The American Dream-Master

On Thomas Pynchon

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Photograph, 1939, via Getty Images

Thomas Pynchon returns, let us hope not for the last time, to an America finally besieged by its own Gestapo, Ice also being the surname of the tech-lord villain of his last novel, 2013’s Bleeding Edge. Twelve years on, on my own side of the pond, we endure the resistible rise of our own British-grown wannabe fascists, led by an anti-European whose fake French surname is one vowel shift away from “Nigel Farrago,” a Pynchon-ass moniker if ever there was one. Yes, we know where we are. So forth, as the man himself likes to say.

Fewer people, we hear, are reading than they were 12 years ago. Attention spans are twitchier. Yet it seems that, judging from the web-based lots where these things are made manifest (see the heroic Pynchon Wiki, an indispensable companion for reading the novels, and several online Pynchon symposia going deep on Twitter, Reddit, and elsewhere) Pynchon’s cult only grows, especially among the young and youngish, and not (despite the accusations) exclusively males. This is some cause for — not hope, exactly — but trust, maybe.

Twelve years after Bleeding Edge, people weren’t expecting Shadow Ticket. Surely, he was done. Reviewers thus far have made much of the apparently “escapist,” “light,” or “minor” nature of Shadow Ticket. There’s a pattern, too, of acknowledgments that Pynchon’s world of comically evil control systems incurs ever more on our own, with the demurral that whatever the 88-year-old novelist might have to say to us now, it surely can’t be up to date. His last missive has thus generally been taken as a minor, if enjoyable, bagatelle — a sign-off with a flourish.

(Disclaimer: I have not read V., Against the Day, or Mason & Dixon. I am certainly aware that doing so would probably lead to very different thoughts on the latest novel than the ones that follow. Such is the nature of Pynchon’s work: it demands to be seen as one. I also feel it necessary to acknowledge and point readers toward what I think is by far the best available commentary on him, namely the multi-episode analyses on the American writer Michael S. Judge’s podcast, Death is Just Around the Corner. The first port of call for anyone looking to pick up The Crying of Lot 49 or Inherent Vice as their first route into Pynchonland — even before, I would say, the books themselves — ought to be Judge’s “Thomas Pynchon and the American Reconquista.”)

Shadow Ticket is Pynchon’s shortest novel after Lot 49, and it completes a trilogy of shorter, detective-inspired works Pynchon began with 2009’s Inherent Vice, still the best way into Pynchon for any newcomer. It has been noted that, with the release of Shadow Ticket, Pynchon has filled in most of the blanks in one madcap fictional-historical-mythic epic of the (American, at least) 20th century. Filling in the interwar period, the setting is Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1932. The Great Depression is in full swing, and so are the big bands. In the timeline that we know, which is not necessarily that of the novel, FDR is shortly to reach the White House, which will lead to a partial, incomplete, and never-to-be-forgiven redress of some of the wounds inflicted by the profit-drawn, death-driven vampire class.

Along the way, we meet the elements of the homegrown fascism America has always been nurturing (the kind that Hitler himself took inspiration from). We see the harbingers of this in the head-busting strikebreakers, gangster capitalists (the novel’s putative antagonist is the multimillionaire “Al Capone of cheese,” Bruno Airmont), real gangsters (Capone has just been put away), and a Hitler-admiring uncle named Lefty.

Our hero, Hicks McTaggart, is a reformed strikebreaker who got a conscience and turned private eye. Compared to the more driven lone wolves of Pynchon’s previous two novels — Inherent Vice’s hippie stoner PI Doc Sportello and Jewish mom sleuth Maxine Tarnow in Bleeding Edge — Hicks is a put-upon figure, almost a prefiguring, indeed, of the gig economy worker. He is employed by the Unamalgamated Ops agency, the name a not-so-subtle nod to intensifying consolidation by America’s security state under J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Like any pawn in today’s marketplace, Hicks is weathering a dead economy, waiting out payday, and being farmed out by his boss, the terse Boynt Crosstown, for gigs he has little choice but to take. The latest of these is to recover a former flame, the skipped-town heiress Daphne Airmont, daughter of Bruno, the aforementioned dairy kingpin.

As usual, Pynchon inserts his hero into a spiraling story of intersecting, conspiring networks of power, but the forces at play here are perhaps more inscrutable — more, well, shadowy — than in any Pynchon plot hitherto. Before long, Hicks has spied what seems to be the impossible sight of a rogue ghost U-boat appearing from underneath Lake Winnebago, and soon enough he finds himself, as the Pynchon-penned blurb puts it, “shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner,” the Stupendica (last seen in Against the Day), ending up in Budapest among a recognizable Pynchonian cast of unreal people.

