Return of the Counterforce

Back in April, a screaming came across the sky, the announcement of a new Thomas Pynchon novel, to be published in October, entitled Shadow Ticket. This marks a literary event, an unforeseen comet spark in the darkness. Pynchon is arguably the greatest living novelist on the strength of Gravity's Rainbow (1973) alone, but the reclusive 88-year-old had not published any new books since 2013's Bleeding Edge, so his fans might've been forgiven for thinking his days of writing new stuff might be over. There had been no word of any upcoming new work, until this big announcement dropped. This signal from the Counterforce emerges at an especially dark time in the world when it seems everything decent is under siege, the war machine rages on, books are being banned, free speech attacked, democracy crumbling, history rewritten, reality itself overstretched and worn out. We needed to hear from Pynchon at this moment. 

His works have always had a prescience to them that has helped to inform the present moment, possibly because his novels often focus on an era in the past thru the lens of Pynchon's deep history, paranoiac descrying, and comic relief. I'm thinking of how Gravity's Rainbow is a novel from the early 1970s but is set in Europe at the end of World War II, following the ridiculous misadventures of a wandering lieutenant and his cohort of castoffs aka "The Counterforce" and their attempts to jam the gears of power and thwart  the military-industrial complex seeking to consolidate power out of the ashes of post-war Europe. I'm thinking also of Bleeding Edge, the 2013 novel that deals with the tech underground, hackers and cyberwars, although it takes place at the end of the 90s dot-com boom in NYC, with its narrative punctuated by the 9/11 attacks. And then there's also Against the Day, which is my favorite Pynchon book, it came out in the mid-2000s, a work of historical fiction focused on years at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, weaving world-building narratives across decades with a global setting featuring elements of espionage, steampunk, sci-fi fantasy, and anarchist westerns, while examining and educating the reader on some of the factors that led to the First World War. (See my longer write-ups about Gravity's Rainbow here, Bleeding Edge here, and Against the Day here.)

We don't know much about the new novel, Shadow Ticket, at this point except for the one paragraph description provided by Pynchon himself. His synopsis places the story in 1932, focusing on a private eye in Wisconsin, Hicks McTaggart, who somehow gets dragged into "bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering" and ends up in Europe getting "entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them." The elements of a private detective, caught up in the crossfire of counterespionage, in the period leading up to a major war, these are all familiar in the Pynchon universe. The internet has been buzzing with Pynchon news ever since, with some readers having received review copies of the upcoming book.

Amplifying the vibes of the Pynchon renaissance, of course, is the new film from director Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another, to appear in theaters next month September 26th, supposedly a loose adaptation of Pynchon's novel Vineland (1990). There were rumors for years that PTA was interested in making a movie of Vineland after the solid work he did adapting Inherent Vice, also a Pynchon novel, back in 2014. Leonardo DiCaprio stars in the new movie, in a lead role seemingly similar to that of Zoyd Wheeler from Vineland. Here's the trailer:

One Battle After Another (2025, trailer)

Vineland (1990) was Pynchon's first book following an extended silent period after Gravity's Rainbow (1973). It had a reputation for being Pynchon lite, a more approachable and even optimistic story than his previous works, although for all its lightness and humor, it's also a novel of political grief, forecasting the escalating authoritarian police state in the United States. Vineland takes place in the year 1984 in a fictional equivalent of Humboldt County, in northern California, during the heightened Reagan-era drug war. The story mainly follows a father's attempts to protect his daughter from the blowback of her parents' revolutionary activities in the 1960s. The new film looks to be a loose adaptation that places the period closer to the present day, ostensibly with the parents' acts of resistance having to do with freeing immigrants locked in ICE prisons. 

I first read Vineland back in 2017 during the first Trump regime in America. A few years later, I read a great book by Peter Coviello called Vineland Reread (2020) which revisited Vineland in light of the presently unfolding descent of the US into a fascist police state. Coviello is an incisive scholar, his book is dense for a slim volume, I learned a lot from it, as he examines the nuances and political depths of Pynchon's most approachable and light-hearted novel as amounting to a story of resistance against authoritarianism and the carceral state. Consider it recommended reading. 

