There’s a line in Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 debut, V., that I’ve never quite forgotten, although I’ll admit I had to look it up for this review. In it, Pynchon suggests that “we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in,” which was certainly the case for me as a 22-year-old reading V. in the early 1980s, and—if Pynchon’s ninth novel, Shadow Ticket, is any indication—it appears true of him as well. Shadow Ticket takes place in 1932, five years before the author’s birth, and while I hesitate to make too much of this, isn’t making too much of things what reading his books has always been about? Pynchon is now 88. His last novel, Bleeding Edge, came out in 2013. This makes Shadow Ticket, whatever else it may be, an example of philosopher Theodor W. Adorno’s “late style,” which is to say the sort of work an artist produces toward the end of life. That Adorno coined the phrase in 1937, the very year Pynchon was born, only adds to the layering.
The question, of course, is whether any of this matters, including Shadow Ticket itself. What I mean is that the time of Pynchon’s relevance, his cultural centrality, is almost surely past. And yet, the glorious thing about Shadow Ticket is that he doesn’t seem to know it—or, more importantly, he doesn’t care. Eighty-eight, if you happen to be lucky enough to get there with your faculties largely intact, is an age at which you can do what you want, if you choose to do anything. I think of Cormac McCarthy, whose dyad of final novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, came out in 2022, a year before his death at 89, and mark a shift, in many ways, away from the desolation of his earlier work to a more expansive, quantum universe.
Shadow Ticket does not represent that sort of deviation. Rather, it seems a reconciliation, a return. Like Bleeding Edge—and, even more, 2009’s Inherent Vice—it is, after a fashion, a detective novel, built around Hicks McTaggart, a Milwaukee strikebreaker turned private eye. Like V., it involves a dizzying welter of transcontinental intrigue, steeped in old-world conspiracies and cabals. As the narrative begins, Hicks is working for a Pinkerton-type outfit called the Unamalgamated Ops. (The name recalls the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn.) He’s sent out on a “simple pickup and delivery”: to track down Daphne Airmont, the wayward heiress daughter of a “local multimillionaire.” Not only has Daphne run off with a clarinetist; she and Hicks also have their own clandestine history.
It all seems straightforward, but this being a Pynchon novel, nothing is as it seems.
Daphne’s father, Bruno, for one, is no mere worried parent. Now in Central European exile, he is an infamous heavy in his own right, known as “the Al Capone of Cheese.” That reputation stems from his efforts to corner the U.S. cheese market, “climaxing in the Cheese Corridor Incursion, a wildcat operation denounced at the time variously as Bolshevik, cartel, or Capone-related,” in which “a major sector of Wisconsin [was] decheesed in the blink of an eye.” That these details are too convoluted to explicate should go without saying, and anyway, all that is beside the point. What Pynchon is doing, rather, is setting the wheels in motion, drawing us into a web of coincidence and inference, hidden danger, and absurdity. Before he’s finished, the setting of the novel will have shifted from Milwaukee to New York and then across the Atlantic, with stops in Belgrade, Serbia; Vienna; Budapest, Hungary; and beyond.
“There used to be more time to make a getaway,” Hicks is told in Europe by an officer of Interpol. “Now they’re flashing everybody’s mug shot all around the world in the blink of an eye, pretty soon there’s no place to run anymore.”
On the one hand, that observation highlights the dizzying speed of technological innovation in the first half of the 20th century. This is hardly new territory for Pynchon; it infuses not only parts of V. but also his 1973 magnum opus, Gravity’s Rainbow, and 2006’s Against the Day. For Pynchon, technology provokes an essential, and perhaps irresolvable, set of tensions, between humanism on the one hand and fascism on the other, between counterculture and control.
As Shadow Ticket progresses, however, such commentary grows increasingly pointed; it is impossible not to recognize some discomforting parallels. “Compliance is the price of liberty,” a federal agent declares during a raid on a beer hall, in what feels less like a reference to Prohibition than like a reflection of our current circumstance. Elsewhere, another G-man cautions Hicks, “This is the next wave of Feds you’re talking to. We haven’t even begun to show how dangerous we can be, and the funny thing? Is, is we could be running the country any day now and you’ll all have to swear loyalty to us because by then we’ll be in the next war fighting for our lives, and maybe that’ll be all you’ve got.”
I want to be careful not to reduce Shadow Ticket to a political parable; it takes a long time to write a novel, after all. I can’t say when Pynchon began to work on it, and I don’t want to assume the presence of an agenda, since that is not how literature works. Instead, I’d like to suggest, what’s at work is a matter of the author’s sensibility, an exploration of his signature concerns. Fiction not only as an act of the imagination, in other words, but also, perhaps, as one of restitution, restoration, in which, as Pynchon hinted in his 1990 novel, Vineland, “secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed.”
Late in Shadow Ticket, after all the convolutions are exhausted—and, to be honest, after we may feel a bit exhausted, too—a submarine crossing the Atlantic comes upon a giant statue, “hundreds of meters high, of a masked woman draped in military gear less ceremonial than suited to action in the field.” The scene recalls more than anything the opening of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, in which a young immigrant to the United States confronts, as his ship enters New York Harbor, a nightmare vision of the Statue of Liberty, “arm with the sword now reached aloft.”
Whether Kafka was writing allegorically or otherwise remains uncertain, although increasingly the image feels much more intentional to me. Shadow Ticket, despite a tendency to meander (as might be said of every Pynchon novel), is similarly full of wisdom, the more so, perhaps, for its insistence to engage. “Some of us,” Pynchon writes, “if consciences had toenails, would be hanging on by just that margin. Yet conscience must find ways to go on operating inside history.”
Words to live by? Who can say? But at least, perhaps, a path to get along.•