The purported “lightness” that many seem to have found in Shadow Ticket holds to an extent. The trademark flights of soaring, freewheeling Pynchonian prose are reduced to a handful, though there are still some glorious passages. But big chunks read essentially as a movie script, mostly dialogue from some hard-boiled, surreal, highly ironic, pre-Code Hollywood noir. And this is not so surprising: Pynchon has always had a complicated obsession — a suspicious, fascinated love affair — with the movies, that art form which America uniquely managed to seize and then sell back to the rest of the world.

In a subtle way, the novel is as strange and formally experimental as anything Pynchon has done in the latter half of his career. And, to my surprise, it was his acknowledged masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow, which was on my mind as I read it, from the return to Nazis to a fresh willingness to revel in what we might call “the supernatural” in ways he hasn’t indulged since. I wonder if it amounts to an acknowledgment on the author’s part that, while he has successfully sought to craft a more accessible, empathic, human-centered, and in some ways more straightforward voice since 1973, everything that he has most to offer is still, always, in that book.

In his review of Shadow Ticket for Bookforum, Christian Lorentzen gives a perceptive account of the Pynchonian reading experience: “Then as now with Pynchon, the experience is the thing. The meanings are there, but they are overloaded in the prose, and the prose propels you past them.” This is where I diverge. The experience of reading Pynchon is very much the thing, but within this is, and is at least as much, the experience of experiencing “meanings.” Lorentzen, of course, is an expert critic and clearly a sensitive reader of the man’s work, which makes how he weighs Pynchon’s “meanings” more baffling. The plot of Shadow Ticket is, at least to begin with, about cheese, something which seems to Lorentzen self-evidently “a joke.” After all, “How seriously can you take a book built from such a premise?” It is quite a bizarre comment for a reader of Pynchon (nine novels in?) to make. His silliness means he’s not serious? Byron the Bulb, for starters.

The New Statesman’s Leo Robson, in his review, similarly seems to scorn what makes this novelist special. “For every moment of pathos and intimacy,” Robson writes, as though in accusation, “there has been at least one pun or scientific allusion.” Robson refers to Pynchon’s own introduction to 1984’s Slow Learner, a story collection, which is the fullest — well, only — account he has ever really given of himself and his development as a novelist. There Pynchon described his efforts (from 1990’s Vineland on) to balance his natural bent towards the potentially alienating zaniness of cartoonish characters and the more cerebral reliance on “printed sources” and grand motivic constructions, with a more accessible style based on “the human reality” of character and relationship. And I’d agree that Pynchon in fact achieved some successful harmonization of his talents in his later work. The shorter detective trilogy of the 2010s and now 2020s indicates, possibly, his attempt to reach the widest audience possible, and the artistic fruits of this new attention to the people within the larger “systems” are evident from Vineland on. It is the touching effectiveness of the familial bonds in that novel that Paul Thomas Anderson has so successfully translated to a larger audience in the recent One Battle After Another.

Yet for Robson, “Shadow Ticket seems to consist entirely of what Pynchon claimed to ‘dislike’ about his writing. It’s hard to believe that he ‘began from’ Hicks and his personal predicament,” Robson writes, “and not the symbolic structure or topical resonances, or that the material about German inflation, Interpol and Béla Kun didn’t place him at the mercy of printed sources.” The implicit judgment here — that there is a right way to go about the novel that we all tacitly agreed upon, and that even Pynchon ought to be no exception to this rule — is a little dispiriting.

A writer’s most essential, valuable gift is often the burden they find themselves seeking to escape — or at least transcend. But Pynchon’s unique genius has always been an unerring grasp of structure, form, and, above all, a restlessly intuitive feeling for language as alive — a sense that, line by line, sometimes word by word, creates a kind of contrapuntal play of motif, of (yes) scientific allusion, of cultural arcana, of buried history, maps of power and structures of perception, resonances on different frequencies of meaning, of theme, which, as the reader moves through the text, begin to harmonize with one another, rising out of it in a redefined experience of “paranoia” not so dissimilar, in fact, from Caliban’s “thousand twangling instruments” humming uniquely about each reader.

