‘About all that Hicks can recall,” Thomas Pynchon writes of his latest protagonist, private detective Hicks McTaggart, “is having what he thought was an innocent beer, which turned out to have been visited by a needle full of something in the chloral hydrate family, sending him off to dreamland before he could remember how to find a coaster to set his glass upon.” This is 1932 America on the brink of repealing Prohibition and almost anything goes.
Shadow Ticket is the 88-year-old author’s first published work since 2013. He is famously reclusive – a possible 2018 paparazzi shot aside, Pynchon has not been photographed in more than 60 years – so any new book is a surprise. But the book, his 10th, also reveals that someone who has written some of the 20th century’s most important novels is having fun – seemingly – and letting the reader share in it.
Shadow Ticket preserves many of Pynchon’s tics while being the most audaciously comedic of his novels. It takes its cue, and its language, from 1930s American pulp fiction. It is a fantasia on pre-World War II true history put through a blend of the Marx Brothers with a dash of True Detective, and offering more than a nod to the present.
Dashiell Hammet, author of books such as The Maltese Falcon and a real-life private detective and strike-breaker, is the model for McTaggart. Despite Pynchon’s humour, his often vaudevillian sensibility and his vast store of recondite information, Shadow Ticket has a sub-text of conspiracy, paranoia and fear, even more apparent in a world on the brink of war.
“Maybe he saw something, but doesn’t know what he saw,” Pynchon writes. “Knows enough not to talk but not exactly what he shouldn’t be talking about. Or who to. Which makes him dangerous, putting forces he never knew existed to the trouble of putting things right again.”
The novel’s early set-pieces involve a runaway Wisconsin cheese heiress and sometime jazz singer named Daphne Airmont (“A dame with some moxie instead of one more baby-talking lulu”), a leftover Austro-Hungarian World War I submarine on liquor-smuggling runs between Canada and the US beneath the ice of Lake Michigan, the dreams of the nascent American Nazi movement, and dances like the Lindy Hop, all dressed in period clothing with equally detailed sets. But they are simply the initial moves of a sprawling plot with unknown intent.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, perhaps Pynchon’s finest book, he provides a list of “Proverbs for Paranoids”. Number three reads: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” McTaggart finds himself asking the wrong questions with frequency, but giving the answers is not the intent of Shadow Ticket.
While the reader meets McTaggart in the Great Lakes city of Milwaukee, the author soon hustles him into full-blown Pynchonia: leaving New York drugged on the way to Budapest via a trans-Atlantic liner – the SS Stupendia – accompanied by espionage agents of varying allegiances and the weighty ghosts of the dying soldiers of World War I, when the vessel was used as a hospital ship.
Once in the remnants of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, Pynchon ramps up his plot with side ventures into occult “apporting” (making objects appear out of thin air at a séance), pre-WWII models of motorbikes and bikers, attractive women, off-street Budapest nightclubs, Hungarian swing singers, Jew hunters and ever more obscure branches of secret agencies, all sprinkled liberally with Pynchon’s trademark self-written song lyrics.
Also in characteristic form is the “thickness” of Pynchon’s backgrounds. In his only remarks on his writing in Slow Learner, a collection of early fiction, he revealed the basis of one short story: “It wasn’t until Under the Rose [1959] that I could bring myself, even indirectly, to credit Karl Baedeker, whose guide to Egypt for 1899 was the major source of the story.” In Shadow Ticket, historic detail is vastly apparent, in the form of guidebooks, timetables, newspapers, magazines, movies and music.
His characters appear as a whirl of names: the bandleader Hop Wingdale; Stuffy Keegan, one of the novel’s more unlikely heroes; Vivid Fancy “with her small hat at a provocative angle”; and Pips Quarrender of the British Intelligence Service, turning up again in Budapest, with her hair “gone platinum …” This dazzle of personalities all contributes to the novel’s momentum.
The more a reader knows about history, the more laugh-out-loud and perceptive the novel becomes. Pynchon can change tack and effect with immediacy: “Republicans and gangsters? How can such things be?” or “… a wordless voice that might be more than wind strumming the guywires of radio masts” and “another jingle-bells excursion out on to the ski-slopes of commentary”. Everything arrives on a roller-coaster of wit at speed.
Often, the dialogue is in hard-boiled slanguage with its origin in gangster flicks and pulp paperbacks. Hicks is the bumbling but engaging private dick always on the edge of the discovery, distracted by women, unanswerable questions and the politics of gangster America and a Mitteleuropa facing the prospect of Total War. Ultimately, there is only the quest.
Shadow Ticket ends in a tricky side-step. Pynchon’s reader discovers a real seriousness beneath the novel’s adroit lightness and there are many hints in the air of the sinister rise of genocidal fascism darkening this fictional world. There is also a warning on the book’s final page: “Better if someone tells you now – innocent and not guilty ain’t always the same.”
The novel’s propulsion also comes from the jazzy idiom of 30s America, moving ever forward in its syncopated, copacetic vernacular. Despite the abrupt location shifts and musical jump-cuts – “a break from Prohi-/bition, wave /hasta la Vista to the Feds …”, sings Daphne – a certain human coherence remains on the edge of the void. This is the reasoning of an older writer, who waits – like us all – as the Big D tickles the drums.
Following Pynchon’s own vagrant will, Shadow Ticket is the most deft of his novels, but beneath the slapstick are ultimately questions that every reader must resolve for themselves. The relationship to the present world abounds and where Hicks goes, we can only follow.
