{"id":197105,"date":"2025-10-02T12:21:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T12:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/197105\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T12:21:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T12:21:10","slug":"thomas-pynchons-strangely-stripped-back-noir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/197105\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Pynchon\u2019s Strangely Stripped-Back Noir"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like Gravity\u2019s Rainbow<\/a>, Thomas Pynchon\u2019s latest,\u00a0Shadow Ticket<\/a>,\u00a0begins with a boom. Back in 1973, the big explosion came courtesy of a V-2 rocket, wailing over wartime London, saddled with a deadly payload and one of the most famous openers in the literary history: \u201cA screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.\u201d The supersonic rocket and its description introduce the tone and theme of a neutron-dense novel that has variously been described as \u201cterribly haunted<\/a>,\u201d \u201cprofoundly exasperating<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cone of the best-realized paradigms<\/a> of our century.\u201d With its exhaustive remit\u2014the brainy, slangy, horny, endlessly funny book is a chronicle of the twentieth-century death-drive, aroused by humanity\u2019s perverse faith in technological progress, filigreed with a giant octopus, a sentient revolutionary light bulb, coprophagic indulgence, a song about suicide, and reflections on the moral dignity of pigs\u2014Gravity\u2019s Rainbow\u00a0presented a problem. When a book encompasses so much, what is left to say? The novel, after all, ends with the annihilation of not just the world, but its own narrative.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Pynchon did not produce another novel for 17 years, and, famously private, he avoided being interviewed, photographed in public, or otherwise pinned down by the Literary Industrial Complex during his absence.\u00a0Vineland<\/a>\u00a0(1990) marked the end of an extended leave during which, David Foster Wallace remarked<\/a>, Pynchon appeared to have \u201cspent twenty years smoking pot and watching TV.\u201d\u00a0Mason & Dixon<\/a>,\u00a0another phone book\u2013thick historical epic, from 1997, was a more fulsome return to form. His longest novel, 2006\u2019s\u00a0Against the Day<\/a>,\u00a0was almost deceptively maximalist, busy in its plotting with considerably less on its mind than its predecessors. Then came\u00a0Inherent Vice<\/a>\u00a0(2009) and\u00a0Bleeding Edge<\/a>\u00a0(2013), riffs on detective fiction\u2014marginally more accessible novels that the critic Michiko Kakutani has called<\/a> \u201cPynchon Lite.\u201d These demonstrably lower-key efforts spurred some of Pynchon\u2019s more obsessive devotees to imagine that the now 88-year-old author was surely laboring over another gargantuan masterpiece. Rumors of a mothballed meta-historical magnum opus have long circulated in the Pynchonite underground, at least since Salman Rushdie referred<\/a> to some \u201c900-page Pynchon megabook about the American Civil War\u201d in his review of\u00a0Vineland.<\/p>\n

Shadow Ticket\u00a0may be an exercise in late style. But what is a Pynchon novel without its sense of unruly bigness?<\/p>\n

Bummer, then, that\u00a0Shadow Ticket\u00a0lands with more of a soft thud than a bang. Pynchon\u2019s latest (and possibly final) book is a lively, amusing yarn, unfolding across the American Midwest amid the Great Depression and Central Europe under the sinister umbra of rising fascism. It may be Pynchon\u2019s most purely comic novel to date. But at 304 pages, it is also his shortest since 1966\u2019s\u00a0The Crying of Lot 49<\/a>.\u00a0And worse than short, it is slight. To read the Pynchon of\u00a0Gravity\u2019s Rainbow\u00a0or\u00a0Mason & Dixon\u00a0is to encounter nuclear-grade creative intellect, radiating with an excess of intoxicating ideas, ludicrous images, and formal experiments. Read forgivingly,\u00a0Shadow Ticket\u00a0may be an exercise in late style: the author bucking all those busy excesses. Yet, without that overabundant quality, it\u2019s hard to place\u00a0Shadow Ticket.\u00a0What is a Pynchon novel without its sense of unruly bigness that builds, upon each encounter, with the mounting bafflements of an increasingly puzzling world?<\/p>\n

