Tom Le Clair's review

[Erik T. Burns]

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon — Open Letters Review
<https://openlettersreview.com/posts/shadow-ticket-by-thomas-pynchon>

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon

Shadow Ticket

By Thomas Pynchon

Penguin, 2025





With me, Pynchon is personal.  I’ve been reading him for more than five
decades.  His *Gravity’s Rainbow* reformatted my brain and became the novel
against which I have judged, probably unfairly, all new fiction.  So please
pardon this unusually personal (and long) review of his new novel *Shadow
Ticket*.

*Gravity’s Rainbow* is what I call a “monsterpiece”: a very long, profound
and masterful work that some readers consider a monstrosity because of its
genre mashing, formal idiosyncracies, and stylistic excesses.  I used the
term when reviewing Olga Tokarczuk’s *The Books of Jacob* in these pages
and should have used it when I wrote about *Gravity’s Rainbow* at 50, also
here.  Of all novels written by Americans since World War II, *Gravity’s
Rainbow* is the grandest monsterpiece, the twentieth century’s *Moby-Dick*,
both the monster whale and Melville’s monstrous novel.

*Shadow Ticket* is no monsterpiece.  Not even close.  Once rumored to be
long, it is 293 pages.  It has no monsters within it, and it’s not a
creative monstrosity, some new or even old Pynchonian deformation of
conventional narrative.  *Shadow Ticket* coasts merrily along in its
detective genre, linear like the gumshoe story *Inherent Vice* but with
historical settings, first Depression America and then Eastern Europe 93
years ago.  At 88, Pynchon is himself almost historical, and *Shadow Ticket* is
his ninth novel.  Maybe he just wanted to have some fun in what may be his
final book.  But he wasn’t free for fun.  Having published two
monsterpieces—*Gravity’s Rainbow* and *Mason & Dixon* — Pynchon had created
expectations or desires or wishes in his readers.  This one hoped that he
would go out with a deep dive into the deep state, even if his book
imploded like that submersible descending toward the *Titanic* this spring.

I should have known better, because in *Bleeding Edge* Pynchon trolled me
for just such a hope of depth.  This professor was pleased to be noticed by
the master but also disappointed.  Here’s a description from my review of
the novel:

“At the beginning of *Bleeding Edge* a documentary filmmaker named Reg
Despard abruptly zooms in and out on scenes, causing viewers cognitive
dissonance.  Pynchon makes fun of an academic who submits Despard’s work to
Brechtian analysis and who praises his film for its `leading edge’
post-postmodernism.  I praised a similar scene of disorienting zooming
in *Gravity’s
Rainbow* as a metaphor for the Brechtian alienation effects of that novel’s
`epic theater’ in my book *The Art of Excess*.  Foolish me.  Later in *Bleeding
Edge*, Despard says he just shoots what is in front of him and intends `no
deeper meaning.’”

Although *Bleeding Edge* includes a “DeepArcher” website down in the “Deep
Web,” Pynchon was mostly shooting what was in front of him, another
investigator on the streets with eccentrics and hustlers in New York City
in 2001.  The fall of the Trade Towers had little effect on the novel.
*Bleeding
Edge* lacked the usual Pynchon hard edge as well as depth.  In my review, I
speculated that one source of Pynchon’s earlier authority and depth as a
novelist was his ability to occupy and revision historical periods, as he
does in his two monsterpieces and in *Against the Day*, his longest novel.
In *Shadow Ticket* his mix of historical research and wacky invention (one
never knows which is which) makes it more substantial than the
contemporary *Inherent
Vice*, but this new detective plot offers no cognitive dissonance, no
monstrosity disorientation.  As one of many walk-on characters says to the
obtuse Private Investigator protagonist, “Leave the deep thinking to others
and get on with the action.”

Although the action and the P.I. in *Shadow Ticket* do move from Milwaukee
to several European countries, the innocent (or guilty) abroad is familiar
from many Pynchon novels all the way back to his first, *V.*  As usual, his
characters have fanciful names.  They could be an alienation effect, I
suppose, but they don’t push the reader to think about the people and
politics—the purpose of Brecht’s alienation effects.  The characters often
talk about the movies of the time, and many of the characters seem
satisfied with playing familiar cinematic roles (the dangerous broad, the
sentimental sap).  They speak then contemporary slang and have old-movie
repartee, which must have been fun for Pynchon to write, a challenge like
the 18th-century British English of Mason and Dixon.  Because point of view
is the usual Pynchonian selective omniscience, he’s free to do whatever he
wants, sometimes bandying, sometimes brooding.

