Arriving as it does on the heels of Against the Day (2006) - 1,085 pages pastiching half-forgotten pulp genres while inviting the reader to contemplate such topics as pre-Einsteinian theories of light - the new book delivers at least two big surprises. I'd have to agree, but I'd also have to point to his latest novel, Inherent Vice, which shows, if nothing else, that his brow is less rigid than is commonly assumed. You could argue, of course, that Pynchon can deploy as many talking animals and Star Trek jokes as he wishes without putting a dent in his super-highbrow status. Pynchon writes, and has always written, like someone who sees no boundary at all, which makes him much more durably hard to pin down. It's often hard to see what all the fuss was about when considering figures who were once seen as flamboyantly mixing 'high' and 'low' culture, because the boundary between the two isn't fixed. Terrible song lyrics and silly jokes are as central to what he does as arcane bodies of knowledge, and there's little scorn or condescension in his use of less brainy material. And in spite of the forbidding reputation surrounding such novels as Gravity's Rainbow (1973), his books don't present themselves as strictly high-cultural artefacts. Although his books are enshrined on reading lists, his cult has stronger roots among dope-smoking graduate student types than it does in the higher echelons of academic prestige. Thomas Pynchon, by contrast, continues to embrace a version of 60s-ness as it's commonly understood, which has interesting effects on the authority he wields as America's senior postmodernist writer. In universities, where many avant-garde writers make their living, this smartening-up was helped along by the technical language of French theory - itself a 60s enterprise, though few people associate such dapper figures as Roland Barthes with unwashed hippies. A lot of the 60s stuff that's now thought of as 'postmodern' has acquired a rather sleek and technocratic aura, much as the acid-tripping Steve Jobs eventually brought us the iMac.

But later developments play a part as well.

This is partly because different kinds of artist get invested with different kinds of cultural authority. I f, like me, you weren't yet born in the 1960s, it can take a bit of effort to apprehend the 60s-ness in some of the cultural endeavours of that decade.It's strange to think, for example, that Gabriel García Márquez wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude with 'A Hard Day's Night' on his turntable, or that Doris Lessing was once considered as way out as Captain Beefheart.

Inherent vice by thomas pynchon