Can't wait for the author tour

I was thinking of Thomas Pynchon yesterday in the news agent's, which was a shrine to Jade Goody, her bald pate plastered on every paper from the red tops to the broadsheets.

Being able to live your life on screen and in print is the most cherished goal of our narcissistic age; Goody choosing to have her death in front of it perhaps the pinnacle of that. Her publicist says now that she won't actually die on camera, but I am unconvinced. I suggested to colleagues that she will sell right to a camera installed in her coffin so viewers could see her body decompose. They thought this in bad taste, but surely it is the logical conclusion.

I don't begrudge Goody whatever money or fame she has found from, well, doing nothing apart from being a reality TV celebrity. If magazines and newspapers are willing to fork over cash to take photos of a cancer victim as she wastes away, she would be stupid not to take it. And complaining about it in a blog which is itself some form of narcissism would be a tad ironic.

But there was perhaps a balancing out of the universe when Pynchon's new book was bought by a UK publisher in the week Goody announced she had a month or so to live. Pynchon, choosing to live his life out of the public eye, is the matter to Goody's anti-matter; if the two ever met there would probably be some rent in the time space continuum, destroying life as we know it. He is often called a 'recluse' in the press, but that is just journo-speak for not speaking to the press. He apparently lives in New York City, has a family, gets out to gigs and is a fan of at least one indie rock band. He obviously has some sense of humour about the whole thing as well, having sent up his whole image on The Simpsons twice.

But I find it comforting that there is still someone out there who lets the work speak for itself. His next book is to be a detective novel and though it assuredly won't be like most of the genre, it may be more accessible than his other books. I once read Mason & Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow back-to-back, which I do not recommend. It was difficult, not Finnegans Wake difficult, but I felt blinkered, bludgeoned and beaten up, and couldn't read anything more challenging than Heat magazine for about a month. But the crime novel might lead to more fans. His last book Against the Day sold 10,500 copies in the UK. Jade Goody's first autobiography: 130,000. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about what that says about the times we live in.