Lisa Borst at The Baffler:
In a 1990 review of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, John Leonard described the book as “unbuttoned, as though the author-god had gone to a ballgame.” Vineland is maybe my personal favorite Pynchon, although choosing one feels like trying to pick the best lava lamp in a chandelier store, so volcanically exceptional is he to American letters, which can’t help but look square and patrician by comparison. I love all the unbuttoned Pynchons—the later, “easier” novels, the stuff that didn’t take decades to research or at least doesn’t make a show of it, the loosies. Vineland, Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, even Against the Day (a long book, but a fun and limber one): these are where Pynchon’s essential pleasures, the makeshift utopias and ludicrous jokes (some perilously low-hanging) that make him so miraculous, get the most room to roam.
Shadow Ticket, Pynchon’s tenth book and the third installment in his recent trio of detective novels, pushes the limits of “unbuttoned.” It’s a novel that’s barely wearing a shirt. By which I mean it’s both stylistically stripped-down—sparse on the stuff that literature usually comes dressed in, like description and interiority—and horny, in a polite, pre-Code sort of way.
more here.
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