Near the end of *Gravity’s Rainbow* there’s an odd parenthetical passage in
which a voice sounds like a novelist talking to his publisher: “I know what
your editors want, exactly what they want” — a plot that can be
outlined.  *Shadow
Ticket* has one, and here it is:

In Depression and Prohibition Milwaukee, Hicks McTaggart, a slab of a man
even more dense than that “tanker” Tyrone Slothrop of *Gravity’s Rainbow*,
works busting heads at union strikes.  After he believes he has almost
killed a man, Hicks decides to become a P.I. and is tutored by Lew
Basnight, a detective in *Against the Day*.  Hicks works for, it appears, a
nationwide and maybe even worldwide detective firm called U-Ops.  Mostly,
though, Pynchon has him hanging around speaks, talking with the usual crew
of Pynchon oddballs, and keeping an eye out for attractive women. Hicks has
a part-time (and two-timing) girlfriend who worries about him because he
seems threatened by the Mafia, early-adopting American Nazis, and the
federal government. But the first half of *Shadow Ticket *is low energy
hugger mugger until Hicks rescues one Daphne Airmont, the 20-something
daughter of the millionaire cheese baron Bruno Airmont who, suspected of
financial crimes, has disappeared.

In the second half of the novel, Hicks is dispatched to Europe to bring
Daphne, now keeping company with a swing musician, back to America.
Although Hicks several times crosses paths with Daphne, he is reluctant to
pressure her back to the States. He also meets Bruno, the “Big Cheese” of
cheese, but doesn’t try to turn him in.  Hicks has gone native in what he
feels is a culture more permissive than Milwaukee.  If you need an earlier
avatar, think Lambert Strether in *The Ambassadors*.

In the last fifty or so pages, Pynchon thankfully diminishes Hicks’ role,
and the novel’s focus scatters among characters of different nationalities
with various political loyalties and motives.  These figures include, but
are not limited to, Bolsheviks, Nazis, British spies, and motorcycle
enthusiasts. The scenes in the final pages of *Shadow Ticket* resemble the
chaotic “Zone” in *Gravity’s Rainbow*, but, unlike this new novel, it had a
few well-developed characters to balance the frequently unbalanced folks
wandering across the Zone’s downed or disputed borders at the end of World
War II.

To really have something substantial in common with Pynchon’s
boundary-crossing monsterpieces, *Shadow Ticket* needed to be much longer.
This reviewer, now posing as a renegade “editor,” wants the author to halve
the American expository half, triple the length of the European action
half, provide some backstories for the many characters, reduce the
coincidental meets and miracle rescues by air, keep the talking golem if
necessary, start with cheesehead comedy and transition to the kinds of
serious political intrigues that led to World War II (and to *Gravity’s
Rainbow*).  At the very end of *Shadow Ticket*, a submarine captain
describes “an urge more ancient than anything he knows of to go deeper, to
descend, rivets creaking, into depths legendary.”  This doesn’t happen in
or with the novel.

The changes I’ve “recommended” would have made *Shadow Ticket* more
artistically monstrous, and the novel would also have fruitfully resembled
a non-Pynchon monsterpiece about the same space and time, William
Vollmann’s National Book Award novel *Europe Central*.  In addition,
Pynchon’s title would have gained density.  A “ticket” is the word used by
P.I.’s to refer to a case or assignment.  Hicks’ ticket is initially
straightforward, but it changes and leads readers into the unfamiliar
shadowland depicted in the novel’s last pages.  Unfortunately, the too
numerous characters in this novel’s abbreviated Zone are like the shadows
on the wall in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.”

Maybe the octogenarian Pynchon wanted what predictable editors and many
readers want.  Or he didn’t have the time or energy for—or, of course,
interest in—transforming his surface-skimming detective story into
something “deeper,” to use the operative word here.  If you’re a fan of
Pynchon, you’ll probably want to read *Shadow Ticket*.  But be warned.  You
will find that what might be clever or funny inventions to newbies are
sometimes shadows of earlier Pynchon materials.  Most of the following
examples are from *Gravity’s Rainbow* where Pynchon suggested that objects
are alive and have souls.  In *Shadow Ticket* it is cheese and
motorcycles.  The “They” of *Gravity’s Rainbow *reappear, as do the Tarot
deck and the assertion that information is more valuable than money.
Slothrop quests for the killer rocket 00000.  Hicks searches for the most
tasteless lamp ever invented. “Nothing so loathsome as a Sentimental
Surrealist,” says Pynchon in *Gravity’s Rainbow*, but the word
“sentimental” is all over the text of *Shadow Ticket*. When Slothrop is
confused, he stutters words beginning with “a.”  Now Hicks has that tic.
There are an outlaw submarine, pet pig, and a bomb thrown into water in
both *Gravity’s Rainbow* and *Shadow Ticket*. We have songs again, along
with cute meets and witty kiss-offs.  *Vineland* and *Mason & Dixon* have
“mopery.”  Now it’s “aggravated mopery.”

