{"id":75965,"date":"2025-10-15T10:09:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T10:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/75965\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T10:09:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T10:09:09","slug":"everything-is-ubiquitous-in-thomas-pynchons-new-book-town-topics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/75965\/","title":{"rendered":"Everything Is Ubiquitous in Thomas Pynchon\u2019s New Book \u2013 Town Topics"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Stuart Mitchner<\/p>\n

\"\"Writing about Thomas Pynchon\u2019s Against the Day in January 2007, I chided reviewers for warning readers away from the almost 1,100-page-long novel as if it were \u201ca brilliant but perilous ruin.\u201d In September 2009, I took issue with reviews describing Pynchon\u2019s Inherent Vice as \u201ca beach read,\u201d a \u201cpage-turner,\u201d a \u201cbreezy work of genre fiction,\u201d an \u201camusing snapshot.\u201d Calling it a convoluted jeu de cannibas, less a page-turner than a mind-twister, I said that just as marijuana can make a minute feel like an hour, Pynchon can make his novel\u2019s 369 pages feel like 800. Of his last book, Bleeding Edge, which surfaced 12 years ago: \u201cYou\u2019re on Planet Pynchon, love it or leave it. But if you leave it, you miss some of the best writing about New York City since Henry James\u2019s American Scene.\u201d In his new novel Shadow Ticket (Penguin $30), 293 pages feels like 293 pages. To extract a bigger, more satisfyingly Pynchonesque book you have to do some digging.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Big Cheese\u201d<\/p>\n

Imagine an R. Crumb cartoon of a beady-eyed rodent, teeth bared, staring out of a mouse hole at an invisible trap baited with a gigantic piece of Wisconsin cheddar radiant as a Lake Michigan sunrise. Thus The New York Review of Books bites and ducks, with a long, relatively insightful piece headed \u201cThe Big Cheese\u201d above a mug-shot-style graphic based on the author\u2019s senior high school yearbook photo. And, as most reviewers have noted while licking the cheddar from their chops, Shadow Ticket may be the 88-year-old\u2019s last shot: for this reviewer, the swansong of a great American writer.<\/p>\n

Out of Context<\/p>\n

While the novel contains nothing like a formal farewell, one of the closing chapters is haunted by the hint of one in an exchange between the gumshoe hero Hicks McTaggart and the errant heiress Daphne Airmont, daughter of Bruno, the Al Capone of Cheese. This is the fall of 1932 in Budapest. For Hicks imagine Clark Gable in It Happened One Night (1934) after breaking up runaway heiress Claudette Colbert\u2019s marriage. The passage in question begins, \u201cWhat one of them should have been saying was \u2018We\u2019re in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceful and carefree. If anybody\u2019s around to remember. Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark. Until finally we turn to look back the way we came, and there\u2019s that last light bulb, once so bright, now feebly flickering, about to burn out, and it\u2019s well past time to be saying [in case the reader begins to take the tone too seriously], \u2018Florsheims, let\u2019s ambulate.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Next paragraph: \u201cStay or go. Two fates beginning to diverge \u2014 back to the U.S. marry, raise a family, assemble a life you can persuade yourself is free from fear, as meanwhile, over here, the other outcome continues to unfold, to roll in dark as the end of time. Those you could have saved, could have shifted at least somehow onto a safer stretch of track, are one by one robbed, beaten, killed, seized and taken away into the nameless, the unrecoverable.<\/p>\n

\u201cUntil one night, too late, you wake into an understanding of what you should have been doing with your life all along.\u201d Then: \u201cSomething like that. If anybody was still there to hear it. Which there isn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cheese or Cinema<\/p>\n

Pynchon has fun riffing on cheese as he builds his story (one of his best is the play on Edward G. Robinson\u2019s dying words in 1931\u2019s Little Caesar), which moves from Milwaukee to Budapest and Fiume (not all that far from the Maltese setting of V, his first novel). Employed by Unamalgamated Ops, Hicks has a \u201cshadow ticket\u201d instructing him to find and bring home Daphne, who has run off with Hop Wingdale, a clarinet player for a band called the Klezmopolitans.<\/p>\n

