A Shape As Yet Untaken
On Thomas Pynchon's "Shadow Ticket"
The quintessential Thomas Pynchon character is the schlemiel, a protagonist who begins the novel in over their head and only gets in deeper as they go along. They bumble along at play to forces large and often unseen, trying and failing to make sense of the world as it becomes more and more inscrutable. The more knowledge they seem to gain, the less clear it all gets — one knows they are enmeshed in an arcane system, but not exactly who’s involved in said system, what’s exactly happening among all the various participants, or, most importantly, exactly why all of it’s happening, especially to some schlub like them. Pynchon’s latest novels — the so-called “lesser Pynchon” books like Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge — have literalized this figure by focusing on private detectives, but this kind of addled querent has been a fixture right from the start: Benny Profane, the original schlemiel in Pynchon’s debut V.; Oedipa Maas the unwilling executor of a mysterious estate in The Crying of Lot 49; Tyrone Slothrop a moving piece of V2 bait in Gravity’s Rainbow; the titular heroes of Mason & Dixon trying to find and create the defining line of a young nation itself. (Vineland and Against the Day are their own things, Vineland a bit more of a family novel set against a slowly unraveled conspiracy, Against the Day an explosion of genre including but also going beyond the detective story.) Pynchon’s latest and presumably last novel1 Shadow Ticket features perhaps his most luggish protagonist yet, Hicks McTaggart, a private dick who knows very little at the outset of the novel and somehow ends up only more confused by the end, a useful idiot across two continents and for a number of competing organizations on both sides of the law. A grander meaning is not on the table for him, just self-preservation, as he responds to a warning from an old pro:
“Just so long as you ain’t another one of these metaphysical detectives, out looking for Revelation. Get to reading too much crime fiction in the magazines, start thinking it’s all about who done it. What really happened. Hidden history. Oh yeah. Seeing all the cards at the end of a hand. For some, that kind thing gets religious mighty quick.”
“I have enough to worry about with real life.”
Hicks is beyond any other Pynchon character a bull in a China shop, the China shop this time being the fragile world historical era between The War to End All Wars and, well, the Big One That Still Came Next.
The initial setting of the novel is Milwaukee, that little socialist jewel of the Midwest, in the early 1930s; Prohibition is on its way out, Roosevelt is on his way in, and fascism is in its nascent ascendancy across Europe. (Il Duce’s been in charge for 11 years already, whereas the Nazis are just getting their foothold in Germany.) Pynchon’s novels often focus on history’s transitory periods of possibility, when the world is destabilized enough to be up for grabs, and how the forces of state and financial power organize themselves in these times in order to maintain control; in Shadow Ticket, the question is as simple as Who Goes Nazi? As one character opines, “It’s a strange time we’re in just now […] one of those queer little passageways behind the scenery, where popes make arrangements with Fascists and the needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact…” McTaggart wades unknowingly into all this, simply a man on a job with the so-called Unamalagamated Ops, a private offshoot of the Pinkertons; before getting into the PI biz, Hicks was simply a headsmasher on picket lines. McTaggart’s first ticket — one of many pieces of ‘30s slang used throughout the novel, here meaning an assigned case — on the list is to track down the missing cheese heiress Daphne Airmont, daughter of Bruno Airmont (formerly known as “The Al Capone of Cheese” before his mysterious disappearance), who’s gone on the run from her fiancé with a Jazz clarinetist, Hop Wingdale. A number of unpaid and further-pains-in-the-butt tickets follow downstream of this initial ask, and things, as they often do in Pynchon novels, just keep getting murkier, the names keep getting sillier, and the goofy songs keep getting sung. Complications? You got ‘em. McTaggart is romantically involved with April Randazzo, a lounge singer running around behind his back with a mafioso boss; he’s previously run into Daphne Airmont, having helped her out of a jam many years ago, and according to some belief systems may be responsible for her life going forward; his rum-running buddy Stuffy Keegan is the target of a car-bombing attempt, and then disappears on what appears to be a decommissioned Austro-Hungarian submarine lurking in Lake Michigan; and despite his many protestations, his boss Boynt Crosstown wants to send him out of town to follow this Airmont ticket, maybe at the behest of the newly formed FBI, maybe at the behest of April’s beau, maybe at the behest of both in some kind of league, and somehow a quick trip to New York to follow a lead finds him waking up, roofied, on an ocean liner headed to Budapest, two MI6 (another just-formed organization) agents keeping a close eye on him. Add to all that any number of appropriately zany sideplots: Cheese price-fixing conspiracies, a desperate used autogyro salesman and an ardent pilot of said machines, bowling alleys that are fronts for German-American Nazi sleeper cells, a Hungarian biker gang called “The VladBoys” traversing the remains of the ol’ Austro-Hungarian Empire, and experts of the sleight-of-hand/possibly supernatural phenomena of ‘apporting’ and ‘assorting’ objects from one place to another in the blink of an eye — now you see it, now you don’t.
