Shadow Ticket: A Novel, by Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press, 293 pages, $30
My favorite story about Thomas Pynchon, which may or may not be completely true: When Timothy Leary found himself in the hole at Sandstone Federal Prison, the defrocked Harvard doc asked a guard for something to read and the screw tossed a copy of Gravity's Rainbow into the cell. Would a random prison guard really have that book at the ready? Beats me, but I love the image of someone trapped in a tiny room with Pynchon's difficult, funny, endlessly digressive novel as his only escape hatch. There's a photo floating around the internet of Leary's marked-up copy of the book (sometimes misidentified as Neil Armstrong's copy, which makes a different sort of crazy sense). Leary's notes certainly look like things you might scrawl if you're being driven mad simultaneously by solitary confinement and by Pynchon's sprawling universe.
