Shadow Ticket Group Read 2026

[Mark Kohut]

yes, I think Laura is right on as we used to say  and I love the way it is
historically contextualized...
nothing I wanted to draw from that phrase seems right....I looked for more
in rereading chapter one
but there is zilch and my memory of my Quick Read says I hallucinated
something to make sure I
overthought it.....lol.....

So forget fate and determinism from me.

I think now that free indirect discourse in a constant presence with
'live'--a judgment--prose is the novel's style.
As in many of TRP's others and in the style of many.,many other
modernists.....the leading 20th C and beyond
way of telling novels...

Unlike Laura, I found the paralleling real history, the shadow reality,
wonderfully done....I find the very use of
his tropes-----Corrupt Chicago, gangland run, a near-perfect parallel with
Trump's Presidencies.....P does 'tell"
us, what many don't know historically, that America's corruption leading to
electing a criminal mob boss goes deep.
Many many---I've been guilty until I think better---say Trump is a
political anomaly....

In some way, I think TRP brings insights into how America (in the sixties)
had seeds of its own sixties failures
in Vineland and look at Bleeding Edge, which to me so gets tech
fascism.....RE Vineland: TRP said himself, did he not,
that the New Left never worked the working class into its politics....and
the ways
women were treated in the movement is part of the failure and more.....

On Fri, Jan 9, 2026 at 11:36 AM Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:

> Assuming the Milwaukee book takes place in 1932, when FDR, with his
> commitment to Repeal (among other things) was on his way to a landslide
> victory, "Prohibition repeal [is] just around the corner" was more of a
> generally held belief than a prescient look into the future.
>
> We the readers know exactly what's coming.
>
> I found the looming inevitables disappointing, in that Pynchon didn't
> really examine them, with his and our hindsight, in any meaningful way. As
> a result the story, such as it was, felt more like filler between ATD and
> GR than any mind expanding knotting in or digging deep.
>
> I don't mind the filling in, given that it's part of Pynchon's grand
> history of the USA, from M&D to BE. Still missing: the 19th century and the
> Trump Era. Maybe he could encompass both bloated gilded ages in one book. I
> hope he has enough time left!
>
> On Fri, Jan 9, 2026, 10:11 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Back to the Future and/or Back to Basics...
>>
>> In a novel in which time is a theme, notice right at the beginning
>> the narrator writes in his opening sentence '" Prohibition repeal just
>> around the corner"
>>
>> The narrator knows (some of) the future already. Lit crit-like readers
>> often say now
>> that a predetermined 'fate' is set up...(Or McFate as Nabokov teases)
>> ....IS it here?.....
>> A curious Pynchon previous work connection comes to me here---very beyond
>> the
>> overt Future folk in Against The Day.....
>>
>> When in The Crying of Lot 49, we get that Butterfly wing allusion
>> early....a butterfly flaps its wings
>> somewhere far away and.......it determines some happening thousands of
>> miles away---or
>> simply, elsewhere in the universe.....some scientific determinists use the
>> flapping butterfly
>> as an example of determinism everywhere.....
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>