The Year of Pynchon feat. Devin O’Shea (Premium E290) Sample
Devin O'Shea guides us into the world of acclaimed novelist Thomas Pynchon, whose cryptic, sprawling narratives echo the chaotic info deluge of contemporary digital culture. With Paul Thomas Anderson's newest Pynchon adaptation, One Battle After Another, hitting theaters in September 2025, and Pynchon himself releasing a fresh novel, Shadow Ticket, in October, it’s time to unpack what makes Pynchon uniquely relevant today.
From the hippie noir mystery of Inherent Vice to the critically-panned Vineland, we explore why this reclusive author has captivated (and frequently frustrated) readers for decades. Along the way, we discuss the complex relationship his work has with history, conspiracy, technology, and power.
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QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Premium Episode 290, The Year of Pinchon.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokotansky, Devin Noshay, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
In September 2025, One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is set to hit theaters, and that will be Paul Thomas Anderson's second adaptation of a Pynchon novel.
Did you fellas see PTA's Inherent Vice?
I did.
Unfortunately, I found it a little dislocated, a little floaty, but, you know, I'm also just not super familiar with Pinchon, so it might just be that.
I did not.
Oh.
Fair.
Nowadays, my movies, they've got to have an asteroid either headed for the Earth, some kind of...
Extinction-level event or extraterrestrials or some kind of ghost.
What about those movies that you watch in, like, really short spurts?
The ones, like, in your phone in the restroom?
That's mostly just, like, guys at gun ranges firing, you know, emptying whole magazines.
Right, right.
That's what I meant.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nice.
Travis, have you seen it?
No, I missed that one.
No one's done their homework.
Alright, fine.
I'm going to carry the team on my back then.
No, that's not...
I mean, I've seen it, you know?
That's true.
Okay, okay.
That's fair.
He's stoned.
He's confused.
Something's afoot.
There's some hippie shit going on.
Yeah.
Jake, you would like Vineland because there's a bunch of Ghostbusters references and there are ghosts and there's Godzilla and we'll get to all that.
Okay.
So, that's a pitch.
2014's Inherent Vice starred Joaquin Phoenix as Doc Sporcello, a counterculture detective who senses that the hippie world of Southern California is shifting off its axis, as 1969 gives way to 1970.
What tips Doc off is a missing ex-lover and something about a golden fang and vanishing black communities, and the sudden presence of heroin in the hippie diet where previously there was only peace and pot, as well as a sense that the American social world was composed of flimsy rules.
In Pynchon's spiritually charged sixties, everything dreamed up by post-war stiffs in suits has been put in flux by music and drugs and politics, but is being settled down by systems of control, from the mental institution to the cops.
Josh Brolin does a pretty good job of playing the LAPD detective Bigfoot Bjornsson, who is sort of Doc Sporcello's shadow self on the other side of the law.
I have a feeling I can rewatch the movie after this episode and enjoy it more and see the subtleties.
There's a lot going on in it, and it is really floaty and narratively disjunctive and all of that dumb postmodern shit.
Which makes sense.
It makes sense.
It's like the acid has turned sour.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Doc is a private eye hippie who is, much like a Raymond Chandler detective, on the hunt for a missing woman, which is a recurring theme in almost every Pynchon story, novel, whatever.
Inherent Vice was a pretty loyal adaptation of the 2009 book, but the new DiCaprio movie is only based on Vineland, which was published in 1990 and takes place in the 1984 year of Orwell and Reagan.
Now I know why there's Ghostbusters references.
Exactly.
Yeah, it's in the air.
I see Leo here with a beautiful handlebar mustache.
He's in sort of a robe, but he looks dressed underneath it also, holding a big rifle.
I mean, I'm going to watch it, in fact.
Yeah, the poster kind of looks like The Big Lebowski meets Heat, which I'm very much into.
That's spot on.
Yeah.
Vineland is still the core inspiration, but one battle after another will be moved up to the 1990s, and the trailer shows plenty of gunfire and car chases, which, as we'll talk about, is sort of a theme in the book.
But the really interesting thing about Vineland is that in 1990, when it was published, everyone hated it.
