Thomas Pynchon’s first novel in 12 years is an event, not only because it was widely suspected that the eighty-eight-year-old author would never publish anything again, but also because Pynchon’s work was always political, although its ideological underpinnings have more in common with Ted Kaczinsky than the Democratic Party. Pynchon’s work has often focused on the dark underside of American history, making sure to note the corporate monopolies in nearly every aspect of life, the death drive of technological globalism, and the real and imagined conspiracies that rule people’s lives. The question was how would Pynchon’s new book react to MAGA America, to the seeming fulfilment of his most outrageous visions?
Shadow Ticket takes place in 1932, the Great Depression rages in America, while authoritarianism rises in Europe. Prohibition is in full force, although it seems to have little effect on people’s drinking habits. Hicks, a Milwaukee private detective and a former union buster, is tasked to find Daphne, the missing heiress to a Cheese empire, who has run off with a clarinet player. Her father has a monopoly on the cheese business in town; he is referred to as the Al Capone of Cheese. The walls are closing in on Hicks in the States, so he takes the job to look for Daphne, except she seems to have disappeared somewhere in Europe. This brings Hicks to the ruins of what used to be the Austro-Hungarian empire. There, Hicks is to encounter all the characters of a continent in decay: con-men, libertines, fascists. Soon, Hicks is going to be wishing he was back in Milwaukee, where “life seldom gets more serious than somebody stole somebody’s fish”.
As is usual with Pynchon, the plot has so many subplots and characters that the brief outline accounts for maybe one-third of what is actually going on in the book. It makes Raymond Chandler’s private eye novels that it is partly riffing on look tightly plotted in comparison. Characters pop in and out of chapters, unannounced and unintroduced, to fulfil their plot function or, more often, to set up a joke. Unfortunately, the jokes often fall flat. There are only so many puns on cheese, only so many ways one can write about the Cheese empire, which has its multinational monopoly and which can potentially threaten the sitting president. After a while, it gets tired. More so than in other Pynchon novels, we are aware of the man behind the curtain, and it is hard to pay him no attention; he is telling the story, he is the puppet master making his farcical creations dance. The novel is self-consciously fictional. It mocks its conventions as it goes, even on the linguistic level. Sentences like: “A glance you could call discouraging.” or “He doesn’t quite slam the door, but there is some emphasis on the way it shuts” are placing the reader at a distance by emphasising their own role in upsetting the expectations of detective fiction. You will never be able to get immersed in this world because this is not the real world. In small doses, this works, but not so much in 300 pages with pacing that never stops to take a breather. That all of this goes on for too long seems a trite complaint. Just looking at the page count and scope of his most famous novels, it is clear that too much is how Pynchon rolls. But as the book goes on, the returns start diminishing. Once you get to the end, you will be wondering what the point of it all was.
In a cascade of Cheese barons, Czechoslovak golems in indiscreet sexual triangles with rabbis, discontinued submarines under Lake Michigan, and objects appearing at will out of thin air, any kind of larger point is easily lost. Hicks passes through early 1930s Europe like a butter knife, but at the end of the novel, he ends up stranded in Hungary, surrounded by an incomprehensible language. Nothing is explained; nothing is revealed. Shadow Ticket is like Georg Grosz’s painting, a disorganised rabble of insignificant miniatures running into each other, grotesque, cartoonish, and overextended. Bugs Bunny meets Neue Sachlichkeit. A large part of the second half of the book concerns fascism, from the German Nazis to the Ustaše training camps, fascism in its “springtime of beauty… before it descended into paperwork and brutality”. But even the Nazis do not seem terribly frightening or dangerous, which might be the point if one is being so crude as to try and extrapolate one from it. That everything is a farce, no matter how serious things get, you should never stop seeing how ridiculous the whole enterprise is; the republic is bought and paid for, fascism was always present and never truly leaves, democracy is fleeting, and so is life, liberty, and happiness, but dick jokes are eternal.
Shadow Ticket is the slightest of Pynchon’s slight works. The comparison with Pynchon’s earlier novels is inevitable. Pynchon’s ability to always see the horror in the heart of farce, so present in his other books, is here used as a setup for a joke the punchline of which never quite arrives. Many prominent writers who were inspired by Pynchon have tried their hand at satirising Trump’s America, Salman Rushdie in The Golden House, or George Saunders in various stories. In every case, the results have been embarrassing. They have failed to properly capture the reality that is so laughably idiotic that by consciously trying to reduce it to satire, it just amounts to a somewhat pouty caricature that betrays a fundamental incomprehension of how things ended up the way they did. Pynchon doesn’t even attempt to do so; the 20th-century horror in the novel serves as little else than window dressing. Never the type to preach from a mountain top, when everything that Pynchon’s novels were ‘predicting’ did in fact happen, the prophet has nothing left to do but retreat behind underdeveloped historical parallels and mildly amusing puns.
