LitHub Review of ST

[rich]

I think he means the feeling of deep dread in the earlier works V 49 GR was
so pervasive, all encompassing and directed whereas post-GR it's mostly
diluted, spread more thinly, across many actors, and still retaining some
bite

rich


On Fri, Dec 12, 2025 at 4:33 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> I differ......what is V but the map of all that is already ruined and ends
> dead ended in Malta?....V is in ruins,
> paranoia is a McMuffin, as it is in The Crying of Lot 49, part of the
> problem of the ruins...
>
> Yes, Shadow Ticket to Hungary where one ends up upon  leaving the vanished
> reality of Milwaukee.
> Milwaukee, the socialist utopia of where America could have gone but for
> corruption coming in on
> the North Shore line....
>
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2025 at 12:57 PM rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I liked this bit:   The early Pynchon sought to map the whole paranoid
>> system; the late Pynchon inhabits its ruins and perhaps what remains—the
>> slapstick, the style, and the pathos—is a “shadow ticket” to a reality
>> that
>> has already vanished.
>>
>>
>> https://lithub.com/studies-in-unmeaning-on-thomas-pynchons-detective-fictions/
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>