chapter 11 of Inherent Vice, a car full of people of various levels of sanity and/or intoxication are having a conversation). This is Pynchon in Hemingway mode, leaving readers to fill in gaps like a director whose script only has dialogue but no stage directions.
18Having said that, it is worth acknowledging that Shadow Ticket only exhibits such stylistic similarities to Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge up to a point. It also has long stretches of uninterrupted dialogue (for example in chapter 11, 71-75) as well as entirely unattributed speech (232), and it also strongly relies on its protagonist Hicks McTaggart as a focalizer. Yet it also detaches from Hicks McTaggart entirely for even longer stretches to focus on a different cast of characters without him being present or even in the proximity. Furthermore, the narrator does shift back to a more conventionally Pynchonian mode especially in chapter 29, in which dialogue is scant, but which is rife with rabbit-hole references to geopolitics, spaces of exemption, motorcycles, anarchism, the “mobility” (Pynchon’s term for the masses), ghosts, magic, economics, and so on. In fact, the novel shifts focus away from McTaggart so much that readers of Gravity’s Rainbow might wonder if this is another Slothrop situation (who “scattered” and vanished not even that closely toward the end). It also shifts away from the medium-boiled mode here, but notably toward the spy thriller and its related conventions, and with this also toward other familiar Pynchon territories, but never so fully that the novel couldn’t make its way back to McTaggart and conclude in a genre-appropriate but very, very open way. All in all, Shadow Ticket pushes against the generic limitations established by Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge instead of merely conforming to them, as if to play even more with their playfulness, but it still observes their rules enough to merit the classification of all three as the crime trilogy.
19All three novels, despite their differences, resonate well with the conventions of a genre built on epistemological uncertainty, mystery, and suspense, and at the same time they are deeply rooted in the Pynchonian fiction that operated outside of crime fiction or merely tapped into it. The three crime novels also approach this in different ways and to different extents. Inherent Vice is the most reduced in this regard, as much of its epistemological demands on the reader are made through the drug-induced cognitive limits of its focalizer protagonist. Maxine in Bleeding Edge is as sober as it gets, though, and so the WTFness is shifted from the focalization more toward lexical and conceptual difficulty again. This does not reach the complexity of the scientific underpinnings of earlier Pynchon novels (or the narrative distractedness they cause), but the novel does set up more rabbit holes again. For example, Inherent Vice mentions marine law but provides readers with sufficient context to understand such references from within, whereas Bleeding Edge really draws on the discourses of finance and coding in a way that invites, if not requires most readers to look elsewhere for further guidance. Shadow Ticket, in turn, eschews such conceptual difficulty as well as drug-induced limitations, instead opting for an increasing complication of characters, settings, and plot points that evokes the expansiveness of The Crying of Lot 49 but pushes it further beyond even the focalizing protagonist. All three novels create their WTFness through a wide and complicated network of characters and plot points that is often merely suggested and hinted at, avoiding resolution or even causality. For example, Inherent Vice resolves the Micky Wolfmann affair that motivates much of Doc’s initial search by simply having Shasta Fay declare it resolved somehow with him being “back home all right” (304); Bleeding Edge lets the disruptive EMP attack of the “Lester Traipse Memorial Pulse” peter out in such a way that it “barely gets onto the local news upstate” (468); and Shadow Ticket ends with a decontextualized letter to the protagonist by a character not many readers at this point even had much of an interest in, let alone would have expected to deliver some kind of resolution or closure—though the author, Skeet Wheeler, may be a relative or even father of Zoyd Wheeler, the protagonist of Vineland, suggesting more continuity between Pynchon’s novels, including the crime trilogy. All in all, then, these three medium-boiled detective novels both conform to its generic conventions and push them into overdrive through aesthetic means that draw on earlier Pynchonian techniques, making this Pynchon’s late style but still very much Pynchon’s style.
20In conclusion, what is the significance of “Pynchon lite”? Instead of considering the shift in Pynchon’s literary production in terms of late (postmodernist) style, I propose we might see it as parallel to a shift in literary standards and the norms of “good reading,” both in the sense of “proper reading material” and “reading well.” Gravity’s Rainbow is so instrumental in theorizing a shift from modernism to postmodernism because it still very much conforms to modernist standards of “literariness”—especially a forbidding inaccessibility that can only be overcome through expert scholarly commentary—while at the same time sufficiently moving beyond these standards. Pynchon’s later fiction, especially Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, and to a lesser degree also Vineland, still exhibits this inaccessibility through sheer volume and density. The crime trilogy, however, with its relatively consistent engagement with genre conventions and its relative reluctance to shift generic modes, reduces the often overwhelming multiplicity of Pynchon’s earlier fiction to a more manageable mode while maintaining its basic WTFness factor as a core aspect of the readerly experience. Seeing this as a dumbing down or a “Classic Comics” version is to stubbornly maintain the high-cultural standards of literariness that Gravity’s Rainbow already both reaffirmed and subverted, and it fails to understand the pleasures and challenges of reading beyond these standards. Similarly, it would be remiss to consider this shift toward relative accessibility in terms of the unfortunate dialectic Jonathan Franzen described between the Contract model and the Status model of literature in 2002, famously identifying William Gaddis as “Mr. Difficult” but naming Pynchon along with him somewhat indiscriminately. Instead, late and lite Pynchon suggests how dated even such binary classifications are today, as literary studies is less interested in defining its own object of study, i.e. “literature,” but rather in exploring the multiplicity of contemporary reading practices. Notions of cultural capital certainly still persist, as do categorizations of high, pop, mass culture, and others, but they arguably matter less than they did at the time of categorizations and periodizations. Now, something else matters more, and Pynchon’s crime trilogy conveys this point more generously than his earlier fiction: in our time, when large language models are built on giving us the most likely next word in a sentence, there is nothing like a Pynchon sentence to remind us that the pleasure of human reading and writing is in the unpredictability of the next word, and the next, and then some.
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