Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon review: 'combines the slapstick and the eldritch'
There’s plenty of comedy in Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, but horrible real-world parallels are hiding just beneath the vaudeville charm, writes Stuart Kelly
The first thing the reader will encounter with this novel is a mordant epigraph, spoken by Bela Lugosi in the 1934 horror film The Black Cat – “Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney… perhaps not.” Almost the last words come in a letter, and say “Right now, we’ve got a couple of sunsets to chase”. It might sound valedictory, but I’ve been hoodwinked by Pynchon’s leave-taking in the past: he is, admittedly, now 88, and Shadow Ticket is in a similar vein and timbre to Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013), after the mammoth carnivalesque of Against the Day in 2006. But he is still the finest purveyor of “perhaps not baloney”. The mania, the wit, the outrage, the outrageousness, the tiny moments of grace are all still here. Nobody can combine the slapstick and the eldritch like Pynchon, unless one were to persuade Mel Brooks to direct a film version of a William Burroughs novel with dialogue from Raymond Chandler.
It is 1932 in Milwaukee, and Hicks McTaggart is persuaded by his boss in Unamalgamated Ops detective agency to take on a case involving Daphne Airmont, who has seemingly lit out for the territories with a clarinettist, Hop Wingdale from the “old Klezmopolitans” musical outfit. It is not an open and shut case of retrieving the heiress. For one thing, her father is the missing “Al Capone of Cheese in Exile”; for another, she is a former squeeze of McTaggart. Even before the investigation proper is underway, there is a bomb scare – but is it Italian anarchists, German fascists, Russian revolutionaries or any variety of hybrid American versions? And who was the intended target?
With this being a Pynchon novel, there are shells within shells and stories within stories, plots and counterplots, double-bluffs and triple-bluffs, great names (Squeezita Thickly, star of “Bigger Than Your Stummick”, and Zoltán von Kiss, a parapsychologist, were favourites), song-sequences and acronyms – there is one – BIGBAD – that isn’t spelled out. Have fun finding it.
The word sometimes mentioned carelessly is “paranoia”, and as far back as Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 it has been seen as a “signature theme”. But if Oedipa in that novel was genuinely confused about whether she was mad or the world was, here it is quite clear that there is a difference between eccentric perspectives and a world becoming more dangerous, darker and almost demonic.
There is a choreographed tension between chaos and determinism in Pynchon’s work: there are laws that govern the flight of the rockets in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and there are too many factors to predict the precise effect of the explosion when it lands. In Shadow Ticket, McTaggart does not know why so many people are interested in the case, but there is ample evidence that this is rather too interesting. He is approached by amateur radio sleuths – 1930s cyberhackers, if you like – as well as the police, the government, the family and psychic secretary Thessalie Wayward, who teaches McTaggart gun-handling which is part stage-magic prestidigitation and might be, well, magic. Or bravery. Or stupidity.
At this point, Pynchon is really only getting started. There are however things to note. MacTaggart quotes the Gumshoe’s Manual frequently, and is almost charmingly naïve about a book that tells you what to do in any given situation. But he’s also a dancer, and jazz is the backdrop, a way of improvising within strictures. The rest ramps up this pas-de-deux of random and planned. MacTaggart learns of a secret submarine in Lake Superior, which ought to have been decommissioned at the end of the Great War. He’s slipped a Mickey Finn and ends up on a boat, the Stupendica, which somehow has left him in a landlocked country – shades of Shakespeare’s Bohemia in Twelfth Night. There are fascists, vampires, golems, a brilliant English spy-couple reminiscent of Jessica Fairlight and Roger Mexico in Gravity’s Rainbow (especially since Pip and Alf here also are linked to Christmas), a crossword that cannot be solved, a motorbike race around Mitteleuropa, more on the international “Cheez” situation, everywhere orbiting Fiume, the no-place, hedonistic capital, temporary zone, disputed area of Gabriele d’Annunzio. With a big lummox stuck in the middle of it.
Of course it is fun, and it is comedy in the way that only comedy can be genuinely insightful. Alf is trying to avert “the Great Simplification”. The “German Political Celebrity” looms large. As with Mason & Dixon in 1997, Pynchon is hiding the horrible parallels under his vaudeville charm. In the swirl and swarm there are signposts. Daphne quotes Jung and the Delphic Oracle – “vocatus atque not vocatus deus aderit” – bidden or unbidden God will come. Pynchon imagines Vienna and Budapest as a doubled mirror of psychoanalysis and the supernatural, but it could as easily describe two sides of a different country.
Much though I laughed through this, the only way to express my sheer joy at it, and its capacity to move, is to quote. “Stay or go. Two fates beginning to diverge – back to the U.S., marry, raise a family, assemble a life you can persuade yourself is free from fear, as meanwhile, over here, the other outcome continues to unfold, to roll in dark as the end of time. Those you could have saved, could’ve shifted at least somehow onto a safer stretch of track, are one by one robbed, beaten, killed, seized and taken away into the nameless, the unrecoverable. Until one night, too late, you wake into an understanding of what you should have been doing with your life all along. Something like that. If anybody was still there to hear it. Which there isn’t”. Amen, maestro.
Shadow Ticket, by Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Cape, £22
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