The Brooklyn Rail

Let’s start with the elephant. Thomas Pynchon, America’s beloved literary recluse, has, at eighty-eight years old, released his first novel in twelve years, and we might all be wondering whether it will be his last. If it is, we longtime Pynchon readers might ask how that knowledge weighs on our reading of Shadow Ticket, an ambitious private-investigative romp across two continents set during the Great Depression and lead up to World War II. And we might further wonder in what ways the novel extends or betrays the vision of an author six decades on the scene of the lone detective—one who, in the process of investigating chaos, learns that in the Pynchonian universe, chaos has no opposite. But more on this later.

Pynchon’s latest centers on the former strikebreaker-turned-private-investigator Hicks McTaggart, a man whose primary attribute others think of as being “solid and in the way.” Hicks, at work for the Milwaukee branch of the conglomerate detective agency Unamalgamated Ops (or U-Ops for short), is tasked early into the novel with tracking down one Daphne Airmont, heiress to an immense cheese fortune who has run off from her fiancé with a jazz musician. Some years earlier and mostly by happenstance, Hicks had helped Daphne avoid commitment to a mental institution, and now various forces and agents in the novel, including Daphne herself, believe Hicks to be responsible for her ongoing safety. The story of the cheese heiress’s itinerancy is further complicated by virtue of being set against the backdrop of her father Bruno Airmont’s—also known as “the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile”—own semi-mysterious disappearance some years ago, having supposedly “packed a trunk full of banknotes and skipped.” (Though who among us Pynchon readers is really going to believe that?) As Hicks begins his investigation—if we can rightfully call it that—he will come in contact with cops, mobsters, musicians, practitioners of the psychical arts, ham radio operators whose fascination with frequencies registers at the level of occult, Nazis both domestic and abroad, rebel motorcycle gangs, government and industry bureaucrats, intelligence agents of various stripes, femme fatale autogiro pilots, aspiring duelists, and more. But if in the worlds of Don DeLillo all plots move deathward, then in the worlds of Thomas Pynchon all plots move toward a state of infinitely scaling entropy.

Meaning that Pynchon doesn’t so much write storylines as conjure networks of relations and commitments among his characters, all of whom first appear as caricatures until their deepest desires are laid bare and become heartbreakingly real. A metaphor for any Pynchon story might be a hundred stones cast into a lake, causing endless ripples to crash into one another. But we as readers never get to know who, exactly, dropped in those stones, much less why. Shadow Ticket is no exception, though it does continue to evolve the private investigator trope Pynchon began over sixty years ago with his novel V.

Those not familiar with Pynchon would no doubt understand the general pivot in any detective novel to be one from obscurity to clarity. Some gumshoe or another becomes embroiled in a mystery, and, through the act of investigation, the world and its players are dragged into crystal-clear view. Evidence is gathered, motive deduced, killer apprehended, etc. This is not the case in Pynchon’s novels, however, wherein the act of investigation gives rise not to answers, but only more questions. The investigating protagonists of Pynchon’s previous novels—Oedipa in The Crying of Lot 49, Doc in Inherent Vice, Maxine in Bleeding Edge, to name a few—often instead act as vehicles by which Pynchon delivers us to a comment about our connections to the social world and what we might owe one another in our journeys. Lot 49 ends with Oedipa, having been driven to an attempted death-by-suicide over her investigation into the secretive mail service known as Tristero, alone and further ensnared in the mystery she seeks to solve; Inherent Vice with Doc, yes, alone, but able to make out the tail lights of other drivers on the road, as he reconciles with truth that the future will be all contracts and zoning; and Bleeding Edge with Maxine clandestinely watching as her sons walk to school, arms over shoulders, together and for the first time without her.

So where on the spectrum of Pynchon’s evolving detective-as-vehicle motif do we locate Hicks McTaggart?

