Review copies of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Shadow Ticket, were scarce and well protected. On the first page of each galley was a letter to the reviewer, marked CONFIDENTIAL right at the top, where some would write, “Hello.” Copies were numbered between 1 and 192 and inscribed with the reviewer’s name. We were reminded that this galley was “not for resale.”
When asked about this marketing strategy, Penguin Press declined to comment.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, David Streitfeld puzzled over a similar situation in 1989: with 100,000 copies of Pynchon’s novel Vineland on the way to bookstores, “no galleys were issued to reviewers or foreign publishers.”
“We’re respecting the author’s choice for us to stay apart from these things,” is how Penguin explained it, in 2006, for Pynchon’s novel Against the Day.
The “author’s choice” in Pynchon’s case is for privacy at all costs. In the 62 years since his debut novel was first published, he has never sat for an author photo or given an interview. “My belief,” he told CNN in 1997, “is that recluse is a code word generated by journalists … meaning, ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters.’”
Shadow Ticket is the third in a cycle of private-eye mysteries that began with the widely adored Inherent Vice, then hit a snag with Pynchon’s less-loved 9/11 novel, Bleeding Edge (2013), but which rebounds in this latest, lightest, most energetic installment.
Pynchon’s hero this time is a 1930s gumshoe, Hicks McTaggart, who falls into a typically convoluted plot. An American cheese heiress is lost in Hungary and needs to be rescued. Thrown overseas into a turbulent pre-war Europe, Hicks crosses paths with British spies, Nazis, bikers, gyroplane pilots, occultists—the gang’s all here.
The first half is great. There’s a hypnotic romance between Hicks and Mafia moll April Randazzo that stacks among the author’s career-best vignettes. Halfway through, Hicks is “shanghaied” to Hungary, and the story dissolves into high jinks.
The cast is huge, the songs are many, the cheese puns “legend-dairy.” It’s trademark Pynchon, in other words, best enjoyed by loyalists, of which a great many have accrued since his first novel, V. (1963), made Thomas Ruggles Pynchon II a best-selling author at 26.
When reporters reached out, Pynchon dodged, telling his first agent, Candida Donadio, that a profile of him or his work would be “riddled with … lies, calumnies and all-around knavish disregard for my privacy,” and his position never changed.
Shadow Ticket’s 2025 release looks a lot like that of Pynchon’s previous books: no book tour, no interview, no photo. Depends what you mean by “advertisement,” but few of those either. No wintry 60 Minutes sit-down, like we got with 87-year-old John le Carré; no lengthy podcast conversation, like we got with 89-year-old Cormac McCarthy.
“A long-standing stratagem with totemic literary figures is to hem in early access to the pages,” says Paul Bogaards, a decades-long veteran of publicity and media relations in publishing. “Pynchon is a literary elder, and of an era that believes more in the work than in being visible to readers.” It isn’t Hollywood, in other words, where titles are marketed in proportion to the distributor’s excitement. “Penguin is doing work that is in keeping with [the author’s] identity, and more importantly, in likely consultation with him.”
“I figure Pynchon can do whatever Pynchon wants,” says novelist Junot Diaz, suspecting, however, that the secrecy might “belong to an age where people cared far more deeply about books (and about Pynchon).”
James Bone, a reporter from the London Sunday Times Magazine, found the author’s address online, in 1997, and waited outside. When Pynchon stepped out, to pick up his son from elementary school, Bone followed, and took a photo.
Pynchon’s shock and anger are visible in the resulting image. He allegedly told Bone to “get your fucking hand away from me” as he hurried off.
Henry Holt, Pynchon’s publisher, wrote a letter to The Times of London expressing “outrage” and threatening to “use every means at our disposal to protect our interest.” They demanded the negatives be handed over for destruction.
Journalist James Traub mocked Holt’s reaction in The New Yorker. “The absolute privacy that Pynchon has maintained,” Traub wrote 27 years ago, “is itself an artifact of the past.”
Readers, on the other hand, seem less interested than journalists in the author’s private life. Tim Ware has been the webmaster of ThomasPynchon.com for decades, writing articles, profiles, digging up artifacts. He concedes that Pynchon enthusiasts are naturally curious about the guy who wrote these books, but he believes the more you dig into the biography, the more it seems like “a big nothing. He just does his thing.” Portrait of the artist as a homebody.
A moderator on the r/ThomasPynchon subreddit who goes by the name Arthur Marx, assumed the role in 2018, just a few months after The National Enquirer published photos of Thomas Pynchon (again with his son) walking around Manhattan. The photos triggered “something of a protective attitude” among readers in the forum, says Marx, a feeling that the author’s “desire for privacy should be respected and upheld.”
But there’s a caveat: citing the recent allegations of statutory rape and complicity in child sexual abuse made against novelists Cormac McCarthy and Alice Munro, respectively, Marx said, “I think most Pynchon fans feel that the less they know about him, the more his work can resonate,” and avoid the potential stains of learning “how flawed (or potentially awful)” the real person might be.
Pynchon allegedly pays for everything with cash, but he’s not off the grid. Twice, he voiced an animated version of himself wearing a paper bag over his head on The Simpsons, because his son was a fan of the show. The novelist Michael Chabon told Vulture in 2016 that he invited Pynchon to lunch in New York, “through many, many intermediaries,” and the alleged recluse said sure. “I don’t know why I thought he would like the steak restaurant,” Chabon said. “It turns out he was not a super-big meat-eating kind of dude.”
Speculation is still alive about who Pynchon really is, but it has mellowed. Ardent Pynchonians seem to have shifted from feeling provoked by his privacy to protective of it. Whoever he might be, as Ware would say, let him do his thing. As the mystique has faded, the books themselves have endured.
Alexander Sorondo is the author of the novel Cubafruit. He writes the newsletter Big Reader Bad Grades on Substack
