The man has a reputation in some quarters as an unapproachable writer rarely read outside the academy, but the Pynchon cultists I encounter are more likely to be eccentric autodidacts prone to building elaborately strange mental models of the world. This is the sort of book that casually invokes "a secret Indian reservation, mentioned only once in a rider to a phantom treaty kept in a deep vault under a distant mountain belonging to the U.S. Shadow Ticket is eminently quotable, and I could probably lay down another couple thousand words relaying good lines ("If you happen to be a spy, one big selling point about Vienna is there are no laws against spying, as long as the spying isn't on Austria") or describing amusing scenes (when "the Al Capone of cheese" meets the actual Al Capone, he asks what Capone is the Al Capone of).
Author: Jesse Walker
Published at: 2025-10-04 20:56:07
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