“When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line.” As good a place as any to start. A new Pynchon novel, Shadow Ticket, came out in October, and for those who were waiting for this sort of validation, The New Yorker has weighed in, and it is safe to ignore it.
I didn’t do that, of course. As part of what The New Yorker refers to as the ‘cult’ who are always interested in what Pynchon has to say, I went down and got it the first day of release, kept it handy on top of my most urgent bedside reading stack, paced myself by reading when I had time to absorb it, and finished it a few weeks ago.
The New Yorker is not really a Pynchon sort of magazine. They are a John Updike sort of magazine. Updike, if you don’t know, is that top-hatted feller in the front masthead who holds a monocle, for looking down his snoot at just about everything.
OK, I kid, obviously, John Updike has never worn a top hat or monocle, that I know of, though his penchant for looking down his snoot at post modern fiction of the sort Pynchon is an eponymous exemplar ( look up: ‘Pynchonesque’ ), is well known.
So while I love reading The New Yorker, I certainly didn’t walk to the library on a sunny Fall afternoon expecting canonical praise. “Silly” “weird” “abstruse” were slid into the carefully judicious early paragraphs of their review. I’m not here to review The New Yorker reviews- that would be bringing a pea shooter to a Pulitzer Prize ‘fight’. The reviewer has in fact won one, the author has not, though he was selected for one by the committee, until the trustees put the kibosh on that, calling his novel Gravity’s Rainbow, ‘turgid’ among other judicious words. Score one for the literary establishment.
On the other hand, a certain segment of academia is obsessed with TP. The analysis can at times be a bit above my amateur reader’s pay grade, though I do my best. Pynchon’s themes, a tangled dark web of control and anarchy, against which the preterite caperers he loves caper and strive through the shadows, are grist for the ‘publish or perish’ mill. The question lingers, after finishing the book: what is an amateur reader to get out of this?
Laughs? For sure. Pynchon remains one of the funniest Pulitzer Prize rejects out there, for those who like their humor deeply absurd, with a side of the irrepressibly juvenile- The New Yorker is not the first gray lady to call him ‘silly’. Pynchon, however, has no use for the sharp satire of Vonnegut or Heller. Humor is not integral to his narrative situations, though it is to his camp visions: irony weaponized, humanism made dangerously flippant. A paranoiac burlesque. Characters burst out in song, as if the apocalypse and dark conspiracy were a musical. In Shadow Ticket, the protagonist knows there’s something up when a German u-boat appears under the ice of 1932 Lake Michigan.
Genre kicks? Recent Pynchon novels have all adopted a narrative stance based on noir detective fiction. This can be helpful as a critical approach, but certainly not definitive. One review headline screamed: “plotless”. Possibly a genre fiction reviewer from a neighborhood weekly, still waiting in the drawing room for Sam Spade to assemble the suspects and finger the perp? Eustace Tilley in the kitchen with the Royal Typewriter, I’m guessing. The novels that follow Against the Day (2006) are all shorter, somewhat more direct in their narrative, and all inspired by detective fiction. Though they are really NOT detective fiction, this may explain his continued sales.
‘Plotless’ would fall well south of ‘profusely plotted’ in word counts of most Pynchon reviews, I think. Shadow Ticket is no exception. However, it is like its P.I.-adjacent cousins, Inherent Vice (2009, which inspired Paul Michael Anderson’s excellent cinema version) and Bleeding Edge (2013), direct in its narrative, making it easier to keep track. For the record-a private Investigator with a shady past pursues a missing heiress. Is he pursuer, or pursued? Nazis, British spies, the FBI and Prohibition era gangland all appear, and spoiler alert to all neighborhood weekly reviewers: the final drawing room scene does not. The novel’s concerns are less procedural and more historical, and the allusions to 30’s American Nazism, and by extension, current, albeit crypto, American Nazism, are clear. And Shadow Ticket, with its lively and peripatetic color and invention, is as good a place to start reading Pynchon as any. The author ultimately seems to be winning this battle; many very laudatory -if somewhat surprised, reviews have appeared.
Ostensibly more related to those later novels, which turn detective genre tropes toward modern anxieties, than his early, darkly comic paranoid/apocalyptic novels, Shadow never finds the depth of insight and invention of the pivotal Mason & Dixon, though it does very much recall its yearning for human connection, a theme in Pynchon which did not really fully emerge until M&D’s predecessor, Vineland, the inspiration for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. But it is certainly not a simple whodunnit.
Shadow would be a curiosity, and a fairly unresolved one at that, if not for its many relationships to Pynchon’s earlier, greater works. But that’s the point. Pynchon is not trying to outline the anxieties of a suburban Connecticut husband, or a conflicted PI; he is attempting, if flippantly, anarchically, paranoiacally, to capture the anxieties of history itself.
But where does Shadow Ticket fall? Like all his books, a second reading can help clarify. In a fictional timeline, Shadow falls squarely between the fragmentary, often overwritten anarchists’ phantasmagoria of Against the Day and the encyclopedically horrific, determinedly unresolved Pulitzer-petrifying Gravity’s Rainbow. Within his lively and devoted ‘cult’, ranking Pynchon’s nine novels has become a sport. I won’t do that, they are all different and inhere to different concerns, both in style and substance, but here are some thoughts, and you maybe can pick out, loosely, my favorites in the examples below.
