Still Got It

Zach Gibson meditates on “late style” in the work of postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon who are still publishing well into their eighties.

By Zach GibsonDecember 14, 2025

• Fiction

• Literary Criticism

ON OCTOBER 7, Penguin Press published Thomas Pynchon’s ninth novel, Shadow Ticket. Typical of a new Pynchon release, the novel’s effect on critics was polarizing. On the one hand, Jacob Brogan of The Washington Post described it as “bonkers and brilliant,” and Christian Lorentzen, writing for Bookforum, praised Pynchon as a trickster figure who reveals an America “more sinister or more perfect than the Union we inhabit.” On the other hand, commenting on the book’s ideological opacity, Kathryn Schulz of The New Yorker complained that “meaning that is sufficiently cryptic becomes indistinguishable from no meaning at all,” while Mark Sanderson flatly dismissed the novel in the London Times, writing that it “fizzles out in a sequence of tall stories and narrow escapes.”

Common to all four reviews was an expressed interest in Pynchon’s advanced age (88) at the time of the novel’s release. Shadow Ticket, the reviews implied, either stands as a testament to Pynchon’s exceptional stamina as he nears his 10th decade, as Brogan suggests when he describes its prose as “balletically dazzling,” or it points toward creative decline, as when Sanderson writes that “Pynchon comes across like a latterday Falstaff on his deathbed.”

Couching a work’s success or failure on the question of whether aging authors have “still got it” is a common critical refrain when dealing with late-career work. While it is certainly reasonable to consider how age might play into aesthetic choices, speculating over how successfully a writer has warded off cognitive decline or claiming a book’s perceived strengths as evidence of uncommon endurance reduces the work of criticism to a quasi-biological diagnosis. In this light, both Brogan’s and Sanderson’s reviews carry with them an air of patronizing condescension. As Michael and Linda Hutcheon argue in their 2012 essay “Late Style(s): The Ageism of the Singular,” such arguments “relegate the elderly—whether ascending to sublimity or descending to senility—to a category of the generic and generalizable.”

These generalizations, the Hutcheons continue, play into the “major myth” that the elderly are “all pretty much the same.” Schulz’s and Sanderson’s negative reviews both share a preoccupation with linking Shadow Ticket’s shortcomings to conjectures about Pynchon’s putative sundowning (Sanderson) or loss of touch with the present day (Schulz). Even Brogan’s positive review treats the novel with a sentimental exceptionalism that Philip Sohm, in his 2007 book The Artist Grows Old: The Aging of Art and Artists in Italy, 1500–1800, identifies as the “masked twin of gerontophobia,” a form of special pleading that “tries to rescue old artists from a conventionally predicated decline.”

Lorentzen avoids this trap by calling into question the value of reading the “economies of style evident in the swiftness of transitions, [and] the plunging into familiar perennial themes,” in late-career works such as Shadow Ticket or Don DeLillo’s The Silence (2020), as “pared-down versions of the greatest hits as if in medley form.” Of the four critics mentioned above, Lorentzen goes the furthest to avoid setting the book in a peak-or-decline relationship with Pynchon’s past work.

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Late-career novels by many of Pynchon’s like-minded contemporaries, including DeLillo, William Gaddis, Robert Coover, and John Barth, received similar treatment in the literary press. Like Pynchon, all three completed novels well into their seventies and eighties. Also like Pynchon, all three have been subject to critical judgments that fall back on the question of vitality versus languor. And while Pynchon’s and DeLillo’s outsize reputations have helped them hold mainstream reviewers’ attention, Coover and Barth have suffered from a general unwillingness among critics to engage with their later work as much more than senescent novelties.

In his New York Times obituary for Coover (who died last year at the age of 92), John Williams buried all the author’s work after 2010 beneath an encomium to his early story collection Pricksongs & Descants (1969) and his best-known novel, The Public Burning (1977). Though The Brunist Day of Wrath, published in 2014 when Coover was 82, had received high praise in Stephen Burn’s New York Times review (“Coover of the 21st century writes with considerably more flair than his 1960s counterpart”), Williams, writing in the same publication a decade later, consigned the novel to a three-sentence paragraph providing evidence that “Mr. Coover was prolific and ambitious into late life.”

