Thomas Pynchon's reputation precedes him. He is literature's ur-diagnostician of the post-war psyche, the author of difficult doorstopper novels, and a sort of prophet of paranoia—someone ahead of his time in seeing the outlines of various malevolent forces lurking beyond the safe borders of modern life. Pynchon published Shadow Ticket last month, and because the reclusive genius is now 88, his ninth novel is also in all likelihood the final dispatch he will leave to the world. "Which will come first," fellow aging literary great William T. Vollman asked in his review, "the old lion’s last roar, or my last read?"
The supposed finality of Shadow Ticket has prompted many to consider whether the novel is a sufficiently grandiose coda to Pynchon's legacy and the big ideas he has spent the past six decades working through. Readers expecting the novel to be backward-looking or even dour might then be surprised to find a book utterly unconcerned with propriety, a book populated with old-timey slapstick fare and silly songs about how it's peanut butter and jelly time ("right down-in-to-yer bel-ly time!"). Those readers might wonder: Why is this Great American Novelist's swan song stuffed with so much goofball nonsense?
The literary, metaphysical heft of Pynchon's work is important, though just as critical to the experience of reading him is the matter of how he accomplishes all of this. Which is to say: More than anything, Pynchon is funny, wading through this gnarly psychic terrain primarily by means of humor. That's never been more apparent than in the case of Shadow Ticket, which is, if not the author's funniest book, the novel where Pynchon's sense of humor and flair for the sophomoric do the greatest share of work. The mainstream literary press has largely characterized Shadow Ticket as Pynchon-lite, a fair reading of the book's relatively scaled-back depth and ambition. I would argue that's a matter of Pynchon having been proven right by reality to the point that all the once-hidden malignancy he obsessed over is now in the indisputable foreground of American life, and also that Shadow Ticket's commitment to being funny is a stylistic achievement worth toasting and taking seriously. Thomas Pynchon is smiling through it all; he can believe this is his life.
Shadow Ticket opens in Milwaukee in 1932, between the arrest of Al Capone and the repeal of prohibition. While dodging anarchist bombs and gleeful offers to clink glasses with American Nazi cosplayers, private eye Hicks McTaggart is sent on the trail of the recently missing Daphne Airmont, heiress to Wisconsin's largest cheese fortune. Forces from the federal government, the cheese and traditional mobs, and the recently broken-up Austro-Hungarian empire are on his tail the entire time, and Daphne's trail leads Hicks to Hungary and its associated borderlands. While the U.S. is staggering through the Great Depression, Europe is atilt with the ascension of fascism. Clearly, Pynchon is drawing stateside parallels; the book begins with an explosion, diners pause for a beat "as if everybody’s observing a moment of stillness, and nobody seems surprised."
Fair to expect such a novel to be dark, yet the register Pynchon is going for is hilarity. Hicks does not so much run from danger as he dances. This is Pynchon's third straight detective novel, though where Inherent Vice's Doc Sportello regarded the world and his slowly diminishing place in it through a cannabinoid haze and Bleeding Edge's Maxine Tarnow contended with the forthcoming alienations wrought by technology and capital through an occasionally fraught parenthood, Hicks tumbles through darkening times on his feet, hitting a little two-step. The wolves at the door are of concern, but so is the next party, the next dame to woo, whatever Big Band number will set him moving. He is dancing, dancing. Whether or not he will die is basically not his problem.
This is because Hicks is a man liberated. His early history is as an essentially undifferentiated slab of Midwest muscle, a square-shaped man of uncertain patronage who finds himself employed as a strikebreaker not because he hates unions but simply because he's good at fighting. He experiences a crisis of faith after nearly killing a striker and turns to private eye work. Where'd you run off to, his former colleagues wonder?
Bowling Ball Hospital out on Highway 41, looking in on the progress of his prize Brunswick Mineralite ball, which is having weight distribution troubles, “Drilling, plugging, went on for hours, emergency call in fact, they had to send an ambulance.” A converted Model T depot hack with little bowling-ball-sized gurneys and everybody in white coats.
Here we see both Pynchon's gifts as a straight-line writer of jokes, but also a clever little turn. While the concept of a bowling ball hospital is funny, Hicks invokes it in service to explaining why he is no longer beating the shit out of people for a living. He can sympathize with the plight of things made to get thrown into a crowd.
In between setup and punchline is some force of misdirection, making it so any author determined to be funny must continually surprise. That takes tremendous skill. Other writers might come up with a character like the Al Capone of cheese, but only Pynchon would conceive of having Hicks overhear the social chatter at the Airmont estate, which largely concerns the recent "Bruno Airmont Dairy Metaphysics Symposium held annually at the Department of Cheese Studies at the UW branch in Sheboygan, this year featuring the deep and perennial question, 'Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?'"
