If you’re wrong, I will kill you.

Confirmation from Penguin:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2008/10…

Jesus Christ I can’t wait.

“As for the other rumored details — that it’s a noir novel of about 400 pages, set in the world of 1960s psychedelia — Penguin is remaining silent … for the time being.”

Hmm…that’s the time-frame of The Crying of Lot 49…it’d be un-Pynchon-like to swoop back into the same time period he’s already explored to pick up any crumbs he’s missed, but…we’ll see.

Also, “a noir novel” sounds a bit too limiting for him. Pynchon doesn’t write genre fiction…his novels span many classifications and it’d be impossible to point at any of them and say, “This novel is this type of fiction.” Of course, this could still be accurate—a good portion of it might resemble noir, or that may be its starting point or something…but I’m skeptical of anything linked to Pynchon that one can slap a singular label on.

Well…whatever. I can’t wait to find out about this. I’m as excited as I was when I first found out about Against the Day. In fact, I want to go home and read that again right now.

This is so exciting. I suspect that the “noir” title is more to satisfy curious would-be readers than to really slap a label on Pynchon’s book, but it’s likely that a lot of it is going to center around some sort of detective…or detective-like story…or maybe an acid-dropping monkey that dresses up like a detective and hallucinates that he’s a History professor at Columbia University. …and he’s married to Calista Flockhart!

Seriously. I wouldn’t rule it out.