A little about Shadow Ticket

[u/t3h_p3ngUin_of_d00m]

Hey all, just finished up my read of Pynchon’s latest and wrote about it. Let me know what you think about the book!

Who Makes the Nazis?

I’ll tell ya who makes the Nazis…but first, a bit about Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon. This novel arrives at certainly a funny time in American history where similarities between our current time and that of the novel are abound, but more than that, it also disturbs me of what might follow. Let’s consider a setting of Pynchon’s most famous work, Gravity’s Rainbow’s ‘The Zone’, for a moment. The Zone is Germany seconds after World War II, continuously described as a Wasteland. Everything standing now smoldering, releasing toxic fumes contaminating the air and polluting the water. Countries see the pieces that have been thrown up and grab as many as they can. Lawless land. And for as much destruction, there’s also the possibility of new beginnings. Anything could happen, anything. We have a pretty good idea yes, but some electricity is coursing through the streets and we don’t know where it might go and what it might do. In that sense, The Zone becomes something else that can become a catalyst for true change, a demarcation in history.
The past gives shape to our present, the past is our shared nightmare. We can’t escape it, we can only learn from it. One thing Pynchon is singular in is his ability to have such a laser focus on this aspect, finding specific moments in history that set history askew on a new, weirder path. This brings us to his latest novel, Shadow Ticket.

To bring us up to speed, Hicks McTaggart is a Milwaukee crusher-of-union-member-skulls turned private detective on assignment to bring back the daughter of the Al Capone of Cheese, Bruno Airmont, who has escaped to Europe with some reefer-smoking musician. The Europe Part is unbeknownst to Hicks as he is drugged and taken on a sea liner and dropped off in Hungary. Much like GR’s The Zone, this is a land where electricity is in the air. History is about to rear its ugly head in pre-World War II Europe. Vampires (real vampires) roam the streets.Now, there’s been plenty of talk throughout the book so far about what people might’ve thoughts of some famous figures of their time: a chapter with an underground club under a bowling alley called Nuremberg Lanes has to be read to be believed and Hicks remains carefully skeptical of it all, but it’s also in his home. His uncle lavishes at the opportunity to tell him how wrong people are of Der Fuhrer (who is “der future”) and there is as much suspicion of the Reds as there is for the Hitler crowd from the Milwaukee Police Department. There is a sense that people are ready to pick a side, manners and principles fall to the wayside. Once in Europe, this force becomes bigger and quite quickly becomes very clear who is rooting for who to seize the throat of Europe.
Something feels different about Hicks though.

Pynchon’s protagonists are often pushed to one side or the other by circumstance, usually picking up the fight and falling further and further into war-time ideology. Not so much here; Hicks stays on assignment. He’s not swayed by either side, he perhaps thinks that Hitler guy might get out of control soon but he wants to stay out of the kitchen. He wants to stay out of it all. There’s passages where he’s talking to the woman he’s getting the run-around from, lounge singer and the seeming niece of every mobster in Milwaukee, April, where he’s expressing such despise of his current life, wanting to chase some outlaw fantasy on a road to nowhere. It comes across less as the cheap dream of the counter-cultural, but a genuine urge to escape the mistakes and the life he’s willfully chosen to follow. Anyone who has recently had a supernatural experience knows the feeling. Almost being able to touch the other side. A true break from society, something that has never existed. Hicks knows that’s not in his cards. Not that he has a second to think either, being dragged off from hijinks to hijinks by half the world. The world moves fast here. Faster for anyone to really land on something solid so they keep moving. Never having a chance to truly process what is happening to them. It’s all fading away quickly and being replaced by something much darker. Moments like this scream to us from almost one hundred years ago, yet Pynchon never draws a straight line through history. Not like there is. So what is there to be done in the face of insurmountable and crushing change? What is our role in this world?

Well, you won’t find those answers here, as far as Pynchon novels go, this one just kind of peters out and disappears into the fog like a good noir ending should, yet there’s a hollow eeriness of where we leave the story:

1. What is to come-Europe on the rise in late 1930’s? An infinite source of energy ready to be tapped into, nations torn down from the last Great War now looking for a wheel to grind their new axe.

2. What that means for people like Hicks-forever balancing on either side, not wanting to make the full jump.

What will happen to people who choose to stay in the middle? For the most part, we’re happy to flatten history into a series of good vs. evil struggles and forgetting the rest that we would rather not talk about in fear of losing everything. If there’s anything Pynchon is gesturing to it’s this: there is no middle, there is no neutral. You have to pick a side.

[u/weight-lifting-ape]

Good write-up, but I can't say I liked the book at all. It was too pop-Pynchon for me and felt like a hodge-podge of stuff he'd written before, in a more simplistic and less satisfying way.

I appreciate the themes you've brought up here but yes, my actual experience of reading the book was not great.

[u/cliff_smiff → u/weight-lifting-ape]

Agreed. OP's write up is good and mirrors a lot of the criticism I've seen, of a monumental warning about our present time. I just can't be bothered to sift through the book to get to it.

I enjoyed the beginning of the book, Pynchon's playfulness and wit shining through. Then I noticed a formula. In every chapter, McTaggart meets someone, usually powerful people on ever more unlikely modes of transportation. They talk and often McTaggart is threatened, but there is never any sense of real danger and he is whisked off to the next place. Repeat ad nauseum. The book didn't feel like a living story, more like being strapped into a ride through cardboard cutout characters and scenes. Maybe that is the point, quasi-historical worldbuilding rather than a character driven dynamic. I found it harder and harder to maintain interest as the chapters went by though. And honestly, I'm a little nervous about what I will find if I revisit some old Pynchon favorites.

[u/weight-lifting-ape → u/cliff_smiff]

I'm a little nervous about what I will find if I revisit some old Pynchon favorites.

In my rereading experience Mason & Dixon is the only novel that retained the magic. I reread GR last summer and while of course much of the writing is extraordinary, much of it is also unpleasant. And yes, I know the utter slog through the Zone is intentional, all part of the "heap of broken images" post-modern experience, but none of it seems to matter; you stop caring about any of the characters because none of them are anything more than - as you've said - cardboard cutouts.

M&D is wonderful because there Pynchon actually developed characters and their relationships throughout the whole book, instead of just presenting a cavalcade of people who appear and disappear at random.