Reasonably good timing: I just finished Brian Eno and Bette A.’s What Art Does, so I didn’t have to set anything aside to start Pynchon’s just-released Shadow Ticket.

Note: Links in this post may be affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission, at no extra charge to you, if you make a purchase through such a link. Learn more here.

Pynchon became my favorite writer in grad school (though I’ve explained why I have become skeptical of that word, “favorite”). Before that, I’d read The Crying of Lot 49, but that was just one excellent book among many that I was reading, thanks to a circle of English major friends.

But in grad school, I signed up for a class on the Contemporary American Novel. The professor, Michael Clark, gave us the syllabus early and recommended we get a head start over the winter break — especially on Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, as it is both long and challenging.

It was good advice. I planned to read it over the course of the two-week-or-so break — 750 pages divided by 50 pages per day — but I couldn’t keep up that pace. It is not a quick read. I was only two-thirds of the way through when the quarter started — and not for lack of trying.

But I was hooked from the first paragraph (“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”), which melts through the surreal into the absurd in just the first few pages, and then stabilizes into an enthralling narrative (only to destabilize in so many different ways).

And now, at 88, Pynchon has released another book. It’s more like the other short-ish books (Vineland, Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge), which are much tighter, perhaps because they lean toward detective fiction, rather than the longer books (Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day), which sprawl toward historical fiction.

So far, I’ve read the first chapter of Shadow Ticket, and I’ve already found myself grinning like a giddy schoolboy.

I don’t know what the critics are saying; I’m trying to avoid spoilers, and I don’t want to be reading in answer to any critics who might not be pleased.

I will say, though: the headlines suggest that the critics are, in fact, pleased.