Pynchon has a long bit in *Shadow Ticket* about asports and apports,
disappearances and reappearances during séances.  Perhaps he was aware of
familiar materials reappearing in the novel, and they became part of the
fun, possibly some winking self-reference for the delectation of his fans.
Or maybe he forgot what he had imagined earlier.  For me, who believes
fiction should defamiliarize, the reappearances and repetitions were not so
much fun as sad. The sociologist Max Weber, a probable influence on *Gravity’s
Rainbow*, would have called Pynchon’s refamiliarization “the routinization
of charisma.”

Even the supposed mastermind villain of *Shadow Ticket* is short on
charisma. A pop up character describes Bruno Airmont as a “deep desperado,”
but he’s no monster.  Arguing with her lover about her father, Daphne says
he’s like a fake “monster in the Tunnel of Love,” maybe guilty of “family
crimes, bad blood” but no outsized threat.  Gaining a monopoly on cheese
production doesn’t compare with Hitler’s rocket technology that a character
calls “a monster by the tail” in *Gravity’s Rainbow*.  Novels don’t have to
use the word “monster” to become monsterpieces.  I quote Daphne on Bruno to
suggest the low stakes of the action in *Shadow Ticket*, the limitation of
much of the novel’s purview to the personal, “evil” as a bug in an
individual not a feature of the cultural systems that Pynchon anatomized in
his monsterpieces.

I was admittedly sketchy describing the plot of *Shadow Ticket* because the
story and characters elicited little intellectual engagement, and the novel
caused me no fear.  “Paranoia” is the psychological term most often
associated with Pynchons’s work, but I prefer “fear.”  I had no fear that
“horrors” (such as a gross movie about food) in *Shadow Ticket* could
impinge on my life and no fear that I would be mystified by *Shadow
Ticket* when
finished reading.  Because of my tepid response to the book, my attention
turned to its author: why write this novel?

Since almost nothing is known about Pynchon the author or man, one is
forced to speculate—as one would about the meanings of his novel were it a
monsterpiece.  Although reportedly tall and self-conscious about his
appearance, Pynchon is no monster.  Not even an “art monster.”  I know
someone who had dinner with him.  They talked about New York real estate.
The genre limitations and frequent repetitions in *Shadow Ticket* have me
thinking of the author as an organ grinder that one still sees in tourist
areas of European cities.  Organ grinders are usually older men who dress
up in period costumes and push through the streets the machines from which
they crank out over and over a small repertoire of simple, familiar, and
entertaining tunes. The organ grinders I’ve watched appear to revel in the
pleasure that their audiences display, even if it’s the pleasure of
witnessing an amusing anachronism rather than the pleasure of listening to
tortured music.  So maybe my initial notion—that Pynchon just wanted to
have (and maybe give) fun—is not so far off, and readers should enjoy one
last turn of the crank for what it is.  I would if I could, but the descent
from *Gravity’s Rainbow* to *Shadow Ticket* is too steep and deep for me.
I wanted Pynchon to remain a crank, a writer willing to take original or
crazed ideas to and even beyond their aesthetic limits.

Two other authors of monsterpieces who are often associated with
Pynchon—William Gaddis and Don DeLillo—also wrote short final books.
Gaddis’s *Agape Agape* was partly about the player piano and Americans’
lust for entertainment.  DeLillo’s *The Silence* was partly about
television and that same lust updated.   In old age, the novelists attacked
machine-delivered popular “art.”  Because Pynchon keeps cranking, *Shadow
Ticket* ultimately suggested to me a motive and explanation deeper and
bleaker than having fun.  In Russell Banks’s last novel *Foregone*, the
terminally ill filmmaker/narrator keeps going on and on and on for a
documentary film crew because, he says, telling his story keeps him alive.
With Banks in mind, I wonder if Pynchon keeps writing to keep writing to
keep living, doing what he has been doing all those decades he was never
seen in public.  Keeps writing in *Shadow Ticket* a similar story with some
of the same materials.

Banks’s protagonist dies.  In *Shadow Ticket* no major character dies, and
there’s no conclusive end to the story. Yes, the deaths of millions are
foreshadowed with the rise of Hitler, but they are in the novel’s future.
Like Slothrop, Hicks keeps averting death in the present. In *Gravity’s
Rainbow* millions had already died, and in the first line, “A screaming
comes across the sky,” we have the sound of future deaths, our deaths
launched from afar.  There is no screaming in *Shadow Ticket*, just the
repetitive and simple music of the organ grinder cranking on and on,
dodging that final ticket to what he usually calls the “Other Side.”  I
think it’s not an idle rhyme to say, “No death, no depth.”

Organ grinders in earlier times were sometimes given money to stop playing,
to move on.  I’m glad you are still here with us, Thomas Pynchon, but you
have written two monsterpieces.  You have done more masterful work than any
of your contemporaries.  Now you can stop.

*Tom LeClair is the author of two critical books, two volumes of essays,
and eight novels.  At 81, he keeps on writing reviews.*