Around the time of his Vineland Reread book, Coviello wrote an article with some of the main points from his book, you can read that piece here, it's called "Vineland and the Coming Police State" where he writes of Pynchon's 1990 novel:

It hasn’t become less sad, and certainly not less funny. But read it today, in the midst of our own fever dream of penal sociality, and you are liable to be taken aback by the clarity of its insistence that a style of carceral fanaticism—a making over of everyday life into the image of perpetual security crisis—is no less a signature of the thing we call neoliberalism than are manic privatization, oligarchic dominion, and the total absorption of public life into market imperatives. Uproarious and joy-propounding as it is, Vineland is a novel of acute political grief—a thing as near to us as it has ever been, and likely to get nearer.

Can't help but be struck by how some of these phrases resonate with today, like "carceral fanaticism" in a time where the regime promotes something they're calling "Alligator Alcatraz"; and "a making over of everyday life into the image of perpetual security crisis" when the senile scoundrel occupying the presidency has manufactured crises in order to send the military to occupy American cities. 

Another book I was reading around that time was Occupy Pynchon: Politics After Gravity's Rainbow (2017) by Sean Carswell. It’s an academic study, this one looking at the novels Pynchon published after Gravity's Rainbow and examining their politics in light of the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring. The novels from Vineland thru Bleeding Edge seem to model a resistance that is non-hierarchical, horizontal, fragmentary, harder to detect and crush. But even beyond any kind of organized community resistance, Pynchon also celebrates the individual's enduring refusal to comply with authoritarian control. Small acts of kindness, simple gestures of affection, or the creation of good art, anything to emphasize our humanity, to preserve culture and oppose the continued authoritarian efforts to rot our brains with stress and frighten us into submission. Just like Peter Coviello's Vineland Reread book mentioned above, Carswell's study adds new depths to Pynchon's lighter, slimmer novels like Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, while highlighting the shift in attitude and vibes after the dark paranoia of Gravity's Rainbow, moving to a brighter, more humane, optimistic sort of pleasurable resistance. 

*   *   *

What is the counterforce? That's never made exactly clear. It's a subtle, unofficial, intangible, loose shifting entity that is named in Gravity's Rainbow, but which is present across all of Pynchon's novels in some way, always with a vague, imperceptible quality to it. A book by J.M. Tyree about the counterforce as it relates to Inherent Vice considers it to be an antidote to all orthodoxies, an outlook that recognizes that despite recent history suggesting "the low likelihood of the present and the future turning out any differently […] we still must care for one another as the tragedy unfolds." To quote from an article written by a biologist in a scientific publication, the counterforce could be seen as more of "an organizing principle" than an entity:

...in the last section of Gravity's Rainbow, there is a “counterforce”, an organizing principle that runs counter to the tendency towards maximum entropy, at least in some instances. His metaphor for the organizing force is the period immediately after the fall of Nazi Germany, when competing interests — national, commercial, and individual — scurried about to carve order out of the rubble. Pynchon ascribes almost mythical character to the counterforce, which he also refers to as the “green uprising” or the “Titans of the Earth.” He suggests that there is a general principle, as fundamental as the second law of thermodynamics, but running in the opposite direction, that allows daisies to grow out of the ashes.   

This fundamental law of the universe, a counter-entropy, allowing daisies to grow out of the ashes, reminds me of a recurring theme in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, captured in a quote Joyce took from historian Edgar Quinet, of abundant flowers growing out of the rubble of clashing civilizations throughout history's cycles of wars. All of this stuff also makes me think of the work done by artists, scholars, authors, monks throughout history trying to preserve and encapsulate the treasures of culture, buried underground or otherwise fortified to endure through the chaos and destruction of the siege, to plant seeds for the future. 

Another version of a fundamental law of the universe captured in a quote is used by Pynchon in Vineland where a character has memorized a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson having discovered it "in a jailhouse copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James," which goes:

Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil. 

