Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice, will be released on August 4th. A strange thing happens to me before his novels appear. I can’t read.
In contrast to other nights, when I sit down to read for three to five hours before going to sleep, in the weeks before a Pynchon novel comes out I find I can’t read at all. Last night, I went through a few pages of ten books, putting them all down and, finally, turning to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Pepys’ Diary for a while before giving up to fidgeting and wondering about the new Pynchon. A detective novel. All Pynchon novels are a mystery at heart, one that will never provide an answer, just myriad perspectives into the truth.