Tom Le Clair's review

[Erik T. Burns]

as I mentioned elsewhere:

About third of the way in to Shadow Ticket and so far these are the worst*
puns:

Fancy dining for horses is "oat cuisine"

A-and

The popularity of deepwater bowling is evidenced by the existence of 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea

*chacun à son gout

On Wed, Oct 8, 2025 at 5:53 PM Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:

> Pretty scathing and mean-spirited, but probably on point.
>
> I think the advent of the internet struck a blow to Pynchon's style. The
> obscure facts, crazy connections and aura of conspiracy that showcased his
> dogged research skills and made his first three books so fun and seductive
> are now available to the masses. You can read the old Baedekers online. Got
> a conspiracy theory? Take a number.
>
> On Wed, Oct 8, 2025, 11:39 AM Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.*
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>