William Gibson, Lisa Simpson and More on Their Favorite Pinch of Pynchon

Call it a Pynchon-palooza!

“Shadow Ticket,” Thomas Pynchon’s 10th book, hit the New York Times best-seller list this month, soon after the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed movie, “One Battle After Another,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and inspired by Pynchon’s “Vineland.”

The Book Review recently reached out to writers and other cultural figures, asking them to share a favorite scene or moment from Pynchon’s works. A host of them responded, including Homer and Lisa Simpson. After all, Pynchon, a dedicated fan of “The Simpsons,” lent his voice to several episodes over the years, his animated avatar gently mocking the author’s desire for anonymity by wearing a paper bag, imprinted with a question mark, over his head.

Below, Homer and Lisa (courtesy of Matt Selman, the executive producer and showrunner of “The Simpsons”) are joined by Rachel Kushner, Don DeLillo and a founder of Devo, among others, who explain how Pynchon manages, in the words of Pico Iyer, to “expand our sense of possibility and leave us unsure of everything we thought we knew.”

William Gibson

Novelist

A moment in Pynchon’s work I’ve found more urgently haunting, over the past decade or so, is the sermon given by Father Rapier in “Gravity’s Rainbow,” distinguishing between They, humans aligned with extreme wealth and technology, and lowercase we, the rest of us. As long as we clearly recognize that They can and will kill us, all’s going well for Them. But should we resist, and continue to, They begin to lose power, and as the number of resisters rises, to lose it exponentially — potentially leading, as Rapier suggests, to humanity’s salvation.

Rachel Kushner

Novelist

Probably the environment I come from, a world where the ’60s continued into the ’80s, predisposes me to “get” Pynchon’s California novels. The rendering of Telegraph Avenue and Berkeley, my alma mater, in “The Crying of Lot 49” was absolutely indelible to me when I read the novel in college, even if the layers of zaniness were a style I didn’t fully appreciate until later, until after I read “Inherent Vice” and then went backward to “Vineland,” and reread “Crying of Lot 49.” Pynchon’s humor proves that he understands our world so well that he can flex it.

Homer and Lisa Simpson

Springfield residents

LISA: Dad, did you read “Gravity’s Rainbow” yet, the Thomas Pynchon masterpiece? He’s what I want to be when I grow up — a famous literary recluse. Just imagine being speculated about by the most consequential people in the world: English literature grad students.

HOMER: Sweetie, I really wanted to read it. But you know I don’t like to read. My eyes get so tired going right, right, right, then, ugh … left. Plus from the title I thought “Gravity’s Rainbow” would be about Skittles. It didn’t seem to be, so I took a break about halfway through.

LISA: You made it halfway through the book?

HOMER: Halfway through the first line.

LISA: OK, I thought you might struggle with it, so I got you a pop-up version too.

HOMER: Sorry, pop-up books are way too hard. If something’s going to pop up at me it better be from a toaster. Plus you have to figure out how to get the pages to lie back down flat again. I’m no engineer.

LISA: I thought you were a nuclear engineer.

HOMER: That’s more about pushing buttons. Or not pushing buttons. I can’t remember which. So if you had to choose a passage from the book to appear in The New York Times, what would it be?

LISA: It would have to be this quote about power in America: “All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few …”

HOMER: Interesting. Did you know there’s a green Skittle? Do you think this Pynchon guy knows what it tastes like?

LISA: Another great conversation, Dad.

Ian Rankin

Novelist

If I had my copy of “Gravity’s Rainbow” to hand, I might opt for the two-page scene in whose margins the undergraduate student Ian Rankin has written four large letters: P-O-R-N. But my copy is several hundred miles away, so instead I’ll go for the closing of “The Crying of Lot 49.” Throughout I was wondering what the title meant and how it could possibly connect to the story I was reading. And then, right at the death, all was revealed, with a deftness of touch that still puts a smile on my face when I remember it.

Ishmael Reed

Novelist

I don’t know why “Against the Day” hasn’t been banned. In one of the most remarkable scenes penned by an American writer, Pynchon cites events that the anti-woke crowd would want deleted. Referring to the Blacks and Filipinos, Mexicans and hillbillies who are present in that scene, the character Lew Basnight “gradually understood that what everybody here had in common was having survived some cataclysm none of them spoke about directly — a bombing, a massacre perhaps at the behest of the U.S. government.” Those with prominent media megaphones today are denying that such cataclysms took place.

Ed Park

Novelist

There’s a small moment in “Bleeding Edge” which I think about often — an uncanny New York moment. Our heroine, Maxine, is walking down Broadway when she sees the lid of a takeout container rolling down the pavement on its edge (“thin as a predawn dream”), stop for a traffic light, then keep going until it’s finally squashed by a truck. “Real?” she wonders. “Computer-animated?” Having been immersed in the Deep Web (this is 2001), she attributes this improbable run to either the mysteries of airflow or the directives of a “nerd at a keyboard.” This is the title’s bleeding edge, and a memorable instance of Pynchonian paranoia: that moment when even the reality of waste — the street detritus all of us New Yorkers see on a daily basis — can be called into question.

