Thomas Pynchon - Shadow Ticket review - Pulp Diction

Thomas Pynchon is having a moment. Paul Thomas Anderson’s second Pynchon adaptation, One Battle After Another (loosely based on Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland), is a critical and commercial hit; and his new novel Shadow Ticket is garnering the sort of reviews and attention that generally tend to accrue to authors with much less of an aversion to playing the publicity game. 

For long-term Pynchon fans, this is heartening. Pynchon has never really gotten the recognition he deserves, compared with what critics would consider the big hitters of post-WWII US fiction. This despite the fact that, whatever their respective merits, none of his contemporaries - not Updike, not Roth, not even Bellow - ever produced a book to rival Pynchon’s singular masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow. 

There’s also the fact that Pynchon’s work speaks so powerfully to our troubled, unstable geopolitical moment. Pynchon has always been a deeply political artist. Underneath the corny jokes and impish po-mo shenanigans, lurks a deadly serious, antiauthoritarian worldview. He’s on the side of the underdog, the overlooked, the "Preterite". He’s been characterised as the patron saint of paranoid conspiracy theories, but the  paranoia Pynchon depicts is very much of the justifiable sort, not merely the “too many tokes too early in the morning” variety.

Meanwhile, the conspiracies in which Pynchon traffics aren’t theoretical: what his fiction does, at its deepest and most serious, is to pull back the veil and expose the rigged game we are all obliged to play, the parasitic nature of capitalism, and the mechanisms which the powerful use to maintain and consolidate their domination of the powerless. Mechanisms such as what we laughably call our “elected representatives”, and the “liberal media". 

It’s often said that the world today is catching up with Pynchon; another way to put it is to say that people are beginning to realise what Pynchon has been telling us all along. The veil is wearing thin. That said, it’s hard to contemplate some of the wild-eyed goons whose sweaty hands are now on the levers of US power, and not think of Pynchon’s fictional world: JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Russel Vought, Kristi Noem or the orange-faced fascist scumbag Trump himself, could easily have stepped out of the pages of a Pynchon novel. When I saw the footage of Elon Musk - crazy name, crazy guy - cavorting on stage at CPAC with Argentina's hirsute fascist President Javier Milei, waving around an ornately customised chainsaw, I couldn’t help but wonder was I dreaming a scene out of Vineland.

Pynchon tends to attract passionate fans, and I’m one of them. But I’m also someone who believes that a refusal to acknowledge gradations in an artist’s work does the artist a disservice. I found Pynchon’s previous novel, Bleeding Edge deeply disappointing when it was published in 2013, so much so that I felt it would be sad to see so great a writer bow out with such a sub-par work; so my hope and prayer was that it wouldn’t be his last book.

Well, be careful what you wish for. Now we have Shadow Ticket and, well, I sort of wish I’d wished for something else. This is Pynchon’s third detective pastiche novel in a row now, and we are deep into diminishing returns. Although widely regarded as ‘Pynchon Lite’, 2009’s stoner noir Inherent Vice was more substantial than its amiable surface suggested, and anyway it felt like a welcome palate cleanser after the monolithic, omnifaceted Against the Day in 2006. It also mapped, in intriguing biographical ways, onto Gravity’s Rainbow. 

The themes explored in Bleeding Edge - Sept 11th, the end of the ‘American Century’, the rise of the Internet and bursting of the Dot-com bubble - promised rich pickings for someone with Pynchon’s sensibilities, but the book felt inert, confused, and stale. It was heavily dialogue dependent, which might not have been so much of a problem had it not also marked a ratcheting up of Pynchon’s late dialogue mode, which has become so stylized it’d make the Coen Brothers blanch. You might call it ‘pulp diction’. Shadow Ticket continues this trend, and worsens it in that Pynchon now has the narration sometimes talking in this cod-hardboiled patois as well. Whether you find this funny, or irritating, will largely determine whether you enjoy this book or not. 

It does begin well. There’s a lightness of tone, a sort of phlegmatic affability, that makes the first hundred pages or so go past quite enjoyably. The opening chapter may well be the best one in the book, and the restricted milieu - early 1930s Milwaukee, where “it seldom gets more serious than somebody stole somebody’s fish” - lets Pynchon fill in considerable local colour. 

But then Pynchon’s put-upon protagonist, Hicks McTaggart, a perpetually horny ex-strikebreaker turned private detective - a kind of cross between Dashiell Hammett and Benny Hill - is assigned a new case (or "ticket"): “locating and bringing back” Daphne Airmont, “the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering”. Daphne wanders all the way off to Europe, and Hicks is obliged to follow her. 

After a low-key buildup, the reader is now expecting the novel to get down to business. Instead,  Pynchon gives us rapid-fire snapshots of Budapest, Belgrade, Vienna, Transylvania, Rijeka, etc. each of them pretty much interchangeable backgrounds for the increasingly tiresome antics that substitute for plot. Hicks ricochets around, ogling the women (or "tomatoes"),  keeping his gun ("gat") close at hand, gobbling cocaine. Bombs ("pineapples") and pratfalls crop up and clutter his path like randomly-spawning mushrooms in Super Mario Brothers, and the story, such as it was, degenerates into a frantic, cartoonish sequence of zany scenes featuring flurries of characters who are little more than names. 

