The “political” Thomas Pynchon has been the object of an extraordinary amount of critical inquiry over the last quarter-century, but this activity is roughly commensurate with the fecundity and insight of Pynchon both as an experimental writer and as a commentator on current events and modern Western history. Samuel Thomas's monograph is a welcome addition to what he calls the “small but notable Pynchon Industry,” though to judge by swelling bibliographies and brisk Google Alerts traffic, there is nothing terribly small about the volume of Pynchon criticism and commentary.

More insistent than systematic in approach, Thomas's analyses take heed of Marx and the Marxist legacy, and find special relevance in the Frankfurt School – Adorno in the main, with the other familiar names in largely supporting roles. The political praxis of the “political Pynchon” is construed here, quite sensibly, in rather limited terms. As Thomas summarizes midway through his study, and faithful to his theoretical biases, he is intent on revealing “‘fugitive’ or ‘oblique’ politics that persist in ‘negative’ spaces – small resistances to the totality of instrumental reason and the mechanisms of a monetary and ‘conceptual’ economy” (109). Pynchon is clearly not advocating the storming of barricades but, rather, providing analogies, extended metaphors, comical vignettes, shaggy-dog stories, mini-allegories, etc. in short, illustrative narratives of all sorts – upon which, in this case, Thomas can apply Adorno's “counter-dialectical method” which strives for “an ‘objective’ result ‘revealed by subjective effort’” as set out in the latter's Aesthetic Theory (154).

Thomas examines Pynchon's first five novels. (Published in December of 2006, Against the Day appeared too late for consideration of consequence here.) Working against convention, even if frankly to little evident hermeneutic effect, he discusses the novels not in order of their appearance but rather in order of their respective temporal settings. Thus Mason & Dixon (1997), with its eighteenth-century focus, is taken up first – and at greatest length – and Vineland (1990), and its discussion of American politics and cultural life under the Nixon and Reagan administrations, left to the last. The various critical readings begin with the citation of a shorter or longer passage drawn from the given novel; Thomas then uses these fragments to propel his analyses, though predictably other quotations are brought in to advance what he calls his “micrological” enterprise.

Based on his D.Phil. thesis (University of Sussex, 2005), this monograph demonstrates many of the strengths of an ambitious young scholar: unremitting curiosity, rhetorical liveliness, and obvious enthusiasm for his subject author. Still, there are times when the discussion moves down side streets and alleyways, and away from the main track of the discussion. The Lot 49 chapter, for example, devotes undue attention to the purported commonalities between the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, who engaged in widely reported self-immolation during the Vietnam War, and the Yoyodyne executive, with the consequence of a stalled discussion; so too, for example, with the digression on William Gibson, William Burroughs, and Jonathan Safran Foe in the Gravity's Rainbow chapter. In any event, Thomas's study provides a spirited and nuanced reading of arguably the greatest living American writer, and it is certain to find a place within the Pynchonian critical canon.