Okay, look. This dude I'm facebook friends with is roommates with Jackson Pynchon at Vassar. So, apparently Pynchon sends the manuscripts for what he's working on at the moment to his son, just to make sure that the story makes sense. Plus I guess it's a dad-son bonding thing, or who knows. Anyway, dude messages me on facebook, sez Jackson left the room and the manuscript is there, wanna peek? Okay, so. Pynchon's new novel is entitled "The Japanese Insurance Adjuster". It's set in 2004, and the main character is a middle-aged mild-mannered Japanese Insurance Adjuster (natch) whose problem is that he first achieved sexual climax in the back row of an Osaka cinema in 1971 during a screening of the Gene Wilder psychdelic musical "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory", more specifically during the scene in which Violet Beauregard turns into a giant blueberry. So the plot (if you want to call it that) of the novel hinges on the fact that the Japanese Insurance Adjuster discovers that a remake of the film is coming out, and realizes that his entire erotic imagination is about to be demolished by Tim Burton. So he turns to the Internet----and there's A LOT of this book which is apparently just continuations of the dark ruminations about the surveillance possibilities of the Internet that began with the discussion of ARPAnet in "Inherent Vice"---and specifically turns to social media in the hopes of persuading someone to essentially create the erotic fantasy for him, in which a teenage Caucasian girl morphs into a vast and spherical Vaccinium Caesariense. Now I want you to just hang out on /lit/ for a week or two, and see if anybody posts a thread like that. Because guess what? THAT'S Thomas Pynchon. The problem is that because everyone's anonymous on here, no-one will ever believe you.
Fondly,
James Franco