Sustaining such a force while telling a story about what is essentially the end of a party—the exchange of Swing Era two-steps for Nazi era goose steps—is even more difficult, yet Pynchon pulls it off. Something like that would only be possible through humor, and while Shadow Ticket lacks the profundity of really every single other Pynchon novel, it manages to sustain itself on laughs as it chugs towards an abyss. There is nothing funny beyond the end of the punchline here. And yet there is a pathos in joking towards it.
What Shadow Ticket evokes and then sustains is less the paranoia of Pynchon's earlier work and more a mood of frenzy. What happens when order frays? Things get weird, which is what he's interested in crystallizing. In Fiume, at the triple junction between Italy, Hungary, and the Balkans, "Rogue nuns in civilian gear are two-stepping with bomb-rolling Marxist guerrillas. Fascist daredevil aviators are playing poker with Yangtze Patrol veterans who believe all that airplanes are good for is to be shot down. Wagnerian sopranos are learning the hillbilly guitar chords to 'Wabash Cannonball.' Pirates are getting soused with peddlers of marine insurance." In other words, the end of the world also probably means a party.
A sense of motion animates the book, undertaken by characters thrown into ridiculous forces beyond their control. Almost everyone Hicks interacts with is running some madcap scheme, and nobody stays still long enough to get sentimental. Our protagonist has a thing for April Randazzo, though she's the "promised bride of evil, known locally as Don Peppino Infernacci." When his goons pay Hick's a visit to tell him to fuck off, they get administrative, asking him, "You mind signing this release form for Don Peppino, he likes to see some proof we didn’t just go off someplace and roll a couple of frames."
Speaking of Don Peppino, yes, the novel is stuffed with funny names: Fancy Vivid, Hoagie Hivnak, TP O’Grizbee, G. Rodney Flaunch, Dr. Swampscott Vobe MD, Glow Tripforth del Vasto, Dr. Zoltan von Kiss, Lady Forsythia Bladesmith. This isn't unique to Shadow Ticket—the narrator of Mason & Dixon is named Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke—though we see here most clearly that Pynchon's fixation on funny names is not just a dedication to making himself and his readers laugh, but also a storytelling technique, a particularly effective one in the case of Shadow Ticket.
A name, in most cases, is something given to you, a marker of circumstance. What does it say, then, about the version of 1932 Pynchon is trying to evoke that a Nazi cosplayer would be named Ooly Schaufl or that the child star of a Great Depression-sploitation movie would be named Squeezita Thickly? It suggests that these characters, in all their cynicism and evil ideation, for all their flaws and strengths, cannot help being born into a preposterous, unruly world. There's a loose joy here, an insistence on seeing the absurd heart of things, even very evil things. Pynchon's characters are, in his words, "thrashing desperately themselves against the relentless vortex of a sinking world order." Their nominative deformations hint at the outlines of the vortex. Their labor is exploited by ever-greedier bosses, the political regime holding everything together is unstitching, and those in power can't stop what's coming or even see its shape. Or, to use seven words instead of 29: "Assistant Special Agent in Charge T. P. O’Grizbee."
And what of our world? Pynchon's final misdirection is to leave the reader hanging, triangulating fascism's century-old first wave to its present-day second and refusing to offer a way out. He sees in the time just before he was born the seeds of the sociopolitical conditions that would define the last era of his life. But he does not prescribe a corrective. In the end, despite all his yearnings for Milwaukee's comforting tube-meat and cheez, Hicks is forced to accept the "counter-domain of exile." FDR is dethroned in a coup led by the country's most powerful businessmen, who install General Douglas MacArthur as President. As Pynchon terms it, "post-American life" is here, the order that propped up the country throughout his life no longer capable of sustaining itself.
When Hicks and Daphne part for good, Pynchon kisses them off with an imaginary twinned soliloquy, something one of them should have been saying but does not.
We’re in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree. If anybody’s 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’s that last light bulb, once so bright, now feebly flickering, about to burn out, and it’s well past time to be saying, Florsheims, let’s ambulate.
"Something like that," he writes. "If anybody was still there to hear it. Which there isn't." I read this as Pynchon saying thank you for coming to the show, which is now over. The jokes have gotten us this far, the silly songs, the goofball names, all the cartoonishness, every spoof and gag that Pynchon had left in him spent in service of outlining the looming bulk of something very dark. But now that something is here. Pynchon doesn't fully leave the audience hanging, though. "Maybe they’ll keep finding new ways to be innocent," a character writes, alluding to the nebulously defined "eternal youth." In other words, there will always be jokes to laugh at, no matter what happens. But "innocent ain't the same thing as not guilty."