I’ve dwelt on these two reviews because, though written by apparently sympathetic critics, both display two attitudes that hold people back from reading or appreciating Pynchon in the first place. Without some willingness to follow deeply into the historical territory he’s playing with in any given novel — that madness-inducing wallowing in a sea of meanings and resonances rather than simply glimpsing them as they are “overloaded in the prose” — the peculiarly powerful emotion his novels offer won’t properly hit. The same applies to frustrated expectations of Pynchon trying, with varying degrees of success, to fulfil some contract of literary fiction signed by most other writers before they even know they’re born — what Milan Kundera, in The Art of the Novel, calls the “verisimilitude pact.” Though I’m fairly sure he would have disliked Pynchon’s work if he ever read it, Kundera is a very useful reference point.

In the opening essay of “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes,” Kundera locates the Spanish author as the fountain of a European novelistic tradition. Crucial to the ethos of this (largely abandoned) “legacy” in the novel is, Kundera writes, “the appeal of play”:

Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Denis Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste are for me the two greatest novelistic works of the eighteenth century, two novels conceived as grand games. They reach heights of playfulness, of lightness, never scaled before or since. Afterward, the novel got itself tied to the imperative of verisimilitude, to realistic settings, to chronological order.

This is a tradition to which Pynchon belongs at least spiritually, as much if not more than any recognizable American lineage. (His exile from American public life is also, in its way, literary.) As George Plimpton pointed out in the 1980s, Pynchon belongs partly to the picaresque tradition and so resembles Cervantes — and through him, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, even Dickens — more than any American writer other than Melville, with whom he certainly shares a few frequencies.

It may seem a little obvious (especially for the already on-board “heads”) to have to commit these rebuttals to print, but it also seems a certain amnesia is at play in our moment’s aesthetic disappointments. Tired expectations or frayed patience for the demands of fiction and other worthwhile things may be encouraged by the constraints of a technologized reality, broken attention spans, etc., but then surely the imperative not to forget the possibilities that have already been opened up by these forms as instruments of consciousness is even more urgent. Kundera, again, proves useful:

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility. But again, to exist means: “being-in-the-world.” Thus, both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities.

I think this must be something like what Don DeLillo had in mind when he remarked that it “was as though Hemingway died one day and Pynchon was born the next, and fiction changed in that manner, abruptly, from pure realism to something more cosmic.” If we renege on all such cosmic-imaginal abilities within ourselves, which Pynchon at his best is a shining example of, then, as is clear by now, AI and the accompanying vision of consciousness and existence will continue to code and recode our shared world into a new “reality” no one asked for. Either we accept that the “cosmic” is also the human imagination, and that it may be allowed to take strange, even silly or somewhat stagey forms (Shadow Ticket takes all of these) or we open ourselves further, as though we needed it, to a yawning future of preprogrammed AI realism. (Needless to say — Pynchon warned about that, too.)

In the 20th century — and Pynchon knows this well — the “realism” imperatives were only heightened by the rise of movies and television, more immediately accessible media with a lower attention demand. It is hardly original to observe that many contemporary novels seem, consciously or not, to mimic the rules of these other media, with little concern that they have “abandoned” much of the irreplaceable possibilities unique to their own form. In Kundera’s words, this is simply its “almost boundless freedom. Throughout its history, the novel hasn’t taken much advantage of that. It has missed out on that freedom. It has left unexplored many formal possibilities.” It strikes me just how transferable Kundera’s remarks on the relationship between the novel, form, play, and freedom are to Pynchon’s historically oriented concerns about human freedom in the widest sense, the lineage of his youth in the 1960s when such things still seemed possible. “If the novel should really disappear,” Kundera warns disquietingly, “it will do so not because it has exhausted its powers but because it exists in a world grown alien to it.”

Assuming these lenses on a near seven-decade oeuvre are legitimate — though not the only ones, God forbid — how does Shadow Ticket fit, or not? Several reviewers have already suggested that, on these terms — considered either as another Pynchonian political prophecy, a brilliant paranoid map of “systems” and controlling conspiracies, or even just as historical or detective fiction — it is weak. It’s true that the historical milieus are as genre-pastiche colorful — though, as ever, lovingly detailed — as we’d expect, but they feel comparatively sketched, hinted at, as though Pynchon acknowledges that the historical maps of conspiracy and doom that he etched in his earlier novels are now widely available. There is reference to the origin of the Dawes Plan, for instance, and to the amalgamation of independent private investigators into the wider FBI network of J. Edgar Hoover. But where the younger Pynchon would have drawn these into a wider web of interlocking menace and meaning, here they read as brief nods, wry flashes of a history that’s already on the record, to be read, examined, and learned from, if anyone cared to.

