Forty Years in America with Thomas Pynchon
This is a translation by the author of an article that originally appeared in the February 2026 issue of Merkur (issue 941)
When I came to the United States in 1986, I was convinced that American English was simply a reduced, attenuated stage of British English, that there was therefore no need to learn it separately, and that American novels, poems, and films would, in principle, be accessible to me with a bit of vocabulary work. The first seminars and lectures in the pastoral calm of the campus did little to shake this conviction. The following summer, which we doctoral students divided in equal parts between the library, Pescadero State Beach, and Antonio’s Nuthouse, I set out to read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, the novel Friedrich Kittler—just back from Stanford himself—had raved about during my farewell visit.
As I read, it dawned on me—something that visits to the movies and conversations with non-academics had already intimated—that “American” may not be a language in its own right, but that what it commands in wit, laconic precision, and poetic impact has to be learned and understood all over again. Pynchon, especially when he pits his heroes against agents of the British Empire, makes this difference between classist grammar and context-soaked pragmatics repeatedly visible. I read Gravity’s Rainbow against the grain: following less the paranoia and the breathtaking inventiveness of the plot than the intonation of the dialogues and the linguistic incarnation of its characters. Conversations often only revealed themselves when I read them aloud and listened for the cadence of what was being said. Then again it sometimes seemed—and the vast secondary literature has long since confirmed this—that Pynchon would take seemingly inexplicable detours for no other purpose than to land a joke, a pun, or one of his absurd songs.
The dynamic that propels his dialogues, but also his descriptions, forward often resembles that of the riff: a basic figure transposed in repetition, variation, and improvisation, a pattern I was beginning to recognize from American stand-up comedy, from rock ’n’ roll, and, of course, from jazz. There is, I suspect, not a single sentence in the entire novel—and probably not in Pynchon’s complete œuvre—that simply follows a propositional logic, that exists only to advance the plot and does not at the same time possess this musical valence. How much I actually grasped of the complicated story on that first reading I can no longer say; what I do remember is the feeling of elation, of liberation, of groundlessness.
When I drove across the United States in 1990 to take up my first job in Chicago, Pynchon had already introduced me to a whole gang of language-, music-, and film-riff artists—Tom Waits, Bill Frisell, John Lurie, David Lynch, Laurie Anderson, Spike Lee—with whom I now began to appropriate the new city. Chance and my meager salary conspired to settle me within walking distance of the intersection of Broadway and Lawrence, where, within a radius of less than a hundred meters, the Aragon Ballroom and the Riviera Theatre offered two of the most ravishing music stages in town, and where the Equator Club hosted Highlife and Juju bands every weekend, My musical and soon social home, however, became the legendary Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, a gorgeous, smoke-filled cave from the Capone era, where a different jazz band played every night until four in the morning (until five on Saturdays), and where, after teaching and furious, despairing writing on my first books and essays, I learned the language of jazz and the language of those who make and listen to it into the small hours of the morning. There I heard it, night after night, this riffing on instruments and in English—a language that wants to be heard, that can be carried along by the voice, often expansively narrative, then again laconic, steering toward some oddity or a joke. Enchantingly beautiful when fueled by just the right amount of alcohol or other substances, pitifully collapsing in on itself once that mysterious threshold was crossed.
In the meantime, Vineland had appeared—smaller in scale, but closer to the real-paranoid events in the United States, where the Iran-Contra affair and the resurgence of the hard right around Ronald Reagan had brought both old and new networks of anti-democratic forces to light. Today, video clips circulate on the internet in which Reagan praises immigration or research universities in order to highlight the distance to our present barbarism; Pynchon even then seemed convinced that for Republicans and their allies in industry and the military, democratic commitments would count for nothing when it came to the crunch. Resistance in the novel was once again bound up with music, now more with rock ’n’ roll, and with marijuana, a drug of passivity that Pynchon would celebrate once more in Inherent Vice.
In 1992, with the election of Bill Clinton, a new era began, in which—despite unmistakable warning signs, the bombing in Oklahoma City in April 1995, the rise of such baleful politicians as Newt Gingrich or culture warriors like Bill Bennett—everything seemed new, everything possible, everything up for experiment.
Chicago was a city both intoxicated and intoxicating. Dave, the owner of the Green Mill, took me and the young trumpeter Brad Goode to the New Apartment Lounge deep in the otherwise inaccessible South Side, where “Vonski” Von Freeman hosted Tuesday-night open-mic sessions for young jazz talent; Nirvana smashed the stage of the Aragon Ballroom to pieces in a legendary concert; David Bowie made infernal noise with his band Tin Machine at the Riviera; at the Bismarck Hotel, a great riffer from the East, the qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, mesmerized his Sufi community; and downtown Daniel Barenboim began his tenure as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with a semi-staged performance of the three Mozart–Da Ponte operas on three consecutive evenings—all this in the first years of my assistant professorship at Northwestern University in elegant Evanston.
