![]() ![]() Their bylines were side by side: “John is a novelist” “Tom is a writer.” ![]() Two decades later, Batchelor and Pynchon published stories on the same page of the newsletter of New York’s Cathedral School, which both their children attended. In 1976, a writer named John Calvin Batchelor wrote a long essay arguing that Pynchon didn’t exist and J. D. Though likely you have heard the rumors: He was the Unabomber he was CIA he wrote ornery letters to the editor at a small-town newspaper in character as a bag lady. * The more he flees, the more we want-even now that, at 76, he’s just another local writer you wouldn’t recognize on the street. He’s said he wants to “keep scholars busy for several generations,” but Pynchon academics, deprived of any scrap of history, find themselves turned into stalkers. He doesn’t just challenge his fans he pranks them, dares them to find out what he’s really about (or maybe just to stop exalting Important Writers in the first place). But Pynchon, by truly going the countercultural distance-running farther, fighting harder, and writing wilder-has crafted a more slippery persona. Other high-serious contemporaries, like Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, have avoided most publicity out of a conviction that their work should stand apart, and they’ve largely succeeded no one stakes them out with telephoto lenses, and everyone takes their reticence as proof of their stature. Today, he’s a yuppie-self-confessed, if you read his new novel, Bleeding Edge, as a key to the present life of a man whose travels led one critic to reflect: “Salinger hides Pynchon runs.” Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it a postmodernist master who’s called himself a “classicist” a workaholic stoner a polymath who revels in dirty puns a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six. In select company, he’s intensely social and charismatic, and, in spite of those famously shaming Bugs Bunny teeth, he was rarely without a girlfriend for the 30 years he spent wandering and couch-surfing before getting married in 1990. First of all, it’s pronounced “Pynch-ON.” Second, the great and bewildering and, yes, very private novelist is not exactly a recluse. Then: Pynchon, age 16, in his 1953 high-school yearbook, one of the few known photos of the author.
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