In its treatment of character, Shadow Ticket betrays another stark departure from the previous volumes in Pynchon’s late trilogy. The characters, in effect, are all straight out of the movies. Hicks and his girlfriend April watch themselves on a date as though they are actors fulfilling roles they’ve already seen play out on the silver screen; on the run with Daphne, both Hicks and she know (per It Happened One Night, just a year or two from hitting theatres in their timeline) that “runaway fiancées and their duty-bound pursuers are expected to fall in love.” References to characters in the novel as actors in a movie — suggestions, even, that the novel’s “reality” itself is or has somehow become a movie — abound. The novel, then, finds Pynchon embracing the ironic possibilities of form and its artifice in ways he hasn’t for some time.

So, what of Hicks? In some ways, he’s a recognizable Pynchon dude — a figure usually defined by a kind of scrappy, seat-of-the-pants escapability, go-getting courage, and a disrespect for authority (likely both cause and effect of Pynchon’s affection for the cartoon heroes like Bugs Bunny, Shaggy, and Homer Simpson). On the other side, there is intuition and a naïve desire for the truth. (In Inherent Vice, Bigfoot Bjornsen compliments Doc Sportello on this score, remarking that, unlike most hippies, “you know the difference between child-like and childish.”) A lineage back to the figure of the thin knight Quixote is clear. Pynchon might be the only modern novelist to have clung to this archaic archetype for all it is worth. Pynchon’s heroes are always flawed and jaded, but they still believe that things have meaning and matter.

The previous two “detective” novels featured perhaps Pynchon’s most detailed, well-observed, human characters. Doc and Maxine are rounded and affection-inducing, displaying clearly what the older Pynchon had by then learnt from the close observations of more traditional realism. When we close Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, we know them, we care about them. Hicks, by contrast, is a lovable doofus, drawn as lightly as everything else in Shadow Ticket. He elicits our sympathy for his good-heartedness, particularly when we learn that he is a hunk of muscle with a conscience, who turned his back on his head-busting days when he grasps that the “strange feeling he couldn’t get a handle on was relief at not having killed somebody.”

But, uniquely for a Pynchon hero, Hicks is not paranoid. Unlike Doc Sportello or Oedipa Maas, no Golden Fang or Tristero web draws him irresistibly into its proliferating mesh. Hicks has three clear motivations: get a solid payday, a ticket out of Hungary back to Milwaukee, and Daphne Airmont — whom he rescued once before and for whom, via an Ojibwe belief Pynchon has referenced many times, he feels ever-after responsible — home safe. He doesn’t seem too bothered by the whole “conspiracy” thing, which in any case is so disjointed that it hardly seems to be what you might call “the point” of Shadow Ticket.

I don’t disagree that old age’s waning energy, and the need to conserve it, likely led Pynchon to write Shadow Ticket in his sparest ever mode. What I would suggest is that we also trust this as a carefully considered choice on his part. We know him to be a writer of very consistent self-awareness, ironic flexibility, and masterful control over his whole body of work. If he chose to write and release Shadow Ticket at all and over a decade after apparent withdrawal from the scene, which of course he was never even in to begin with, he probably felt he had something new to say within this form, even amidst the admitted constraints of age.

The key to what this something might be comes only in the novel’s latter half, as Hicks half-hunts for Daphne around Budapest, where he also encounters a cadre of (as the Pynchon-penned blurb summarizes) “Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists” — a familiar carnivalesque. Except that in this Budapest, the logic of the “normal world, which may no longer exist” seems to have dissolved.

In another essay in The Art of the Novel on Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, Kundera refers to Broch as possessing a “polyhistorical” novelistic mind. In his way, Pynchon is another. Gravity’s Rainbow, for example, shows how historical moments can be overlaid and placed side by side to reveal unbroken continua of energy and thought, so that they in fact reflect one another backward and forward in time. They echo on, continuing their transformations into the present, so that patterns of development that might seem distinct — the development of the V-2 rocket and the atomic bomb, for instance — are revealed as being one thing, contained within the novel itself and all leading directly to me, sitting in this chair, reading it.

Within the historical sweep of his larger work, though, Pynchon always seems to be on the hunt for pockets of escape from history, the as-yet-unmapped territory, the uncharted or fugitive zone. In Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste, Kundera reminds us, “we come upon the two heroes in mid-journey; we don’t know where they’ve come from or where they’re going. They exist in a time without beginning or end, in a space without frontiers, in the midst of a Europe whose future will never end,” where time “idles happily by [before] it has set forth on the train called History.”

