Penguin
Review by Walter Cummins
Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, published sixty-two years after his first, V, the author having reached age eighty-eight, replicates a number of themes treated in his previous works. While in earlier works those themes conveyed a prevailing atmosphere of threat in an ongoing plot, this latest novel, set in 1932, is much more of a lark, as the references to Hitler and the coming Nazism and world war are treated more like the mustached Führer in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and the various cities visited by the main characters more like the Marx Brothers’ Fredonia in Duck Soup. Someone honking like Harpo wouldn’t be out of place.
It’s hard to take the characters seriously, even those who are openly or uncertainly sinister. Whatever dastardly things they done and when they snarl at others now don’t resonate as a source of menace.
The novel lacks a developing plot. It’s much more a collection of incidents, some involving characters who have appeared in previous chapters, but others free-floating. For example, the character who provides a thread through the first part set in the Milwaukee is Hicks McTaggart , a private eye working for the Unamalgamated Ops (U-Ops) detective agency under a man named Boynt Crosstown, wandering in an out of underworld joints, occasionally performing show-stopping dances with a flame called April Randazzo. Are they involved in a hard-boiled romance? And, if so, how deeply?
The question of whether they are or not drops out of the novel, especially when Hicks is shanghaied from Milwaukee for a series of adventures on an ocean liner and in the shady neighborhoods of several European cities. April, long forgotten, reenters near the end of the novel with the news that she married a gangster named Don Peppino and is carrying his child. Hicks is asked if he’s jealous, and he blows it off. It’s as if Pynchon remembered to tie up that loose end in his final pages.
In fact, Pynchon has spun off so many characters and relationships that a good number of them are left dangling, a few—like April—briefly reinserted. The last word of the novel is “Skeet,” a signature on a long wrap-up letter to Hicks that explains the outcome of a number of people and situations. But why give that role to a “flyweight juvenile” who is associated with Hicks in early chapters but has disappeared for 200 pages?
Even Hicks, who initially seemed to have the role as the novel from the opening chapters is absent for a number of chapters when the scenes take place in Europe and often retreats to the fringes of a walk-on appearance in a number of other situations.
All I’ve done so far is complain about flaws, but I still recommend reading the novel, even though it is far from Pynchon’s best. It offers the pleasures of his very inventive imagination in chapters that are, in effect, separate episodes to be consumed in a manner similar to a collection of short stories. For these chapters the reader often has to adjust to a new group of characters or an existing character who reappears in a new light. It’s not like following the development of an ongoing set of circumstances. Readers should not expect continuity, just immerse in the separate chapters.
Central to that enjoyment is the music—a good part dissonant—of Pynchon’s paragraphs with their shifting syntax and rhythms. In a sense, they mirror the unpredictable movement from one chapter to the next. Here’s an example:
“There’s the problem,” a bomb squad old-timer nods, “mode of delivery. Typical Italo whizbang tends to be absentee, time-delayed, slow-dripping acid, two-dollar Ingersoll slow-dripping acid, wired into the ignition, but seldom if ever rolled down the street by hand like it’s Bensinger’s Recreation out here or somethin, which any li’l pebble can throw your shot off, ain’t it, not the usual leaf-and-a-half special, capeesh, wanna roll it under a truck, has to be some local genius who can read this pavement like a golf green.”
There’s much more than information here. In fact, that information is not in the surface of the wording. What matters much more are the rhythms of the telling, the digressive asides and returns, the accumulating verbal energy, the sudden culmination. Like the sentences, the novel offers an intense rhythm of revelation that is an end in itself, more important than plot.