These aren’t so much ‘walk on’ parts as ‘run across’. Pynchon indulges his fondness for silly monikers: we meet (and very quickly forget) Zoltan von Kiss, Pips Quarrander, Sandor Zspuka, Squeezita Thickly, Swampscott Vobe, Glow Tripforth del Vasto, the whole sick crew. It becomes harder and harder to follow the dialogue, to keep track of who is saying what to whom - or why we should care. 

Like Bob Dylan, Pynchon contains multitudes; what you enjoy about his writing might be totally different from what I see in him. Plenty of classic Pynchon facets are present and correct in his latest book: long, multiply subclaused sentences; lists; sex and drugs; gallows humor; weird foodstuffs; Steampunkish tech; hats; motifs; puzzles; red herrings; doublings; dichotomies; dad jokes; tendrils that curl off into other Pynchon books; inscrutable espionage; scatology; surreal goings-on.  

There’s a lot about cheese. Cheese fraud, cheese enforcement, even radioactive cheese. The "Al Capone of Cheese" meets the real Al Capone and asks him “What is it you’re the Al Capone of, again?” And the narrative now and then gives way to vaudeville-style showtune lyrics offering meta-commentary on the plot - like a Greek Chorus on LSD. 

You’d have to be very po-faced not to find any of that stuff fun. But a little of it goes a long way. The reader is left with the inevitable sense that it would make little substantive difference here had Pynchon given us a hundred pages more, or fewer, on these European scenes. As for those long, rhythmic passages of sui generis poetic prose Pynchon used to treat us to, passages that stop you in your tracks and lodge in your soul? There were very few in Bleeding Edge, and there are none whatsoever in Shadow Ticket.

Maybe form is intended to enact content: the relentlessness might be the point. 30s Europe is unstable, war is coming, and a feeling of narratorial vertigo might very well be deemed appropriate. Tony Tanner has written insightfully about just this sort of effect in Gravity’s Rainbow, borrowing a phrase from Levi Strauss to describe how an “overabundance of signifier” results in a “beset and bewildered consciousness which is the unavoidable affliction of his characters.” But should that discombobulation also afflict readers? 

The reader of classic Pynchon often experiences something similar to Oedipa Maas, protagonist of The Crying of Lot 49, who one day finds her "Chevy parked at the center of an odd, religious instant. A revelation trembled just past the threshold of her understanding, a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meanings, of an intent to communicate." One of Pynchon’s most powerful qualities is his ability to put across just this tantalising sense of meaning, not explicitly, but just clearly enough for us to discern its outlines, its general shape. But with Shadow Ticket, there’s no real sense of this; it feels like playing Blind Man’s Bluff in an empty auditorium.

Pynchon’s view of technology is deeply sceptical, to say the least: the V2 rocket whose flight arc gives Gravity’s Rainbow its title and plot trajectory, is only the most famous example of how Pynchon ties sex, death, and technology together in tight little thematic knots. In Bleeding Edge, a character points out the folly of tech utopianism, reminding us that the Internet was a military creation and has “never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet”. In Shadow Ticket, there’s plenty of tech, but it’s treated in a much more facile way, with technology more likely to offer a deus ex machina than inaugurating a post-human surveillance dystopia. In a jam? Don’t worry, there’ll be a WWI submarine or an autogyro along in a minute!

Despite the theme of burgeoning fascism, and clear indicators that it’s on its merry way to the good old US of A, there’s no sense of political urgency or even relevance here. Yes, there are hints about a counterfactual world in which there’s no FDR, no New Deal, and the final chapters take on an elegiac tone seemingly intended to connote the death of America as an idea, and an ideal. But it all feels too diffuse, too half-baked. And how can Pynchon, a politically engaged writer with a particular obsession with technologies of death and destruction, produce a work of fiction adverting to contemprary horrors, and warning of fascism, without even alluding to the fact that Israel has been gleefully carrying out a live-streamed genocide for over two years, with the full, enthusiastic support of all Western politicians, arms manufacturers, and mainstream media?

Perhaps it’s unfair to expect Pynchon - the man who, in Gravity’s Rainbow, reminded us that “war is a celebration of markets” and warned that “living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide” - to keep on dropping breadcrumbs to lead us out of Plato’s cave. If he wants to dick around with screwball private eye spoofs then who’s to say he shouldn’t? 

There are rumours - there always are - that Pynchon has another novel in the can. When Pynchon fans hear that sort of thing, we hope it’ll be another big baggy monster like Against the Day or Mason & Dixon. And so, succumbing to a recidivism that would doubtless strike a chord with Pynchon himself, and with a circularity redolent of the rocket narrative that begins and ends Gravity’s Rainbow, we, “old fans who have always been at the movies (haven’t we?)”, bow our heads and pray that Shadow Ticket will not be Pynchon’s last book.