[- Ralph Waldo Emerson] (from Vineland, Pynchon, p. 369)

I'm glad to see in the summer of 2025, Thomas Pynchon is now having a moment. It means great literature is having a moment. A new book from such a legendary writer is some of the best news of this year. I've been seeing copies of Vineland stacked forefront in bookstores across the country in the past year. A new movie inspired by Vineland is about to drop, with Benicio del Toro and DiCaprio. And then we get Shadow Ticket. Something like the counterforce is returning.

A few other things to check out: the Biblioklept blog gave annotations to The Guardian's recent ranking of Pynchon's novels. LitHub also wrote about why Vineland is the novel we need right now. And some reading groups dedicated to Vineland started up, including this one at the RAWillumination.net blog. 

Book Review: Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day is Lit!

Last summer, topping off a binge of reading Thomas Pynchon books, I set forth on the long, arduous, and vastly entertaining excursion of reading his 1,085-page epic, Against the Day. Almost a year later, I'm still preoccupied with this multifaceted meganovel. Before putting the cinematic cinderblock of letters back on the shelf for a while I've got some thoughts I'd like to share on it here.

Mainly, I must declare that Against the Day is Lit!!! As in, Against the Day is Literature in extremis! Literary, narrative worlds taken to extreme levels of world building, as Bruce Allen of Kirkus Reviews captured it, "Pynchon is both wordsmith and world-smith." The book is all about journeys traversed around the world, and it is told in a bountifully rich style of extremely erudite yet comedically committed prose that serves to weave a vast interconnecting network of literally hundreds of characters across the span of a few decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century.

It's also Lit as in Bonkers as in yo this book is lit af. (Millenial slang for "yo it's wild as fuck!") In Against the Day, Pynchon takes risks, letting the imagination expand in full flourish of zany, unpredictable explosive interactions and storylines, straining the limits of credulity as he works within the genre of what Wikipedia calls historiographic metafiction or metahistorical romance. The powerful electrical experiments of Dr. Nikola Tesla himself make up part of the story, mixed with the ominous tensions of turn-of-the-century political revolutions and the buildup to World War I, witnessed by a team of globe-trotting, time-traveling aviator adventurers (the Chums of Chance), with the overall storyline centered around a decades long struggle between the family of a murdered anarchist bomber (Webb Traverse) against a merciless robber baron/cartel boss (Scarsdale Vibe). It is the grandest manifestation of Pynchon's consistent theme of the struggle throughout history between what he labels the elect vs the preterite or the rich and powerful vs the common man. Serious, important historical stuff. But as Steven Moore noted in his review, the book's Marxist melodrama is laced with the comedic strain of Groucho Marx. Since this is Pynchon in full force, the novel is completely bonkers, often hilarious or silly, and sometimes ridiculous in its sexual excesses.

For example, flipping open the book at random, on page 384 we encounter a freedom fighter in the Mexican Civil War named El Ñato described as an "energetic presence" dressed in an "officer's jacket from the defunct army of some country not too nearby" with a ridiculously oversized parrot perched on his shoulder, "so out of scale in fact that to converse with its owner it had to lean down to scream into his ear." Then we meet the parrot:

"And this is Joaquin," El Ñato smiling up at the bird. "Tell them something about yourself, m'hijo."
"I like to fuck the gringo pussy," confided the parrot.

Later on when one of the main characters is about to strangle the insolent parrot, Pynchon describes El Ñato "sensing psitticide in the air." Parrots being of the Latin order Psittaciformes, Pynchon invents a clever word for parrot murder.