The peaceful eight Clinton years culminated in the great book summer of 1997, when Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, and Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon all appeared at once. By then it had become obvious to me that these three simply did not write in the same league, and also that Pynchon (as is perhaps the case with any favorite author) wanted to communicate with me directly through his novels. At the time I was deeply immersed in research for a book on the problem of orientation: cartography and geodesy, astronomy and colonial history, horology and the history of instruments— I had voraciously ingested all of it in the conviction that not in the media, but in instruments and practices lay the key to the problem of modern subjectivity. And so I was Pynchon’s ideal, indeed his only possible reader, because I knew what was at stake in every sailing maneuver, in the transit of Venus, in the monologue of the Harrison clock, in the labors of triangulation, and in the intrigues surrounding the lunar ephemerides. And by now I had been in the United States long enough to pick up effortlessly the innumerable jokes and allusions to American popular culture behind the archaizing language that Pynchon devised so convincingly that contemporary English seemed flat and dull by comparison.
Yet in the novel that is all mere accompaniment to a deeper meditation on the problem of demarcation, on the drawing of boundaries between bipolar opposites which, embodied in the title heroes, were beginning to inscribe themselves into this countrz as a play of manic domination and depressive guilt. At first it seems, in the constant banter between the two surveyors, as if this boundary must be either straight (by virtue of Mason’s astronomy) or broad (as the work of Dixon’s geodesy), until both realize that every latitude has a breadth, opens a zone in which the multiple forces of expansion and contraction enmesh, in which the original sins of the coming country—the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans—appear in their mutual conditioning. For Pynchon, the price for gridding the land is the loss of Indigenous and African wisdom and spirituality, a loss he will return to again and again in later novels. The entanglement of opposites, symbolized by the ampersand of the title, ultimately dissolves the dichotomy between the main figures and the sciences they defend, and culminates, in the final part of the book, in the wonders and consolations of friendship. And friendship includes the author’s friendship for his protagonists, whom he now accompanies all the way to their deaths.
By then this was my country, the country in which I lived and worked and in which I became absorbed, the country I could no longer, and no longer wished to, leave behind. Even when, in November and December 2000, we had to watch how an election was hijacked first by the Brooks Brothers rioters, then by judicial fiat; when in 2001 we watched live as the second plane crashed into the South Tower; when that ill-starred war began; when in 2004 the Abu Ghraib photographs appeared and nonetheless failed to influence the election—my mantra was that the good things (the musicians, writers, actors, comedians, thinkers, painters, colleagues, students) and the good institutions (universities, museums, architecture, technology, restaurants, national parks) had become indispensable to me here and could not be eclipsed by the bad.
And then, in 2006, Pynchon wrote a new novel for me, Against the Day, which—no clearer hint could be imagined—begins in Chicago, precisely where I trained every day on my bicycle. Once again, our research seemed to move in synchrony: mine on the kinematics of cylindrical form as the secret motor of industrial aesthetics, his on fin-de-siècle mathematics, the beginnings of the labor movement, the Tunguska event… but in the end it was no longer about that. I was holding a thousand pages of Pynchon in my hands, which meant: ahead of me lay at least twenty blissful evenings of reading my Vergil through a country in which, after the midterm elections of 2006, a path from hell into purgatory seemed to be opening.
Against the Day is neither describable nor criticizable, so overabundant, overripe, and exhaustive is the novel; its fantastic stories disintegrate into scenes, into pages, each of which contains sentences one wants to recite and copy out. It is the paradox, perhaps the tragedy, of absolute mastery that, like Beethoven’s late string quartets or the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Birds of Fire, no longer struggles with form. That month gave me the experience that beyond the critical reading to which my profession had condemned me—and which had still guided me in Mason & Dixon—there is also a free, associative, jazz-like mode of reading.
There were hints: from the Thelonious Monk epigraph (“It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light”) to the speculations on anarchy and organization in a “Jass” cellar in New Orleans—Pynchon was once again writing about and in the idiom of jazz, about the tension between riff and improvisation, with no return to a final, summarizing chord. And so I remember above all the reading rather than what I read, in that glorious autumn in which I often ended my evenings with a visit to the Jazz Showcase or the Green Mill, and in which, at first quietly, something unheard-of began to announce itself in this country and in this city.