Although I dutifully followed the cheese plot all the way, my interest was actually initially engaged by the circa 1930s photograph, which shows the M\u0171v\u00e9sz Sz\u00ednh\u00e1z (Art Theater) on Nagymez\u0151 utca in Pest, which has since become a nightclub, according to a post on Reddit. It\u2019s also worth noting that the book\u2019s epigraph is courtesy of Bela Lugosi in The Black Cat (1934): \u201cSupernatural, perhaps. Baloney . . . perhaps not.\u201d In an early chapter, Hicks takes his girlfriend April to Lugosi in Dracula, which opened in Chicago on Valentine\u2019s Day, as Pynchon makes sure to tell us. By the time the film was over, April had eaten \u201csix cubic feet of popcorn\u201d and was using his tie \u201cto wipe the butter off her fingers.\u201d She\u2019s knocked out by Lugosi (\u201csome kind of Hungarian oomph there\u201d). Hicks imagines her whispering Bela\u2019s name in her sleep.<\/p>\n

Enter Diane Keaton<\/p>\n

In case Lugosi\u2019s reference to \u201csupernatural\u201d seems a stretch, you can be in the middle of another screwball love scene in 1930s Milwaukee when you\u2019re told of Diane Keaton\u2019s death in October 2025, delivered while Hicks and April are dancing (he\u2019s a pro) and she\u2019s calling him \u201cyou big chump\u201d and crying \u201call over his shirt just back from the Chinese place.\u201d The fact that one of Keaton\u2019s most memorable roles is as Michael Corleone\u2019s wife in The Godfather fits nicely with April Randazzo, who is \u201call but the kept tomato of Don Peppino Interfernacci.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile Hicks is crooning a Pynchon love song into April\u2019s ear as they dance: \u201cyou\u2019re ubiquitous . . . like the airwaves through the air . . . how ridiculous-ly I\u2019m yearning, into what a sap I\u2019m turning\u2026.\u201d And no wonder as she\u2019s showing off \u201cthe sparkler\u201don her finger in case he doubts that Don Peppino is a Calbrese \u201cwho\u2019d rather kill you than work things out.\u201d By this time, however, April is taking on shades of the Wisconsin girl Keaton played in Woody Allen\u2019s Annie Hall. When Hicks keeps making light of the threat, April turns her face away and chides him for \u201cthe happy patter, you Einsteins, what is it with you? heads in the fog, never know how much trouble you\u2019re in.\u201d<\/p>\n

As it turns out, my reading of supernaturally ubiquitous Hollywood in Pynchon\u2019s vision of early 1930\u2019s Milwaukee (\u201clike nose tissue at a Garbo movie\u201d) makes an easy 80-year leap to mid-October 2025 viewings of Diane Keaton in her glory in Annie Hall (1977), a joy wowing and wowed by Jack Nicholson in Something\u2019s Gotta Give (2003), and going movingly face to face with Meryl Streep in Marvin\u2019s Room (1996).<\/p>\n

Dracula in Milwaukee<\/p>\n

No cheese for me. As long as Pynchon\u2019s providing prose like the Lugosi-inflected opening of Chapter 11, where \u201con days of low winter light\u201d the federal courthouse in Milwaukee \u201ccan take on a sinister look, a setting for a story best not told at bedtime, the jagged profile of an evil castle against a pale light reflected off the Lake, bell tower, archways, gargoyles, haunted shadows, Halloween all year long. Or as some like to think of it, Richardsonian Romanesque. Heavy icicles all along the overhangs, waiting to let loose and pierce your skull\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Metaphysical Critter<\/p>\n

References to the motorcycle as \u201ca metaphysical critter,\u201d \u201cmore tall tales from the wild highways,\u201d and \u201cthere\u2019s a fierce living soul here that we have to deal with\u201d remind me to mention Pynchon\u2019s old friend Richard Fari\u00f1a (1937-1966), to whom he dedicated Gravity\u2019s Rainbow.<\/p>\n

Written by: Stuart Mitchner<\/a>\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Stuart Mitchner Writing about Thomas Pynchon\u2019s Against the Day in January 2007, I chided reviewers for warning…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75966,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[412,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-75965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}