And finally, the novel is also Lit in the sense of Illumination. One of the main preoccupations of Against the Day is Light. The novel is full of newly lit cities, luminous prose, an ever expanding glow of creativity and proliferant storylines intent on covering everything under the sun. The force of the Tunguska event plops upon the text with "A heavenwide blast of light" (p. 779) that leaves the sky over the European continent alight for weeks. The light-refracting crystal Iceland Spar is a recurrent element in Against the Day. We experience frequent digressions into philosophical, scientific or occult contemplations of Light itself, as in the scene where the young genius mathematician/engineer Kit Traverse argues with his cynical brother Reef on science vs mysticism, pointing out how wireless waves were complete "bunk" not very long ago, then he reminds us: "Seems every day somebody's discovering another new piece of the spectrum, out there beyond visible light, or a new extension of the mind beyond conscious thought, and maybe someplace far away the two domains are even connected up." (p. 670)

To illustrate the ways in which Against the Day is totally lit, let's further expand on each aspect of its lit-ness:

Book Review: How Thomas Pynchon's Novel Bleeding Edge Hit Close to Home

When the miasmic shitstorm of authoritarianism and real-life Idiocracy gained full force earlier this year, I felt compelled to dive into Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland in search of informed, anti-authoritarian entertainment and guidance. The novel mostly takes place in the year 1984 (a recent edition of Orwell's 1984 has an introduction from Pynchon) depicting Californians fleeing the militarized police state carrying out Reagan's war on drugs, with frequent flashbacks to the impact of COINTELPRO's insidious dismantling of resistance movements in the 60s. It sounds dark and bleak, but Vineland is a hilarious and uplifting adventure.

Nobody does it like Pynchon. His works feel like an essential road map for navigating our contemporary political madness. It seems every damn dumb, absurd or gross thing that unfolds in the Trumpocalyptic age begs the question of whether this is actually Thomas Pynchon's world and we're all just living in it. Even the fucking names! When I saw that the source behind a recent NSA leak was a 20-something blonde girl from Texas named Reality Leigh Winner, I thought: go home Thomas Pynchon, you're drunk!

I've been seeing tweets like this every day:

tony "the mooch" scaramucci cucks reince priebus? the new pynchon sounds 🔥

— nick laureano (@nick_laureano14) July 27, 2017

fitting that all trump associates look like they could be a pynchon character named wolf smilestein or something pic.twitter.com/HCtZRfsjw2

— john (@john__wallace) July 15, 2017

After zipping through Vineland, I was craving more Pynchon but had my own anti-authoritarian writing to do, an essay on the treatment of warfare and invasion in Finnegans Wake for the Diasporic Joyce Conference in Toronto (an experience chronicled here). Once that was completed, I took a much-needed break from Joyce to crack open Pynchon's latest novel, Bleeding Edge, and holy shit what a treat it turned out to be.

Bleeding Edge completely stunned me. Not only is it a funny and engrossing web of stories carried by characters engaged in sharp, witty dialogue, but also the setting of turn-of-the-millennium New York City spoke directly to me and my background in a way Pynchon's work never has before. More than anything else, the prime display of the master author's precisely researched rendering of setting just blew me away. Pynchon was born in 1937, a year after my dad. He's a pretty old dude. Yet the cultural milieu he recreates out of the minutia of video games, TV shows, internet culture, rap music, pro sports, etc from that 9/11 time period in Bleeding Edge (published in 2013) suggests an old man who's as with-the-times as anybody alive. He references Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon, for instance, and describes nuances of the Metal Gear Solid video games in such shocking detail that one internet reader suggested the only explanation is he must've had input from his then-teenage son. The book is littered with nuggets of culture like a character holding "a mug that reads I BELIEVE YOU HAVE MY STAPLER." (p. 77)

That mug appears in a scene with weed smoke hovering in a hacker's lair, as our protagonist Maxine Tarnow explores the dimensions of her techy friends' creation called DeepArcher, a sort of cross between virtual reality and online multiplayer games. Maxine (who Pynchon helpfully describes as a Rachel Weisz doppelgänger early in the novel) is a fraud investigator in Manhattan in the years following the dot-com bubble, hot on the trail of a shady Internet security firm called "hashslingerz," itself a sort of pun encompassing Pynchon's penchant for pot references and the term hash used for computer coding. This is a novel full of tech geeks, subversive bloggers, radical filmmakers, hackers, stoners, Mossad agents, Russian mobsters, shadow government assassins, and every other variety of spooks and weirdos. A typically Pynchonian web of colorful characters expanding so far out that I finally had to jot down a who's-who primer in the back of the book.