If you don’t already like Pynchon, all this might be a tough sell. In fact there are very many people who dislike Pynchon because of all this, the high-low mix, the ridiculous sideplots, the puns and silly acronyms (SMEGMA being a double whammy in this one), the allusive and elusive nature of the text as it careens towards conclusion without much in the way of what we’d call traditional ‘resolution.’ I happen to love it, so this is right up my alley, and I find it silly to mark off this one as ‘for fans only’ or to cast it as another ‘lesser Pynchon’ — anyone who writes nine books over sixty years is going to appeal mostly to the people who like the previous books, and any career that long will feature its own peaks and valleys. (I happen to think Pynchon’s valleys are better than a lot of writer’s bests, but your mileage may vary.) In the grand scheme of literature coming out now, Shadow Ticket is leagues ahead of the rest, more interesting even in its flawed sections than whatever the mass publishing apparatus is parroting as a stunning masterpiece on any given week; it has more interesting, beautiful, and funny (and sometimes all three at once) passages in its little pinky than all the bestseller list put together. But that’s hardly playing in the same league, and so rather than repeatedly state just how good Shadow Ticket is for a piece contemporary literature, there’s probably a richer vein to be tapped in considering exactly what the maestro has to say about the world as it is and the way it ought to be, the delta between those two the overriding theme of his oeuvre, in what might be his last novel.
The tone of Shadow Ticket is hardly valedictory, and it isn’t markedly different than what’s come before besides a little more concision — late style, that much overused term, is not really appropriate here. There’s still a vim and vigor to Pynchon’s prose, never flagging besides a couple winsome moments, ones that Pynchon used to more subtly hide under tangents of arcane knowledge and pages-long paragraphs, now a bit more easily accessed. (We all mellow out a little bit as we age.) The sex is still present but more frequently off-screen, as it were, which is something of a relief after some of the clunkier passages in his previous novel, Bleeding Edge, and the prolixity in general has been turned way down, as if baroque description could be left to the younger set; snappy dialogue with cut to the quick descriptors is a bit more the speed here. The phrasing still sings, there are still flashes of obscene talent, they’re just a bit more concentrated, as has been the trend since the (delightful) excess of Against the Day. Here’s how Hicks reacts to a tip to go talk to his Uncle Lefty from a mob henchman:
Since the early bad old days of street war, hand bombs and tommy-g fire syncopating the dark hours, Hicks has learned to look at these hot tips as letters of intent from Beyond, hasty, most often in rough draft, a sort of bargain-counter faith, which working ops down at his own level have been given in place of prayers unanswered. He decides to pay a family visit.
A little Brecht in the monitors, some explosive flashes, a message of unclear origin received on some other wavelength: ah, that’s the stuff, just in somewhat smaller and more digestible quantities, than, say, your average page of Gravity’s Rainbow or Mason & Dixon. Since the displays of Pynchon’s fierce intelligence, political commitment, and writerly pyrotechnics are less overt, a novel like Shadow Ticket working within the generic conventions of the detective novel is easier to slot in as Pynchon Lite — great taste, but less filling. Where, the critic asks, is The Great Novelist Proclaiming From On High? But Shadow Ticket’s breezy appearance belies a dead-serious vision of world history and our current political moment, dispensed in short asides and stray phrases, couched amid jokes, zingers, and quite a bit of dancing. Pynchon presents two countervailing forces rising in the world: corporations, criminals and governments organizing themselves into various fascist bands to enforce rule through pure might; and small but devoted cadres of those who would stand in the way of this fascist ascension. Even with history’s hindsight in how these bands of resistance held up — in the short, medium, and long term — there is still a surprisingly sentimental current throughout the novel; if the lesson in V. was the oft-quoted directive to “keep cool, but care,” some 60 years later the first part of that phrase has been dropped in favor of the second, particularly considering the oppressed and powerless people of the world.
The Nazis and their rising power are easy enough to slot into this historical fiction, and Pynchon lays it on a little thick at points in drawing a comparison between then and now. (All historical fiction is about the time when it was written, after all.) McTaggart’s ironically named Uncle Lefty is, like many Americans of the era, enthralled by Hitler:
You can’t trust the newsreels, you only think you’ve seen him, the Jews who control the movie business only allow footage that will make him look crazy or comical, funny little guy, funny walk, funny mustache, German Charlie Chaplin, how serious could he be? But there also exist other Hitler movies, yes, some even filmed in color, home movies, a warmer, gayer Hitler, impulsive, unorthodox, says whatever comes into his head, what’s wrong with that?