Shadow Ticket\u2019s inciting blast is smaller than\u00a0Gravity\u2019s Rainbow\u2019s wailing opener. Pynchon captures the bombing, as heard from a local Italian eatery, with cinematic precision: \u201cForks and glassware pause between tabletop and mouth, as if everybody\u2019s observing a moment of stillness, and nobody seems surprised\u2026 Everybody is looking at everybody else like they\u2019re all in on something. Beyond familiarity or indifference, some deep mischief is at work.\u201d The target turns out to be the \u201chooch wagon\u201d of a Milwaukee bootlegger named Stuffy Keegan. (Lovers of \u201cPynchon names,\u201d take heart. Mr. Keegan is joined by the likes of Connie McSpool, Boynt Crosstown, Dr. Zolt\u00e1n von Kiss, G. Rodney Flaunch, Lino \u201cThe Dump Truck\u201d Trapanese, Heino Z\u00e4pf\u00adchen, Fancy Vivid, and Hoagie Hivnak, to name just a few of the novel\u2019s motley dramatis personae.)<\/p>\n

Following that \u201cdeep mischief\u201d to its source is the job of\u00a0Shadow Ticket\u2019s protagonist, Hicks McTaggart. Formerly rank and file in a union-busting goon squad, McTaggart now works for Unamalgamated Ops, a detective agency that (contra its name) appears to have a global footprint. Hicks is a familiar Pynchon archetype: a gumshoe like\u00a0Inherent Vice\u2019s P.I. Doc Sportello or\u00a0Bleeding Edge\u2019s fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow, and a streetwise shlemiel, in the model of\u00a0Gravity\u2019s Rainbow\u2019s Tyrone Slothrop,\u00a0Vineland\u2019s Zoyd Wheeler, and Benny Profane,\u00a0V.<\/a>\u2019s discharged seaman and \u201chuman yo-yo.\u201d Pynchon\u2019s characters have a way of being jostled around by forces outside their control, or beyond their reckoning. Call it fate. Call it conspiracy. Call it the insistent nudging of history itself. Hicks McTaggart seems especially susceptible to these influences, knocking around the novel like a greased-up pinball.<\/p>\n

Hicks is barely on the case of Stuffy\u2019s exploded hooch wagon before he\u2019s hit with another assignment: to retrieve Daphne Airmont, heiress to a million-dollar cheese fortune, and thwart her romance with hepcat Hop Wingdale, clarinetist of the Klezmopolitans. Daphne\u2019s father, Bruno Airmont, is known across Wisconsin as \u201cThe Al Capone of Cheese in Exile,\u201d having vamoosed to parts unknown, under strange circumstances. Previously, Hicks had helped Daphne out of a jam, when she was freshly hatched from a mental hospital. In keeping with the beliefs of the local Ojibwe, Hicks finds himself spiritually bound to her, forever. It\u2019s the sort of cosmic debt that the low-life dick could frankly do without. Same goes for rubbing elbows with any of these upper-crust \u201cplutes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hicks\u2019s fetch-quest to recover the \u201cMadcap Subdeb Cheese Heiress\u201d sees him cutting a broad swath across the Midwestern underworld, circa 1932. Shadowed by his sorta-sidekick Skeet Wheeler (forebear ofVineland\u2019s Zoyd, perhaps), \u201ca flyweight juvenile in a porkpie hat,\u201d Hicks rubs shoulders with Italian mafiosi, soda jerks, prohibitionist G-men, lucid dreamers, Bolshevik dairy farmers, and a troubling number of Nazi sympathizers. In the basement of a bowling alley called the New Nuremberg Lanes, he happens upon Midwestern Hitler Youth swing-dancing to a reworked version of the \u201cHorst Wessel Song.\u201d Hicks\u2019s own uncle, the ironically named Lefty, insists that \u201cDer F\u00fchrer \u2026 is der future.\u201d Such fascist foreboding comes more explicitly to bear when Hicks is drugged and shanghaied across the ocean to Hungary\u2014following the trail of both the would-be dairy queen and bootlegger Stuffy Keegan, believed to have fled across the pond aboard a \u201crogue Austro-Hungarian U-boat.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Shadow Ticket\u2019s first act plays things fairly straight\u2014particularly for a Pynchon novel. For all the silly names, songs, strange detours, and reflections on Nazis \u201cforeign and domestic,\u201d the book feels like a fairly trifling piece of period pulp fiction.<\/p>\n

Pynchon finds an ideal form (or cover) in the hard-boiled detective story. Both the genre and the author are known, even beloved, for their capacity to obfuscate. They pile on subplots, side characters, twists and turns, which to the sensitive reader are a pleasure in themselves. Such shaggy dog stories suit an author whose style has been accused of being mostly shag, with relatively little in the way of actual canine. Matters of plotting and characterization have, in Pynchon\u2019s novels, always felt secondary to extended jeremiads on history and ideology and rocket science, or to the cultivation of a general atmosphere of carnivalesque zaniness. In\u00a0Shadow Ticket,\u00a0they seem especially subordinate.<\/p>\n

