I’ve read most of the books by Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937)—maybe our greatest living novelist—but I am still missing three: his most famous novel (Gravity’s Rainbow), his longest novel (Against the Day, over a thousand pages), and the one that just came out last month (Shadow Ticket). Famously reclusive—he is 88 years old, but the last official photo of him is from when he was a teenager in the Navy in the 1950s—Pynchon channels his wide-ranging knowledge of literature, pop culture, songwriting, physics, and engineering into novels that are lyrical one minute and hilarious the next. What I love about him is that he is equally good at the comedy and the poetry, the entertainment and the philosophy, the lowbrow and the literary, the realistic and the outlandish. I’ve never encountered another writer who spans the space of literature’s possibilities this way.

I went back to Pynchon’s beginnings and read his debut novel, V. (1963), a whirlwind of a work that’s hard to describe to the uninitiated. The synopsis that you get from the back of the book is, I guess, what it’s “about”—a self-proclaimed schlemihl, a quick-change artist, and the latter’s search for a woman known as V.—but it’s too hard to give you an idea of what it’s like to read V. in half a page. Pynchon is squarely in the postmodern era, and his wild style is trying to represent the shell shock, the absurdity of living in the twentieth century. He is not afraid to examine that period’s worst horrors at length, yet he is also a writer who makes me cackle out loud because he’s also a blazingly smart comedian. One sentence that felt especially prescient: “The spring thus wore on, large currents and small eddies alike resulting in headlines. People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history’s rags and straws.” This could easily describe the first half of the last century, or the first half of our own, where we get our algorithmic micro-updates fed directly to our nerve centers, artificial neurons rewiring real neurons and constructing an unstable representation of reality.

And one more sentiment, bringing it back to my role at Rinsed: “Mondaugen set out for his turret and oscillograph, and the comforts of Science, which are glacial and few.”