Like I said, laid on a little thick — remind you of anyone these days?? What saves these passages from falling into winking corniness is Pynchon’s insistence on tying Americans to the Nazis — it’s scrubbed away now, but there were plenty of Hitler-admirers in the US and England — and also his continual reminders that the Jews of Europe were being hunted long before the Holocaust began, that genocidal anti-semitism was always a part of the program, officially or unofficially, eschewing historical fiction’s usual insistence that these were features of Nazism hidden to the world before the government progroms began. But beyond these references (to Nazis and to Mussolini’s Italy), Pynchon lays out the beginnings of America’s own parallel strong-arm security state. At one point, McTaggart is pulled into a meeting with some agents of the newly created FBI and given a warning about what’s to come if he doesn’t fall in line:
“I’m afraid it isn’t optional,” explains T.P. O’Grizbee. “Like it says on the subpoena we haven’t served you yet, laying aside all and singular your business and excuses. A federal rap, not to be shrugged off. Potential wrongdoers might keep in mind as yet little-known lockups such as Alcatraz Island, always looming out there, fogbound and sinister, and the unweclome fates which might transpire therewithin […] this is the next wave of Feds you’re talking to. We haven’t even begun to show how dangerous we can be, and the funny thing? Is, is we could be running the country any day now and you’ll all have to swear loyalty to us because by then we’ll be in the next war fighting for our lives, and maybe that’ll be all you’ve got.”
As a parting gift, McTaggart is handed a Jell-O mold that Ellis Island immigrants have been receiving (this is not a Pynchonian invention, this really happened), and he asks if he’s now an immigrant. “Maybe not to the U.S. as you know it,” responds O’Grizbee, “Maybe to the future U.S. we in the Bureau expect to see before long.” Well, there goes the country, snapped up by that next wave of Feds, supercops putting their thumb on every scale possible in order to get what they want, presentiments of our current hypersurveillent and hyperpunitive security apparatus. Add to that the criminal underworld and the corporate underworld in their various conspiratorial frameworks, heck, even P.I. firms have their own fascist undertones, private goons under another name, and so you’ve got something of a pattern; everyone Hicks meets seems to be “another colleague in the same racket, just happens to be working for a different outfit.”
It’s not hard to tilt your head and see the world today as run by these same rackets, even if the fascists were nominally wiped out in the mid ‘40s; as with everything in Pynchon, it runs a bit deeper and is always a bit more complicated, what looks like a victory turns out to be a defeat in the long term, or vice versa. Pynchon as always, beneath these portents of the doom we’re already living though, gives glimmers of a different direction that it could’ve gone, one that is still possible, and in its possibility offers some alteric vision of how it could go from here on. It is easy to be swept away by the force of capital H History — one character says: “Whatever it is that’s just about to happen, once it’s over we’ll say, oh well, it’s history, should’ve seen it coming, and right now it’s all I can do to get on with my life” — but there are subterranean avenues of resistance and alternate visions of the future that can come through. That’s seen in simple enough character arcs like McTaggart’s, who moves from apolitical headsmasher into an at least half-witting agent of good, and also in groups like a submarine crew working as “an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time, forever on the move […] immune to time, surviving all these years in the deep refuge of the sea…” or a woman with a foretold future of “some kind of anarchist sainthood” with a schedule of “going out before breakfast and […] shooting Fascists.” That last one is in reference to the upcoming Spanish Civil War, and yes, we all know how that one goes, but martyrdom is often a path to sainthood; the key is to find something worth dying for. If Pynchon gets at all valedictory in this novel, it’s in these lines: “Some of us, if consciences had toenails, would be hanging on by just that margin. Yet conscience must find ways to go on operating inside history.” It’s a narrow path, but the one to take, no matter how lonely or hopeless it may seem. If you don’t want it so direct, try this passage on for size instead:
All night long, between watches, sleepless, not always sure what they’re dreaming and what they’ve drifted out of dreaming back into however briefly … faces turning from time to time to gaze back down their wake, turning together and drifting upward as if for signs of intention from above, if not quite yet in terror or wonder, at least put on notice — their sight lines briefly converging at the same place in the sky where clouds invisible till dawn are towering toward an altitude still to be reached, a shape as yet untaken, unimagined.
What’s dream, what’s fiction, what’s reality, what can even be imagined, it’s all up for grabs, even if and maybe because of the ever-encroaching ascendancy of sinister forces around the world… there’s always at least a pinhole’s worth of light in the darkness, tides to turn even if only in the most personal of struggles, a chance that things could be different than the way they’ve always seemed fated to be. It takes someone like Pynchon, who, even with all the silliness of his character names and the hysterics of his plotting, can see the shape of history so clearly as to make this kind of hope believable. As far as career capstones go, it’s a tough one to beat.
You can get Shadow Ticket at your local bookstore or local library.
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He’s 88, though this is a man who probably wrote his four novels after Gravity’s Rainbow concurrently, so I wouldn’t be shocked if there was a least another novel squirreled away in his desk drawer, and current scuttlebutt suggests that there is another book to come….