He is regularly rumoured to be in line for a Nobel Prize for literature. Pynchon received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974, and in 1988 collected the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship award, or 'genius grant', which guaranteed the Fellow £160,000, paid over five years. There is rather more to it, otherwise we would have uncovered the simple secret to success: disappear. In consequence, speculation runs unfettered. He has never been interviewed there are only three photographs in existence, all dating from his teens and early 20s the most basic biographical facts are still a matter of dispute and those that pass muster have been excavated with difficulty. Why doesn't this sort of thing happen to Ian McEwan? Because he gives interviews and allows photographers to take his picture and does readings, signings and the rest of it. Remarkably, a subscriber unearths a photo of a 19th-century Tibetan coin that closely resembles the enigmatic original. The subscribers get to work: there's a snow lion in front of the mountains the mountains resemble giant adenoids it's not a seal, it's a coin the coin is a forgery the script is Tibetan it's a Tibetan wireless telegraph stamp the dustjacket is referencing either reincarnation, time travel or tripolar disorder.

On the bottom left-hand corner of an otherwise rather plain dustjacket is the image of what appears to be a seal or official stamp, depicting what might be mountains, encircled at the seal's circumference by lettering in an unfamiliar script. One of the topics discussed was the significance of the cover design.

The subscribers, hardcore textual stalkers to a man (there seems to be only one female subscriber), some of whom have been discussing the finer points of the oeuvre for years, go into overdrive. Over at the Pynchon-L internet mailing list, the lid comes off. 'Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labour troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.'

V thomas pynchon review