California and the end of the American frontier

[Mark Kohut]

First there is Turner's famous frontier thesis, which if I remember right
is alluded to in Against the Day....
that pynchon loved/loves California seems evident by his whole adult
life....part of a book is in an anthology of
California writing/writers.

There's Vineland, of course....

I cannot understand the implicit commentary of Shadow Ticket but I have to
look up Skeet's letter.....but that novel
moving from Chicago--Milwaukee to Hungary seems absolutely misseen,
diminished if it ends about California implicitly.
To me, California would be only another synecdoche about* The Degradation
of the Democratic Dogma,* that essay by
old TRP fave, Henry Adams.....

On Thu, Jan 1, 2026 at 3:23 AM Corbeau Castrum via Pynchon-l <
pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> I recently came across an interesting comment on the Thomas Pynchon
> subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/ThomasPynchon/s/XlKedAUQ0b), which
> interpreted the end of Shadow Ticket (in particular, Skeet's letter to
> Higgs) as an implicit commentary about the position of California as the
> end of the American frontier:
>
> “I keep thinking about how Skeet sees California is the place to "try
> next." The history of the US is one where the first solution to many
> problems has been to simply go west. California (and the West Coast by
> extension) is the place where that stops, and people have to come up with
> other solutions. I believe this explains a lot of California for better of
> for worse: the technological developments, the social movements, many of
> the things explored by Pynchon in other books. Perhaps the final message is
> somewhat optimistic? We're at the end of the experiment, it's all
> California now, we better find a way to make it work.”
>
> Do you folks know of anything in Pynchon's work that understands
> California as a unique place vis-a-vis the geographical end of the American
> colonial project, in which going west is no longer a solution to solving
> its intrinsic social contradictions? And beyond Pynchon in particular, is
> there any social theory, historical work, or other fiction that tries to
> handle California, and its counterculture, in this way?
>
> Thanks much,Cormac Chester
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>