The “flair” Burn noted was presumably a reference to the experimental, recursive use of language that initially prompted comparisons between Barth, Coover, Gaddis, DeLillo, and Pynchon—whose names all stand as shorthand for the wave of postmodern metafiction that emerged during the 1960s and ’70s. While stylistic innovation remains the most obvious point of contact, these writers are also linked by their steady output of new work into the final years of their exceptionally long lives. This longevity was characteristic of postmodernist fellow travelers such as Joseph McElroy (1930– ), William H. Gass (1924–2017), Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007), Ishmael Reed (1938– ), and Christine Brooke-Rose (1923–2012), all of whom continued to produce innovative work well beyond the “threescore years and ten” allotted for a full life in the Book of Psalms.

Gaddis and Vonnegut, the oldest writers most often placed beneath the postmodern tent (both were born in 1922), began writing in the 1950s and continued through the late 1990s. DeLillo (1936– ), Coover, and Reed all produced new work in every decade between the 1960s and the 2020s; Barth (1930–2024) went them one further, beginning in the 1950s. Since 2010, Reed, who remains the most active today, has written four novels, published a poetry collection, and produced eight plays, all while running his online publication, Konch Magazine.

More importantly, as their bodies of work continued to grow, their aesthetic paths began to diverge. Reflexivity, the play of signs and symbols, self-aware irony, porous textual boundaries, and elaborate framing devices provided a provisional link between Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968), Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), and McElroy’s Hind’s Kidnap (1969). A myopic emphasis on superficial similarities, however, blurs important differences in these authors’ larger projects—differences that tend to be papered over in the critical positions of both their detractors (e.g., Jonathan Franzen) and their defenders (e.g., Ben Marcus). Simply identifying them as metafictional experimentalists—and then assessing their later work in light of whether they managed to sustain this playful posture—not only ignores crucial differences among these authors but also fails to account for how each incorporated the results of their early experiments into the work that followed.

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Writing for the Cleveland Review of Books, Cobi Chiodo Powell, like Lorentzen, avoids grading Shadow Ticket on a curve to accommodate Pynchon’s advanced age. Where Lorentzen sees characterizations of the novel as a work of late style as unilluminating, however, Powell argues that the aging process remains an important factor in literary production. Recognizing the “woolliness” of lateness as an evaluative term, he goes on to suggest “that engaging with an artist’s late style is a necessarily historical move.” This does not mean that a late (or even final) novel must be read with a deep knowledge of a writer’s past work. It does mean that a reading that seeks to account for an author’s or artist’s age must maintain a heightened attention to recurring themes, formal or stylistic developments, lines of continuity, and moments of rupture that reappear, recur, disappear, or dissimulate across their oeuvre. Powell, like the Hutcheons, correctly argues that when we approach late works as such, we must do so without losing sight of the work in its singularity.

In a 1937 essay on Beethoven’s final compositions, Theodor Adorno observes a strong tendency among critics to avoid serious engagement with late works. Though it followed on the heels of a growing scholarly interest in lateness that began in the 19th century, Adorno’s essay, which remains among the most influential studies of the link between art and aging, moved the conversation out of the academy. Artistic maturity, Adorno argues, “does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit”; rather, what he calls “late style” takes on an astringency inflected by a frustrated sense of incompletion—traits he finds in Beethoven’s late period. “Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny,” late works “do not surrender themselves to mere delectation.” In its disdain for “sensual charms,” late style tends to abjure the tidy harmony of classical aesthetics, turning instead toward fragmentation, dissonance, and dissociation.

On its face, Adorno’s dour analysis might appear to overlook the sense of finality, wholeness, and reconciliation that characterizes late works such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Henri Matisse’s gouache cutouts, or Claude Monet’s water lilies. His claim that late works are often marked by a contraction of the artist’s “typical” style, however, and his observation that they are often consigned to art’s “outer reaches,” are accurate (if not universal) descriptions of both the place that late works hold in the cultural imaginary and many of the works themselves.

Importantly, Adorno’s essay does not set out to establish lateness as an aesthetic category but instead draws a rough baseline describing common formal features of lateness. Matisse’s cutouts and Shakespeare’s play might not share the bitterness of Beethoven’s late style, but they do share a brevity, economy, and simplicity relative to their creator’s earlier efforts. Although Adorno’s idea of late style is a slippery one, his prioritizing of shared formal and stylistic traits offers a theory of lateness that avoids biographical or biological reductionism.