I followed the election returns on 4 November 2008 at friends’ in Hyde Park; on the way home I asked the cab driver to let me out at Grant Park, where Obama had just delivered his victory speech. This, I had always imagined, is what the hours after the Parousia would feel like. People with faces streaming with tears, predominantly Black and of all ages, falling into one another’s arms and into the arms of anyone who welcomed it. The next day even the weather gods made an exception, bathing the city in summer temperatures and a particularly soft light through which I cycled up and down the lake, thinking. In Against the Day, Pynchon had sung the praises of Colorado to me. A few weeks later I accepted an offer to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
Waiting in my campus mailbox there was Inherent Vice, a stoner book for the stoner paradise in which I now cycled up and down the canyons—one of the most notorious climbs, incidentally, lies along the fortieth parallel that Mason & Dixon had negotiated. Vice is a reprise of Vineland, but sharper in its attack, with more obvious borrowings from Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, from whom Pynchon had taken not only the noir attitude of his protagonist but, as it now became clear, the way he handles dialogue and his impatience in marking narrative space and time. Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation underlines how scenic and coherent Pynchon’s writing is, even though the film requires a narrator. Despite all the repression and violence, the book’s atmosphere was lighter, as if the worst were behind us and we could, in retrospect, work through what had gone wrong in the sixties and seventies—on both sides. The consumption of marijuana as a means of insight and of resistance, however, seemed to me rather implausible.
The jazz scene here is smaller and larger at once: instead of the smoky, disreputable Chicago clubs, there are medium-sized stages on which I have seen Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Kamasi Washington, Ron Carter—and, again and again, Bill Frisell, the Thomas Pynchon of jazz. After a John McLaughlin concert, when we went for a beer in the bar of the Boulderado, the guitarist whom I had seen in 1973 in Düsseldorf with the Mahavishnu Orchestra was sitting two stools away, drinking tea and reading a book. In a plot twist that only Pynchon could have devised, it turned out that Brad Goode, the house trumpeter of the Green Mill, was now my colleague as Professor of Jazz Studies.
Perhaps because of this idyll, I had slept through or suppressed the appearance of Bleeding Edge. And because September 11 had been such a traumatic event and the reaction to it from both the European and the American Left so disappointing, I feared that Pynchon, too, would succumb to the automatism of symmetrical blame, or worse, out himself as a 9/11 truther. But the fear was unfounded; although the novel takes place largely in New York City in the immediate run-up to the attacks, these are largely left offstage. It seemed to me as if Pynchon wanted to drive his paranoid-critical method as close to the present as possible in order to see whether it could still be narrated in this mode without losing momentum, absurdity, or insight. It is also the book in which he finally settles on the form of the detective novel—not to present the detective as a cold logician, but in this case the detective as a caring mother who investigates with the full force of her feelings.
I confess I thought I did not need Bleeding Edge in my garden with its view of the mountains; New York and even Chicago seemed remote. But then came the double blow of an all-too-close acquaintance with local oncologists and the election of Donald Trump. Perhaps the only good thing about that situation was that I could distract myself at any moment from the fear of the one by the fear of the other. In retrospect, Trump’s first presidency looks almost harmless—here and there an attempt at self-enrichment, blackmail, clownery on international stages, but chiefly a frustrated rattling of the cage bars of the Constitution and its guardians in Congress and the judiciary. Added to this was our conviction that all of this had to be some sort of mistake, either actively engineered in Russia or the perhaps forgivable delusion of voters who, unlike us, could not see behind the scenes of this theater. The impeachment proceedings, the investigative committees, the midterm elections, so we thought, would expose the scale of this error to everyone and bracket these four years as an embarrassing interlude in American history.
At the same time, I was suffused with a sense of gratitude toward the doctors and nurses and pharmacists and physical- and psychotherapists who took care of me with unshakable competence, a good measure of humor, and the friendliness that people on the outside are so quick to dismiss as “fake.” It might one day be interesting to compare my experiences step by step with those of a German patient—the much-maligned American health-care system would not come off badly. Briefly and mischievously, one might say that the two systems stand to one another as Mason & Dixon does to Die Vermessung der Welt.
The Biden years, much as we had longed for them, I found disagreeable; for the first time my profession became burdensome—not because of my health, which the doctors had patched together to the point that I could ride my bike again, and not because of the pandemic, which scarcely limited our freedom of movement here, but because of the paralyzing mixture of activism and bureaucracy from which there was now no longer any escape, even in my relatively narrow sphere of work and life. Ever more positions were created to bring the university into alignment with actual or imagined political guidelines; we were subjected to training in which, often in excruciating triads, we had to practice what language we were henceforth allowed to use; searches were only initiated once candidates with the appropriate profile had already been identified; all applicants, even for doctoral positions, were required to submit extensive diversity statements, which in turn drastically altered the applicant pool.