Loyal readers will likely relax a bit in the book\u2019s European section, where that circusy vibe dominates, and the author\u2019s capacity for sheer, iridescent creativity is on full display: vampiric gangs, gyrocopter escapes, a roving motorcycle parade called the Trans-Trianon 2000 that zooms across the \u201cshadow zone between the concentric Hungaries old and new\u201d like something out of a\u00a0Mad Max<\/a>\u00a0sequel; references to Eukodal (an early name for oxycodone, a reported favorite of Hitler himself), international cheese syndicates, guerrilla Croat training camps, and a search for a hideous lighting fixture \u201cconsidered the crown jewel of tasteless lamps, a lamp so stupefyingly tasteless it makes nonsense of the tasteless lamp category itself.\u201d There are instances of the supernatural as well, from the invocation of ancient Indigenous wisdom, to repeated occurrences of \u201capports\u201d\u2014objects conjured or transferred in ritual s\u00e9ances. (Lew Basnight, a \u201cpsychical\u201d detective last seen traversing freely across time and space in\u00a0Against the Day,\u00a0also makes a cameo.)<\/p>\n

In Pynchon, such tumid smorgasbords of hodgepodge esoterica serve as mere set dressing. There are, typically, Big Ideas undulating underneath the insanity. The interwar Hungary of\u00a0Shadow Ticket\u00a0is a familiar Pynchonian landscape; not just in its messy mise-en-sc\u00e8ne, but in its larger theme. Like the post\u2013World War II \u201cZone\u201d of\u00a0Gravity\u2019s Rainbow,\u00a0the pre-Revolutionary America of\u00a0Mason & Dixon\u00a0(\u201ca very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true\u201d), and the titular NorCal hippie enclave of\u00a0Vineland,\u00a0Pynchon\u2019s Europe is a kind of anarchic free state, at once full of possibility and beset by a looming fear. Lines are being drawn. Freelance hustlers and black-market grifters find gainful employment both hunting down Jews and smuggling them to safety (or the temporary illusion of it). As Pynchon describes it: \u201cPeople are keeping company here who, if history had a shred of decency, would never be allowed within miles of each other.\u201d As one of Hicks\u2019s European contacts, an agent of a low-rent MI6 spy shop called MI3b, notes:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a strange time we\u2019re in just now, one of those queer little passageways behind the scenery, where popes make arrangements with Fascists and the needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact.<\/p>\n

Because Pynchon\u2019s books are such rarities, the Halley\u2019s Comet\u2013like arrival of a new one at the current \u201cstrange time\u201d cannot help but feel a little auspicious. It is tempting to read\u00a0Shadow Ticket\u2019s dread about the rising tides of fascism, antisemitism, and general lunacy against the derangements of our current moment\u2014and of the United States specifically. (One may be reminded of Pynchon\u2019s winking warning in his description of\u00a0Against the Day:\u00a0\u201cNo reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.\u201d) When a cop in\u00a0Shadow Ticket\u00a0decries the mega-wealthy cheese tycoon Bruno Airmont as not \u201can evil genius but \u2026 an evil moron, dangerous not for his intellect, what there may be of it, but for the power that his ill-deserved wealth allows him to exert, which his admirers pretend is will, though it never amounts to more than the stubbornness of a child\u2026,\u201d the description naturally calls to mind any number of present-day personalities. Ditto the warnings of an energized authoritarian creep. \u201cI know that going back to the U.S.A. will only be buying time,\u201d the heiress Airmont warns, \u201cthat sooner or later no place will be safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, the compulsively coke-sniffing police officer Egon Praediger sets the table even more ominously, adrift in a \u201cprophetic trance\u201d:<\/p>\n

This is the ball bearing on which everything since 1919 has gone pivoting, this year is when it all begins to come apart. Europe trembles, not only with fear but with desire. Desire for what has almost arrived, deepening over us, a long erotic buildup before the suffering instant of clarity, a violent collapse of civil order which will spread from a radiant point in or near Vienna, rapidly and without limit in every direction, and so across the continents, trackless forests and unvisited lakes, plaintext suburbs and cryptic native quarters, battlefields historic and potential, prairie drifted over the horizon with enough edible prey to solve the Meat Question forever\u2026<\/p>\n