It was hugely disappointing to a whole lot of literature nerds.
David Foster Wallace wrote to Jonathan Franzen complaining that the master had lost his touch.
I get the strong sense he spent 20 years smoking pot and watching TV.
See, man, this is exact, dude, this is why.
By the way, those two names, two of the most annoying people to me.
Like, I truly, I have no love for either, and I know lots of people do, but it couldn't be me.
It's fair.
I'll take pinch on any day.
We're definitely in, like, lit bro hell right now for some people.
But I have to agree that Pinchon is, like, different from all these other guys because he's, like, the progenitor of all of them.
But still interesting, as we'll see.
By the end of this, we'll understand why DFW was saying something so true and yet derogatory.
But on top of a new Pinchon movie, after 12 years of what Pinchon always terms productive silence, since his last novel, the 87-year-old author will publish a new one called Shadow Ticket.
On October 7th, 2025.
See, but going back to this DFW and Jonathan Franzen thing, it's so funny to be like, he's been smoking pot and watching TV for 20 years, which is exactly what America has basically been doing.
Meanwhile, DFW and Jonathan Franzen, they're in their elite circles.
They're reading books still.
They're the ones that unfortunately are out of touch.
Just because DFW is kind of like melted and maybe has trouble finding focus.
I think that's more appropriate for our time than, you know, having remained some sort of, you know, ivory tower book reader.
Yeah, and from what I understand of Wallace, he was definitely smoking pot and watching TV.
That's what Infinite Jest is all about.
So, sort of, I don't know, pot kettle black sort of thing here.
The Trillbillies did a really excellent episode on Pynchon's last novel, Bleeding Edge.
I highly recommend that conversation if you are after some more after this.
It is a little odd that Shadow Ticket is publishing on October 7th, and that has to be a coincidence, right?
It's just a good spot on the fall publishing calendar, correct?
Yeah, I would hope so.
Yeah, I don't know what's happening there.
No comment.
Well, this is the problem with Pinchon.
Coincidences, hidden messages, inside jokes, an unusual amount of clandestine government operations disclosure, it all ends up in his novels.
When we were planning the episode, Travis was pointing out that there might actually not be any better author for our era than Thomas Pinchon because of his absurdist, maximalist style and how it rhymes with, like, the data deluge of the internet that we kind of are...
Absolutely.
Pynchon also has a very long history of writing about rockets and colonial genocide.
Nice.
I don't get the reference, but nice.
I'm kidding.
I'm joking.
The encyclopedic novel is a big genre of fiction that goes back to Homer, if you really want to get technical about it.
But a book called The Anatomy of Melancholy by a hermit scholar named Robert Burton is a more contemporary example, meaning it was published in 1621.
Yeah.
The express purpose of the anatomy was to compile Burton's lifetime of knowledge inside one single book, creating an encyclopedic index of selected quotes and concepts, scientific musings on how the body is composed of migrating humors, all of that 1600s stuff.
But Burton's purpose of the book is to fill it with stuff that will make you, the reader, feel less depressed, which is where you get the anatomy of melancholy title.
And if you look up a picture of Robert Burton, he looks like a guy who's at a gas station at 2 a.m. asking if he can bum a cig off of you, except he's wearing an Oxford ruff, that, like, white thing around the neck.
Yeah, this is a very Jake Rakitansky thing to do.
It is, you know?
You gotta add a scratcher in one of his hands, a lotto scratcher.
Yeah, one that's spent, but, you know, it's got $2 on it.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I'm just going in, I'm flipping, I'm flipping scratchers.
I got $5, that's another scratch.
I win 10. That's two scratchers.
I leave empty-handed.
No scratchers.
Hey, that's an even night, you know?
You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast.
For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA.
Travis, why is that such a good deal?
Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month.
For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes, plus all of our miniseries.
10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie.
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It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting.
Travis, for once, I agree with you.
And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA.
Well, that's not an opinion.
It's a fact.
You're so right, Jake.
We love and appreciate all of our listeners.
Yes, we do.
And Travis is actually crying right now, I think, out of gratitude, maybe?