A book jacket blurb mentioned that, "We are all characters in Pynchon's mad world" and that starts to feel true. He creates such a broad network of characters, male and female, with all range of backgrounds and quirks, that I begin to see myself and my friends appearing in there. That's part of what is so special about Pynchon---his fiction hems fairly close to realism while always keeping things zany, off-beat, and funky with every person, place, and thing having some deliberately weird or funny name (I burst out laughing on a flight when I read of a strip club called "Joie de Beavre") so that you eventually start to view this world a little differently, noticing its inherent weirdness.

*   *   * 

Secret Retributions

Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

(quoted in Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, p. 369, where a character has memorized the passage after discovering it quoted "in a jailhouse copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James." Artwork: Paris Dream by Max Ernst.)

The Allure of Gravity's Rainbow and Its Mysterious Author

Japanese cover for Gravity's Rainbow

[Preface: Last year I developed a fascination with Timothy Leary's deep interest in author Thomas Pynchon & Gravity's Rainbow which led me to reach out to the highly knowledgable OG (Michael from Overweening Generalist) for his input on this topic. A lengthy e-mail discussion ensued and out of that grew a two-part crossover collaboration between "A Building Roam" and "Overweening Generalist". While my piece focuses on the intrigue of Gravity's Rainbow, the mystery of Pynchon, and Leary's role in all of this, the OG further explores Leary's relationship with Pynchon's postmodern epic. So read my piece, go read OG's piece (entitled "Fugitive Thoughts: Timothy Leary's Reading of Gravity's Rainbow") and let us know what you think.]


What could possibly compel someone to read such a beastly and tedious book as Gravity's Rainbow? For me, it was a series of reinforcing recommendations that sparked a compulsive interest.

My initial fascination with the work of heralded author and notorious recluse Thomas Pynchon can be traced back to three events. First, I heard Michael Schur (aka Ken Tremendous), the creator of Parks and Recreation, tout Pynchon's work passionately on a baseball podcast a few years ago. That led me to at least familiarize myself with the author. Then, while discussing books once with my remarkably well-read friend Charlie, he insisted I read Pynchon's work, particularly Gravity's Rainbow, in response to both my love for Joyce and my interest in paranoia. And, most significantly, I was struck when I heard Dr. Timothy Leary rave about Pynchon and express intense adoration for Gravity's Rainbow in multiple lectures and interviews from the Psychedelic Salon podcast archives.

Leary flat out declared Gravity's Rainbow "the best book ever written in the English language" and hailed the genius of Thomas Pynchon on many occasions. While his pal Robert Anton Wilson was known to frequently evangelize about the genius of Joyce, Leary championed Pynchon as a literary god any chance he got. An old 1980s interview clip on YouTube shows Leary calling Pynchon his "hero" and the finest living writer, pleading for the aloof Pynchon to get in touch with him. There are accounts of Leary, stuck in solitary confinement during the mid-1970s, receiving and repeatedly reading the recently published Gravity's Rainbow. He also praises Pynchon in his autobiography Flashbacks, likening him to Joyce and Dante.

How great could this Pynchon guy possibly be to elicit such fervent admiration? Somehow a modern, contemporary writer being so historically special didn't seem possible to me. All the very best writers are dead, aren't they? My inquiries in Google brought back frequent comparisons to Joyce, especially holding up Gravity's Rainbow next to Ulysses and Moby-Dick as the grandest epics of Western literature. My fascination swelled.

