I’ll concede that I am usually slow on the uptake. We’re on the verge of having a new Thomas Pynchon novel, Shadow Ticket, hitting the market any day now. I haven’t yet read it, and hope to get to it soon. And I haven’t yet seen the new movie, “One Battle After Another,” directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, which you might now is an adaptation of Pynchon’s Vineland, which was published in 1990. Hey, 1990, that rang a bell, and sure enough, while I was still book review editor of The Kansas City Star, I reviewed Vineland, and, damn, if the review doesn’t still feel a bit fresh and not to embarrasingly out of date.