In Shadow Ticket, the Native American reservation that briefly offers Daphne shelter is the shadowy relic of a “phantom treaty.” A rogue U-boat surfacing from Lake Milwaukee is “an encapsulate volume of pre-Fascist space-time.” From the “American not yet gone fascist,” to which Hicks seems doomed, some strange grace gets him “thrown by some occult switchwork,” or alternately, “desire for what has almost arrived,” onto “an alternate branch-line,” one of those “wastes of the world,” a strange future-past version of interwar Europe that is neither future nor past, but pure, shadowy “possibility.”

In this shadow-Budapest, too, objects can “apport” (“app”) or “asport” (“ass”) — that is, appear and disappear seemingly from and into nothing. Here, there are real vampires, golems with rabbi escorts and the Czech (meaning the original) “robota” — the still-supernatural progenitors of since disenchanted, deadly dull technologies, imaginatively captured by capital. There is a running joke throughout the novel in which Hicks attributes the secrets of some new tech wizardry as having “something to do with radio,” and I can’t help but ponder the absurd global situation we find ourselves in, strapped to endless life-necessary devices, whose workings we do not understand other than, maybe, as having something to do with radio waves, about which most of us also know nothing, yet which, as the lyrics of one of the novel’s ditties remind us, are still “everywhere, you’re / ubiquitous . . . like the / airwaves, through the air . . . .”

Here in shadow-Budapest, everything is animate, potentially alive — not only is cheese alive and “more than some clever simulation,” as Hicks has already been seriously informed, but a motorcycle, “let’s face it, is a metaphysical critter . . . there’s a fierce living soul here that we have to deal with.” In perhaps the strangest (and best) bit of prose in the book, Hicks’ sort-of lover, Terike, rides a motorcycle into a “city beneath the city”:

. . . grown over the years according to the demands of history, gunpowder logistics, mineral springs everywhere, saline, radioactive, violently boiling, laminar as sleep, bringing in coachloads of well-off Europeans rolling on a yearly cycle spa to spa along routes as closely mapped and annotated as pilgrimages . . .

The structure frays. Any Pynchonian pretense toward genre satisfaction, detective or otherwise, dissolves. (Magic tends rather to get in the way of the causal logic necessary to such a plot.) It was in the final 50 or so pages that Gravity’s Rainbow — the comparison that the feel of the novel had been compelling me toward anyway — truly made itself felt. Its third section, “In the Zone,” is set in the wasteland of postwar Europe. Here, the nominal (and soon-to-dissolve) hero, Tyrone Slothrop, wanders the dreamland of an anarchic break between historical chasms. In this place after the end of the world — or at least a world — perhaps something different, new, might blink into being. Even if (spoiler) it doesn’t, it reminds us that the possibility is still there, imaginable. As the epigraph for Inherent Vice (a piece of Situationist graffiti scrawled on Parisian walls in May 1968) goes: “Under the paving stones, the beach!”

The epigraph for Shadow Ticket, we are told, was spoken by the actor Bela Lugosi in the 1934 film The Black Cat: “Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney . . . perhaps not.” Pynchon has always felt there is more to the 20th and 21st centuries’ standardized, charted, plotted, gridded, predefined, and profiteered definition of the “reality” we have made of the world, of the earth — and not just more than meets the eye, but more than gets into most serious works of fiction. I return to Kundera’s description of one of the novel’s roads less traveled, or what he calls “oneiric narrative”:

The dream is only the model for the sort of imagination that I consider the greatest discovery of modern art. But how can uncontrolled imagination be integrated into the novel, which by definition is supposed to be a lucid examination of existence? How can such disparate elements be united? That calls for a real alchemy!

Pynchon is such an alchemist. In Shadow Ticket, he shows us that he knows it, too.

“Ahhhgghh!” someone shouts in frustration at a late-onset digressive tale in the closing pages. “Do we have time for this?” Within the hour-is-late anarchy of Shadow Ticket, Pynchon plays again, in a way as youthful and sly as he has ever been, and one step ahead of expectations. Maybe it’s because he knows it’s his last time, or soon to be ours. But here an American dream-master chooses instead to let go of all paranoia, strip the stage, lighten up, and reveal the back wall of our theater, which was there the whole time. His people and his world, human possibilities, shadows, remain somewhere in that always present space of possibility, before the darkness of whatever comes next.

I think of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” when Hippolyta and Theseus watch Bottom’s troupe of bad actors. “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard,” she says. To which the reply comes: “The best in this kind are but shadows.”

Gus Mitchell is a writer based in London. His work is featured or forthcoming in the Stinging Fly, Jacobin, Plough, Commonweal, the Cleveland Review of Books, and other places.