Aimee Bender

Novelist

The scene that arrived in my head immediately is when Oedipa Maas encounters the mysterious horn symbol in her bathroom stall in “The Crying of Lot 49.” Did I experience it in a bathroom stall? Did I dream it? Is it in the book? I can think of few moments in art that better convey the slipperiness of meaning and how we can’t quite get our feet on the ground of understanding.

Gerald Casale

Musician, Devo

It’s been 45 years since I read “Gravity’s Rainbow.” What I remember is the insanely dense and layered descriptions and the sex and drug narratives all blending together in a nonlinear way. It was a literary acid trip interspersed with intentionally silly poems that satirized the Horatio Alger, “You can do it, there’s nobody else like you”-style Americana hokum. It was those short, twisted nursery rhyme intrusions that inspired me to try to write a Pynchonesque “poem” of my own. That attempt became my lyrics for Devo’s hit song, “Whip It.”

Jo Freer

Author, “Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture”

The scenes I most like in Pynchon are those where he lets his sardonic cynicism slip a little, revealing a poignant hopefulness. My favorite is in “Against the Day” (2006), when we meet the Yz-les-Bains anarchists. This ad hoc community offers a fairly thorough and concrete imagining of the countercultural ideals present throughout Pynchon’s work; it’s a place where people “work for one another” spontaneously. Women’s critical thinking is explicitly valued in this community, which stands against myopic patriarchy and militant nationalism. Pynchon even goes so far as to suggest that the anarchist spa offers “some hope of passing beyond political forms to ‘planetary oneness’.” Wouldn’t that be nice?

Pico Iyer

Essayist

Thomas Pynchon is a caretaker of disappearances, an explorer of all those lost corners and black holes — in consciousness, in history — that expand our sense of possibility and leave us unsure of everything we thought we knew. Maybe that’s why I most remember the scene in “Mason & Dixon” in which Mason tells of visiting the 11 days that went missing in 1752 after England adopted the Gregorian calendar. Suddenly we’re plunged into a kind of vortex — time out of time and a displaced Eden where Death has no purchase. For me “Mason & Dixon” is Pynchon’s greatest work — the greatest novel of recent decades — precisely because it plays its flawless 18th-century prose off moments that could emerge from a daydreaming stoner.

Mariano Falzone and Luna Nemo

Designers, Orbis Tertius Games

Luna and I both had the same scene immediately come to mind when it comes to the unforgettability factor: the coprophagia scene with Brigadier Pudding and the dominatrix Katje Borgesius in “Gravity’s Rainbow.” But our favorite scenes are those involving a group of Argentine anarchists who stole a Nazi U-boat from Mar del Plata. We are both from the city of Mar del Plata, and we were thrilled to see Pynchon not only referencing it but also showing a deep understanding of Argentine history, idiosyncrasies and literature. The characters’ comments on Borges and on “Martín Fierro,” our national epic, are spot-on. And the names he picks for them, like Francisco Squalidozzi, Graciela Imago Portales, and their contact, Ibargüengoitia, are just wonderful. Those scenes have undoubtedly influenced all our video games.

Paul Grimstad

Writer and musician

Since I’ve had the extraordinary privilege of acting in “One Battle After Another,” I recently went back to the wonderfully zany “Vineland.” My chosen scene comes near the end, where we find the tow truck operators Vato and Blood watching a TV movie dramatization of a Celtics-Lakers game. “Besides Sidney Poitier as K.C. Jones,” Pynchon writes, “there was Paul McCartney, in his first acting role, as Kevin McHale, with Sean Penn as Larry Bird.” I laughed out loud upon rereading that, and then thought of how brilliantly bonkers Penn is in “One Battle After Another” — as Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, not Larry Bird.

Jordan Ellenberg

Writer and professor

I’m a mathematician, and the end of “Crying of Lot 49” feels the way getting deep into a mathematical frenzy feels — like everything is connected to everything else and singing with almost-guessable import. Like if for some reason every orchestra in America started tuning up and you could hear them all at once.

Matthew Specktor

Writer

These days, my mind drifts most often to “Vineland,” and to the scene where Prairie Wheeler is on the run from marauding federal prosecutor Brock Vond. As she roars down the Ventura Freeway with her rescuer DL Chastain and Chastain’s friend Ditzah Pisk Feldman, the three discuss “the whole Reagan program” to “dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home,” words from the late ’80s that feel, naturally, rather pertinent these days.

But what makes the scene isn’t just Pynchon’s antifascist politics, as salient as those are, but his marvelous description of DL’s “Ninjamobile” in flight during the 1984 Olympics, the gorgeous densities of his prose as he describes not just the freeway’s “flirters, deserters, wimps and pimps,” but the city’s “lovers under the overpasses, movies at the mall letting out, bright gas-station oases in pure fluorescent spill.”

David Kipen

Writer and critic

Do I really have to choose one? Instead, for spite, I choose this prophetic moment from a bottomlessly provocative 1984 essay he wrote for The Times called “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?”: “If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come — you heard it here first — when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge.”

1984, meet 2025.