*   *   *

Gravity's Rainbow made quite a splash when it landed in 1973. It was the third book to appear from the completely hidden-from-the-public-eye author Pynchon, whose writing had established a lofty reputation from his first novels V. (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). A gigantic, densely elaborate and confounding epic, a huge messy tale revolving around German rocketry and the end of WWII, Gravity's Rainbow would go on to win the National Book Award (Pynchon sent comedian Irwin Corey to accept the award on his behalf) and generate controversy when it was unanimously selected for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction yet ultimately rejected because of a passage involving coprophilia. So turned off by the perversions of Pynchon, the Pulitzer board elected to give the prize for fiction to nobody. The Pulitzer board described the novel as "unreadable", "turgid", "overwritten" and "obscene" and, after reading the book, I can't help but agree wholeheartedly with each of those adjectives, though I certainly did enjoy the experience overall.

Despite some annoying, disturbing, and offputting qualities ("turgid" really sums it up well), it's undoubtedly a brilliant work of literature by one of the finest writers of the last hundred years. The New York Times lavished it with praise upon its release, likening it in scope to Ulysses and Moby-Dick, and Richard Lehmann-Haupt poured it on pretty thick in a humorous review published in the New York Times Book Review:

'The Adventures of Rocketman' 

Gravity's Rainbow is fantastic---fantastically large, complex, funny, perplexing, daring, and weird---weird as an experience you've never really been through before. Fantastic! ...  

So what can I tell you? That Pynchon writes like an angel and clowns like the very devil? ...  

Perhaps I can only say this: if I were banished to the moon tomorrow and could take only five books along, this would be one of them. And I suspect that's a feeling that's going to last.

A Quick Rundown of Books Read in 2014

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Zipped through this hilarious little gem on my flight to Portugal in the spring. This was my second foray into Vonnegut and, while my socks certainly weren't knocked off by this book, I'm starting to love the guy. His style of writing is just so damn clear and concise, the humor always incisive. With a rather mundane story focused in middle America, Vonnegut brings the absurdity of our modern existence to light as only he can. Few books have made me laugh out loud as much as this one. Upon finishing it, I planted my copy in the bookshelf of the Lisbon apartment we stayed at. Hopefully it will bring someone else joy and bewilderment.

Cat’s Cradle by Vonnegut
A friend, whose brother had originally insisted I read Slaughterhouse Five last year, handed me a copy and urged me to read Cat's Cradle, which he feels is Vonnegut's best book. Much like Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut's economy of style and constant wit blew me away but the story didn't capture me until a sudden plot twist toward the end. The last 100 pages or so have many quotable lines, here's one of my favorites: "When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed." There's a strange affect I've noticed when reading Vonnegut that compels you to crave more. I now see why his easily digestible books are so adored. Can't wait to dig into the next one.

Joyce’s Book of the Dark by John Bishop
The premier critical text of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, occupied an inordinate amount of my brain energy for most of the year. While I completed it in January of 2013 (it shows up on my book list for last year), I felt so adamant that a thorough summary review needed to be written that I spent all of 2013 re-reading it, then spent most of 2014 re-re-reading it and writing a review which became one of the longest pieces I've ever written. You can read all about it here.

Baseball Prospectus 2014
The ol' reliable doorstop made some drastic changes with its 2014 edition. After major complaints from readers (myself included) about the 2013 edition with its shortened team essays and run-of-the-mill writing, the BP editors not only brought back the extended-length essays but brought in outside writers to cover each team. They also broke with a long tradition of leaving the essays without a byline, presumably for the appeal of having some well-known baseball writers featured. It made for a great edition of this often terrific annual, but I remain perplexed at the direction it's headed. Bringing in 30 outside writers is a nice gimmick, but I'd like to see the actual cadre of Baseball Prospectus analysts get back to banging out unique, awesome essays on their own like they used to.

Football Outsiders 2014
This book was partly responsible for me winning my second fantasy football championship in a row. I wrote about it a bit more extensively here. It's an encyclopedic annual overflowing with stats and elevated by always impressive analytical essays. The heyday of Baseball Prospectus has passed, the fantastic Pro Basketball Prospectus series got snatched up and turned into online content by ESPN, but the Football Outsiders/Prospectus group maintains its powers. This is a must-read every year for devoted football fans and fantasy football geeks.