While teaching courses on late works at Columbia University during the 1990s, Edward Said continued the line of inquiry Adorno opened in his essay. While late works often take up themes of death, decay, and finality, the question of late style, for Said, hinges on form more than it does on content. It is marked, Said argues in his 2006 book On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, by a “nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against.” In its disregard for both internal consistency and continuity with the work that preceded it, late style distinguishes itself as episodic, splintered, and disjointed.

Such a tension is acutely present in the ragged, frustrated formlessness of William Gaddis’s final novel, Agapē Agape, published posthumously in 2002. Clocking in at a brisk 96 pages—around one-tenth the length of Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions (1955)—Agapē reworks 50 years of notes Gaddis collected for a book on mechanization in the arts into the inner monologue of its narrator, a fictionalized version of himself, as he rushes to draw his artistic and philosophical projects to a close while struggling with terminal illness. Where his 1975 novel J R, which was narrated entirely in unattributed dialogue, was a work of radical exteriority that gave readers no access to the characters’ interior lives, Agapē, which filters every glimpse of the outside world through the narrator’s point of view, is a work of pure interiority. It juxtaposes the narrator’s frustration with his unfinished projects, imagined conversations between Walter Benjamin and Johan Huizinga, and unfulfilled philosophical judgments that remain tantalizingly close but unreachable as his life draws to a close.

These types of irresolution and fragmentation, Said maintains, are neither symbolic gestures nor ornamental flourishes; they are constitutive features of late style. Late style accepts the impossibility of completion—its fragmentary nature is not a yearning nostalgia for an integrated whole located somewhere in the past, nor does it anticipate synthesis or recuperation in the future. In its acceptance of flux and disjunction as givens, late style, writes Said, “is in, but oddly apart from, the present.”

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Where Gaddis’s final novel was deeply marked by the type of disjunction that Adorno and Said both saw as characteristic of late work, Barth’s final efforts—especially The Development (2008), a collection of vignettes that follow members of a Florida retirement community, and Every Third Thought (2011), a fictionalized autobiography of one of these characters—accept the impossibility of tying off life’s loose ends with an amiable unconcern. Every Third Thought, published the year Barth turned 80, is stylistically irresolute, like much of the late work analyzed by Adorno and Said, but its disjunction and fragmentation have a good-natured stoicism that makes the novel seem less a final mad scramble for the finish line than a serene victory lap.

Yet, despite their marked differences, obvious indices of lateness drive both Agapē Agape and Every Third Thought. And the late works of Pynchon, Brooke-Rose, McElroy, and the rest stand somewhere between the two extremes of Gaddis’s turmoil and Barth’s composure. While a generalized concept of a singular late style is, as the Hutcheons argue, “inevitably ageist,” this doesn’t preclude the exploration of a plurality of late styles (indeed, they end their essay by proclaiming that “there are as many late styles as there are late artists”). If we are to link aging to creative output, we must reconsider our point of entry. The compulsion to appraise a late work by contrasting it with a previous “peak” in the artist’s oeuvre should be discarded, as should the tendency to read late works as consummating capstones. Lateness is not a mere taxonomic category; rather, as Rahel Rivera Godoy-Benesch explains in her book The Production of Lateness: Old Age and Creativity in Contemporary Narrative (2020), it is a “personal code of production,” a mode of “authorial self-fashioning.”

Late works follow, continue, break with, respond to, or even ignore a lifetime of production. In this context, it would be paradoxical to speak of a first novel published on its writer’s 80th birthday as “late.” Though they are produced in (at least, assumed) proximity to death’s door, the imminence of this threshold does not mean that all late works are governed by an omnipresent sense of mortality. Death might not occupy “every third thought,” as it did for Prospero in The Tempest, but its hovering presence does change the artist’s relationship to time. Late works play out a disproportionate ratio of memory to anticipation. For the elderly writer, as William Gass puts it in a short piece gathered in his final collection of essays, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2011), “only the past is likely to have much duration; greed and regret will have eaten the present, which is at best a sliver of cake too small for its plate, while the future fears it may cease before having been.”