Any joy in shared teaching and research evaporated; every one of my assurances that I had been on the Left when the new hardliners were still in their prams sounded, even to my own ears, silly and helpless. The faculty, instead of uniting against the storm that was visibly approaching, splintered into ever smaller interest groups. At her progressive school my daughter was assigned a book in which a thirteen-year-old Black trans detective tracks monsters disguised as policemen. With friends we tried to figure out how much of our misgivings belonged in the category “older white man mourning his privileges”; but even if we conceded half, we still found ourselves in a cultural revolution from above whose ever-accelerating pace seemed to smother us. October 7, 2023 then stirred a hefty dose of antisemitism into the whole brew.
Trump’s renewed electoral victory has led us into yet another world. The bars of the cage that once-sacrosanct institutions and commitments had built around the office are by now almost all bent or broken; the beast and its brood are trampling through counties and cities in ways that even the hardiest apocalyptic imaginations had not envisioned, this time at the express wish of a substantial portion of the electorate. Despite recent electoral successes there are no nationally prominent politicians able to withstand the torrent of legal violations with any success. It is no political strategy to wait for the entire circus to collapse under the weight of its scandals and its greed, nor to hope that what is being smashed now will somehow, someday be mended again. It has grown dark around us; the light reaches only as far as we ourselves can cast it—onto our bodies in need of care, onto our partners, children, and friends, onto the gardener who no longer dares leave town because of ICE and therefore needs new clients here, onto the graduate student who, despite everything, wants to write a dissertation on Nietzsche, onto the parents’ evenings where we discuss how to protect adolescents from the coarseness that has swept in. It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light.
On the darkest day, the second anniversary of the massacre in the kibbutzim and at the Nova music festival, I held Shadow Ticket, Pynchon’s new novel, in my hands. By page sixteen at the latest I knew that he was writing for me again: there the Green Mill and the Aragon Ballroom appear, in the radiance of the thirties and pinpointed with geographic precision. (The brief episode offers a glimpse into Pynchon’s working method: he knows that the Green Mill at the time belonged to Al Capone or one of his intermediaries, and he mentions tunnels running from the ballroom to the Mill, under Broadway. In reality, these tunnels run from the Green Mill to the Uptown Theatre next door.) The hero is named Hicks McTaggart, like the British Idealist antagonist of William James, about whom I had just finished a short book. The Viennese men’s clothier an perfumer Knize gets checked off, and, surely, innumerable bars and baths in Budapest, which Pynchon must have assumed I was familiar with.
And then the jazz. At long last Pynchon has dropped all inhibitions and fused jazz and novel, has so interwoven form and content that, down to the barbed tips of the dialogue, one can hear the riff, the phrase and its rejoinder. To be sure, this is not yet the era of bebop and its frenzied solos; it is the time when big bands played for dancing or accompanied a singer. It is also the time when the clarinet of Klezmer music insinuated itself into jazz and seasoned the idiom of swing. The Great American Songbook emerges from this fusion of Jewish and Black music, which in turn becomes the soundtrack to a new kind of uncensored, politically and sexually bold cinema. And so McTaggart is not only a private eye but also an excellent dancer and an equally adept fighter, traits that, when he is sent out to find a cheese heiress who has run off with the clarinetist of the Klezmopolitans, come to his aid often and always amusingly.
It should be left to others to recount the plot of Shadow Ticket. Pynchon has somewhat reduced his cast and marked them by a few classical attributes; between the chapters there is now a continuity that offers important orientation on the wild ride through pre-fascist Europe in the second part of the novel; the dialogues are, improbably, still more deeply embedded in the action (Pynchon has an almost athletic aversion to any “he said”); the jokes are manifold but no longer distracting (with the possible exception of the search for the ugliest lamp in the world). When “the Al Capone of cheese” from Milwaukee meets his counterpart from Chicago, he asks him: “And what are you the Al Capone of?”
If one were to look for a governing meta-text, it would be the opposition between syncopated, multiethnic jazz for dancing in couples and the bright, tightly regimented major-key clang of the Nazi marching music gathering on the horizon. But that opposition is articulated on so many occasions, especially in the second half of the novel, that it is not particularly “meta.” Nor does the dark outcome of the novel, in which a coup is staged against Roosevelt’s New Deal and the United States slides into a military autocracy, hold much in the way of interpretive gain; it lies so close to our present that there is little for the hermeneut to do. It is all already there.
The miracle of the Western novel consists in the fact that we have collectively grown accustomed to following fictional characters on their journeys and experiences in reading, fully aware that what is told cannot be measured against any criterion of truth. It is no accident that this wondrous habit emerged at precisely the time—roughly the middle of the eighteenth century—when people and readers also allowed themselves to be persuaded that fictional entities such as justice and equality were worth not only believing in but fighting for. That one side of this miracle now threatens to perish makes the other, still surviving side all the more precious. And thus Pynchon’s novel is, first of all, wholly there: not so much in the jokes and allusions, nor in the depth of his political references, but in the lived act of reading, which is real for each reader and different for each.