Such spooky, serpentine diatribes\u2014spiked with punchy little phrases, like referring to all of human life as \u201cthe Meat Question\u201d\u2014are Pure Pynchon\u2122. It\u2019s a shame that they are in short supply. Strange, too, that the author cedes these more familiar free-jazz exegeses to a cokehead cop, when they used to be the very imprimatur of his own authorial voice. Which points to another notable tic of the novel: It is conspicuously dialogue-driven, yet most of the characters prattle in the same, tricky-to-distinguish hard-boiled patois. Pynchon\u2019s characters have always been cipher-ish: stand-ins and synecdoches representing larger systems, or mouthpieces for maniacal ideas. Even still, bracketing some rare exceptions,\u00a0Shadow Ticket\u2019s expansive cast comes across especially same-y\u2014all speaking in the same idiosyncratic manner but without a governing intelligence.<\/p>\n

Though funny, and brisk, and occasionally astonishing,\u00a0Shadow Ticket\u00a0cannot help but feel a little warmed over. It\u2019s not just a matter of those all-too-familiar authorial hallmarks (weird names, sing-alongs, deep-cut historical trivia, etc.) but of the book\u2019s basic theme. The arrival of fascism in America was already a big-time bugbear way back in\u00a0The Crying of Lot 49\u00a0and\u00a0Gravity\u2019s Rainbow,\u00a0more than half a century ago. And\u2014apart from some rather detailed accounts of various vintage motorcycles\u2014the interwar, continental setting adds little to Pynchon\u2019s already masterful mapping of the tangled legacies of colonialism, authoritarianism, internationalism, rank technological fetishism, and the cultlike worship of death.<\/p>\n

In places, lack of inspiration skates uncomfortably close to hackery. Late in\u00a0Shadow Ticket,\u00a0Pynchon cooks up a routine about Vlad the Impaler. \u201cSince I took power,\u201d Vlad laments, \u201cthe threat of Turkish invasion has fallen to zero\u2014do they call me Vlad the Invasion Preventer? No\u2026 But!\u00a0Run one stake\u00a0through one small-time chiseler\u2026\u201d Pynchon is basically tracing over a shopworn street joke about certain of Catherine the Great\u2019s, let\u2019s say, equine proclivities. In other words: It has happened before. But there\u2019s plenty to compare it to now. It\u2019s a version of the same problem that has bedeviled Pynchon\u2019s books, to varying degrees, since the publication of\u00a0Gravity\u2019s Rainbow.\u00a0Having said all there is to say, well, what else is there?<\/p>\n

Given Pynchon\u2019s age, and indications that he is making arrangements for his own exit\u2014i.e., by selling<\/a> his extensive and characteristically secretive archives to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California\u2014there is a natural, if somewhat ghoulish, hankering for\u00a0Shadow Ticket\u00a0to serve as a capstone or summative statement. For those same reasons, the novel hangs under a pall of melancholy. Perhaps the book itself is a kind of \u201capport,\u201d conjured via s\u00e9ance by an invisible author who may (for all we know) have already performed his last vanishing act. Whatever its shortcomings,\u00a0Shadow Ticket\u00a0should still rightly be regarded as an artifact from a writer who is altogether sui generis: a rare, and perhaps final, gift\u2014like getting a postcard from an old friend, dispatched from another dimension. Or a rambling crank call from a weird uncle you haven\u2019t heard from in years.<\/p>\n

Shadow Ticket\u00a0dims with Stuffy Keegan back aboard the rogue U-boat, piloting toward some mysterious, uncharted \u201ccounter-domain of exile.\u201d Hicks, meanwhile, realizes he\u2019s not headed back Stateside anytime soon himself, and attempts to adjust to the new reality of his \u201cpost-American life.\u201d As he lingers in limbo, lost in the widening gyre of a Pynchonian historical interregnum, he receives a message from his old pal Skeet, detailing his plans to head out west, chasing the sunset across that vast prospect of Pynchonian, and American, possibility: California. It seems there are still zones to map, frontiers to chart, literary and intellectual landscapes to discover. And a whole class of hardscrabble junior partners are already on the case. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like Gravity\u2019s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon\u2019s latest,\u00a0Shadow Ticket,\u00a0begins with a boom. Back in 1973, the big explosion came courtesy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":197106,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,114003,88,114002,62793],"class_list":{"0":"post-197105","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-daphne-airmont","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-gravitys-rainbow","12":"tag-thomas-pynchon"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197105\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}