Unlike many of Pynchon’s former detectives, Hicks doesn’t so much investigate Daphne’s disappearance and resulting cacophony of connections created through the project of investigating as he does simply appear in places the narrative needs him to be for the investigation to unfold. Asportation and apportation, the psychical phenomena of objects disappearing and reappearing elsewhere, feature prominently in Shadow Ticket. In fact, having worked as a tough in his strikebreaking days, Hicks now often thinks about the man he would have killed should the club with which he swung to break the striker’s skull had not suddenly vanished from his hand. Hicks’s soul is not only saved from that moment of asportation—soon after this happening, he leaves skull-bashing work behind him to become a PI—but we as readers begin to understand Hicks’s presence itself as a phenomenon of asportation/apportation. With only a vague understanding of why Hicks might/should/could be in particular locations talking with particular people, we simply see him at those locations engaged in conversations with those people. Even his entrant to the transatlantic liner that will ferry him to Eastern Europe—and us into the second half of the novel—is a product of this same narrative-psychical feat. We are simply told Hicks was drugged off-page and carried aboard the ship.

These psychical disappearances and reappearances elsewhere pay off as we begin to notice more and more how the investigation comes to Hicks—and how it comes to us. The investigation starts confronting us so strongly, so agentially, in fact, that Hicks himself begins to disappear from the novel’s later chapters, as if he is no longer needed, so we may instead focus on the various characters who have stepped into the narrative frame through his investigation: Daphne and Bruno Airmont themselves, the motorcycling Terike, the British intelligence agents Alf and Pip, the clarinet-playing Hop with whom Daphne originally ran off, and so many others.

While it feels impossible to spoil any Pynchon novel—because what do the details in them ever amount to anyway?—I’ll still tiptoe lightly to say that there is something endearing and warming about how we eventually see Hicks off: with a kiss and with a narrative baton passed into a future of private investigation that will diegetically take place before so many of the narratives in Pynchon’s oeuvre even start. In the end, we begin. And altogether, Hicks’s story is a reminder that mystery and surprise don’t need our help to find us, and that those outward ripples on the pond will never stop. All of which is a beautiful, if not quaint, sentiment for what might be Pynchon’s finale.

In other ways, Shadow Ticket can be a frustrating read at times, and I found myself torn between the feeling that Pynchon is, in his ninth decade, doing whatever the hell he pleases, audience be damned, and playfully punishing us for paying too-close attention to only what’s on the page. (As one character in the novel says, there’s “too much else going on in movie theaters to be looking at the screen.”) Characters, places, events all with capitalized names can be introduced too rapidly at times—even for Pynchon—and we often find ourselves reading dialogue with little idea of who is speaking. There is more than one scene in Shadow Ticket where three characters converse without so much as an identifying tag—at least I’m pretty sure that was happening; it could be difficult to tell. Many of these moments seemed to fall beyond the boundaries of that controlled vision of epiphanic disorder that Pynchon has curated for us across his career, and into—dare I say—self-indulgence. But the more I think about these elements of Shadow Ticket, the more I question this assessment. As Jonathan Lethem has said, “figuring out what it is like to read Pynchon is what it is like to read Pynchon.” Fair enough.

Regardless, the thrust of Shadow Ticket will not be undermined by these readerly frustrations, and, really, they might be made more because of them. For the world of 1930s Prohibition and Eastern Europe are not for those who cannot handle frustration. “Maybe it’s too late,” Hicks’s mother says to him over the phone as he faces his semi-banishment to Europe. “Just mind what you see and hear in the sky. Ain’t likely to be wild geese on the wing. If you’re lucky you’ll have some shelter ready to jump into, someplace you can believe for a while will be safer.” Shadow Ticket takes place in 1932. In seven years’ time, Nazi Germany will invade Poland. We find ourselves at the end of safe places, and safer ones only exist for a moment—and only in those rare moments between as- and apportation. And we must contend with this being the final statement that our beloved literary recluse might leave us with: that Hicks’s non-sleuthing sleuthing eventually reveals that history is bigger than any of us, more complex than any Pynchonian plot, and yet we all somehow still make it together, and, yes, we are all responsible.