Pynchon’s Americas

The literary event of 2025 (at least in some circles) is the upcoming release of the most recent, and likely the last, novel by the legendary American novelist Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket. With the publication of this late novel (Pynchon is now 88), it seems an appropriate moment to reconsider Pynchon’s career as a whole––and given the fact that the new novel is reportedly set in Hungary, the 15th HAAS conference is the perfect place to do just that. In my talk, I am going to examine two main facets of Pynchon’s career, dealing with his entire corpus of novels, but paying particular attention to his three most recent novels, Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, and Shadow Ticket, which can be seen as a late crime fiction or hardboiled trilogy. First, I will argue that it is becoming increasingly clear that as a body of work, his novels offer a surprisingly coherent and complete counter-history of the American experiment from its inception (in Mason & Dixon) to the twenty-first century (in Bleeding Edge), a history marked by a profound bifurcation between, if the lack of nuance can be forgiven, good and evil. This is particularly clear in relation to his hardboiled trilogy, and may be one reason why Pynchon’s late fiction has leaned so heavily on the crime genre. Second, it is also becoming clear that Pychon’s America––or better his Americas––do not exist in isolation, but are instead carefully situated within, and entangled with, a broader global history of inequality, oppression, and––crucially––resistance.