Unless my math or some established facts are incorrect, Thomas Pynchon turned 89 today.
As far as I can tell, the first time I posted something Pynchon-related on Pynchon’s birthday (May 8, obv), was a portrait by James Jean, back in 2013. The next year I directly recognized the date of his birth in a round-up post, and the year after that I recognized what has been semi-formalized into “Pynchon in Public Day.” And then pretty much every year since then I’ve done something or other. In 2018, I had the gall to rank Pynchon’s novels, even though I hadn’t managed to finish Bleeding Edge at that point. I made a correction in August last year, ranking all the novels to date, and then felt the need to correct a list published at The Guardian later that month.
In Sept. 2025 Paul Thomas Anderson’s film One Battle After Another hit theaters. Based loosely (but tightly enough that anyone who read the novel would recognize it in the film) on Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, One Battle After Another was a hit — at least critically and culturally (it recouped its expenses and earned more than any other PTA film, but still wasn’t a mega-hit I guess — but it did much better than PTA’s adaptation of Inherent Vice, which I also loved, which had a very limited cultural impact). One Battle After Another won a bunch of meaningless awards. I loved it!
A few weeks later, Pynchon’s novel Shadow Ticket, a late career treat, hit shelves. I loved it too! In the meantime, I noticed that my favorite local bookstore (at both of its locations) was stocked with new Pynchon volumes which seemed to sell extraordinarily well. The Pynchon Reddit, once a somewhat quiet space to share analyses and tidbits, expanded like an unbelted belly filled with belches. It now suffers from fan art and dudes who feel the need to cast film versions of the Pynchon books they’ve read so far, and endless “What should I read next?” posts.
This is all pretty fucking great! I like that Pynchon’s audience has expanded, that his books are selling, and that people are reading them. And so well yeah — do we still need a Pynchon in Public Day?
Sure, why the hell not. It was always about fun, I think.
I didn’t do any kind of Pynchon post on 8 May 2025. My best friend of the past three decades died unexpectedly in his sleep on 5 May 2025 and I was a wreck. At what I suppose was his wake (a slow, rolling, evolving open house thing where old friends stayed at our house and drank and laughed and cried), I gave one of my dearest friends a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow because he said he wanted to read it. (I suggested V. to start but he wanted the big boy.) Another friend pointed out that there were like fifteen copies of Moby-Dick in the house and generously unencumbered me of a surplus Norton Critical Edition. (Mike, Dave, I know you don’t read this blog anymore, but have you cracked into those giants?)
I think if I had written something for Pynchon in Public Day last year, it would have been about the anticipation for Shadow Ticket and One Battle After Another. But I ended up writing about those things anyway, and so did a lot of other people.
If I was going to write a blog for Pynchon in Public Day, which I am not doing now, I might try to situate Shadow Ticket into his oeuvre (easy; it fits chronologically between Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow; it is also B-tier Pynchon. If I had to rank it I’d put it above Vineland and Inherent Vice, at least today. Ask me tomorrow, who knows).
But this isn’t a blog about Pynchon in Public Day.
Biblioklept 