Hard boiled conspiracy? An early short novel which draws on detective tropes, but which also shows the influence of Borges, is The Crying of Lot 49, which I recently re-read. There are few options for characters- and readers- in Pynchon’s maze like fictional worlds. Enjoy the ride, is one. Laughter becomes armor. Here, a suburban housewife discovers a dark conspiracy behind the American (Californian) dream. Lawrence Sterne is the model here and in most of Pynchon, not Updike.
Zoning out? I started reading Pynchon in the 70s with the quest for identity in the soulless technological nightmare and sexual industrial complexities of Gravity’s Rainbow, where an American officer in London in WWII is discovered to get erections when V2 rockets are launched. Which is hilarious- and horrifying and strangely poetic. He spends the rest of the monster novel on the run in the occupation zones of postwar Germany, from those who desire to use humans for control, and to colonize human desire.
Sentences running on Pynchon time? The sentences swell, drift, and land on unpredictable beachheads. Many miss the landing point by miles. Some take your breath away- literally. The first sentence of Mason & Dixon clocks in 120 words before surrendering to the second. The critics, anxious to move on to the next Pulitzer Prize winner, do not like spending the time to parse these verbal behemoths in a time sensitive literary world that grew up on the pared down razor wire prose of Hemingway. But do try this at home. You have the time and you’re not paying by the word. What are novels for?
A later New Yorker article addressed the stereotype of readers of David Foster Wallace ( and by extension, his influences, such as TP) as sort of literary incel ‘gooners’, reading their Post Modern Bricks to fluff up their self esteem, a form of mental masturbation ( the author, Hermione Hoby, ultimately repudiates this stereotype). Fans of experimental fiction will always be subject to these snipes. One must devote time and mental bandwidth to enjoy Rainbow, it’s true. But Shadow is a very direct, even pacy read that touches on similar themes in often hilarious ways.
Levelling up? The sublimely gothic M&D, mapping the mysteries of the heavens onto the greed and bigotry of an 18th Century American wilderness that still today holds racism close to its heart in the Trump regions, features, among other digressions, a Native American captivity narrative of the sort popular in the 18th Century, which eventually merges with the main narrative, narrated by a disgraced Reverend, Wicks Cherrycoke, who is himself narrated by an uber narrator when he morphs into 3rd person. A sublime confusion ensues. None of these is shy about making anachronistic jokes about the 20th Century as the 18th Century narrative unwinds, with the Rev’s name leading off (Critic heads explode when confronting these character names, see below). Pynchon gave credit to Barth in an inscribed copy of this novel, ‘been there, done that,’ referring to The Sot Weed Factor. But this is a radically different book, with different aims, whatever the stylistic similarities.
On that note, the name of the schmoes, Pynchon’s specialty? Or schlemiels, such as Benny Profane from V, which bounces like a yo-yo between early and late 20th Century. Or anyone in the books, really, including Brigadier Pudding, in Gravity’s Rainbow, the single character most responsible for the rescinded Pulitzer ( you’ll have to look it up, sorry). As noted, nothing bugs the literary poobahs like Pynchon’s names. IYKYK, I guess; there really is no defense for it and I’ve seen it taken too far by his imitators. It’s a crime against anything that is naturalistic and Updikean and good in literature. But for fans- like snickering in sex-ed class- it didn’t make you not want to have sex.
Mo’ meta? Immersing in the highly digressive but utterly fascinating Against the Day, which I freely admit is not a great novel, possibly not even a good one, but which I’ve read twice and am ready to try again. The metafiction pops quickly in ATD, the absolute brickiest of Pynchon’s battle fleet of Post Modern Bricks. The Chums of Chance, earnest, adventurous and in a world of their own, are refugees from a kid’s dime adventure serial who float in a dirigible over the turn of the 20th Century main action. Pynchon cannot resist letting them encounter one or two of the main characters, but for the most part, they remain separate. This undoubtedly drives the establishment critics batshit, but I found it charming in the same way that Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are charming. As in, magical and conjuring.
The fun of him will remain the fun of reading him as the anti-Updike, a Lawrence Sterne for this age of paranoia and conspiracy, an Oyster Bay prankster still thumbing his nose at the midtown, mid-brow poobahs. Movies, and cosmic detectives aside, there will not miraculously appear in the reviewer’s hands a big key to make sense of the chaos and fit him neatly into expectations. The Pulitzers will not apologize and un-rescind the rescinded Prize, The New Yorker walk back to their morgue and pull out the drawer marked ‘Updike’ and make him get up and write an apologetic zombie review, all’s well, open up the canon, set out a mug for old Tom.
Does the PI main character in Shadow find the heiress? It turns out to not matter all that much. The plots and fantastical tales, crazy puns and seriously unserious character names keep spinning, as do the reviewers’ heads. And understanding America’s turn toward fascism might just require a hallucinogenic PI like TP.
#PostModernLit #Pynchon #postmodernbricks #readinglist #litbros #shadowticket
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