My
first encounter with the work of Thomas Pynchon came in high school when for
some uncertain reason I decided to start reading Mason & Dixon—perhaps
having google searched for the best books of 1997, because it’s my birthyear,
and deciding this one looked the most interesting—which after making it a few
hundred pages or so in I for some other uncertain reason stopped reading and
never did finish—perhaps the simple result of life’s frictions slowing down the
inertia of my progress, rather than any particular dissatisfaction. Who knows;
I was young. My next encounter came in my first post-college summer, the summer
of Covid, the summer of 2020, this time with more foreknowledge of what I was
getting into and indeed who Thomas Pynchon even was, when I picked up Gravity’s
Rainbow as my nighttime reading. With free time galore and the mental space
provided by a slowed-down world, I had disciplined myself into dedicating a full
hour to reading fiction before bed every night, and at a rate of about 30 per I’d
swept through all 700-some pages in what was probably my quickest journey
through a book of that size in my adult life. But here’s the question: did I
understand any of it? I’d have to answer that with a qualified No. Skimming the
book’s Wikipedia page the other day, I didn’t recognize much that I actually
comprehended at the time of reading, even things as simple as when and where
the book supposedly “took place.” No matter. I’m sure I’ll read it again some
day down the line, older and wiser and all that, and if I failed at grasping
some pretty fundamental facets of it I still went away with whatever
edification comes from the simple act of having spent so many hours in a book/world
so clearly the work of a skilled, substantive, stylish author. I breezed
through The Crying of Lot 49 last summer as a short palette cleanser
after a six month trek through War and Peace, and then read Vineland
earlier this year—you wouldn’t believe me if I tried to claim that it largely
wasn’t prompted by the then-upcoming Paul Thomas Anderson movie, so I won’t. I
enjoyed both of these books, and I “understood” them, at least on a logistical
level, more than those Pynchons previous. The announcement of a new Pynchon
novel in Shadow Ticket felt serendipitous on multiple personal levels. I’d
acquainted myself with his work enough for this to be the first real instance
of “anticipation for a new fiction publication” I’d felt since, I don’t know,
whatever popular adult fiction I’d been interested in as a teenager (which I’d
been literarily reared on via my dad); the preceding decade had mostly been
spent reading “classic” literary fiction, your Dostoevskys & Hawthornes &
such (in whatever time I could find outside of my obsessive film viewing
schedule of course); and I’d only read one novel published in the 2020s up to this
point (Michel Houellebecq’s great Annihilation). Secondly, as the work
of an author in his late 80s, the late style associations brought by a new
Pynchon book came perfectly timed with my work on my book about late style—any
time I spent reading Shadow Ticket could be chalked up as research,
making myself feel slightly better about trading progress in my own work for
pleasure in someone else’s, and would generally be a thematically and therefore
aesthetically appropriate addition to my life at this point in time. (If you’re
out of the loop, check my last blog post for details, but my book Late Style
in Film is still on track to arrive sometime early next year.) Lastly, Shadow
Ticket wasn’t to be just a Thomas Pynchon book, but a Thomas Pynchon book set
in Milwaukee. As a southeastern Wisconsin lifer, this brought me no small
amount of pride, and to see my very own hometown—Waukesha, which lies about 15
miles west of Milwaukee, to get personal for a second—mentioned more than once
is enough to be one of those “sorry, this is the only thing I’m gonna be
talking about for the next week” kind of things that I will treasure to the
point of being kind of sad that there aren’t actually that many people in my local
life familiar enough with Pynchon for the coolness of this to even register if
I told them about it. I’m less of a local historian than I’d like to be, but everything
about Pynchon’s evocation of 1930s Milwaukee and the beer & cheese-ness of
it all is just catnip to me, as are the hilarious Pynchonian tangents related to
it (from Chapter 13: “Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess
consciousness?”). For the record, if you’re interested, here is a list I kept
of every Wisconsin city mentioned in the book: Baraboo, Delafield, Grafton, Green
Bay, Kenosha, Kewaunee, Madison, Milwaukee, Oconomowoc, Oshkosh, Racine,
Sheboygan, Two Rivers, Waukesha, Waupun, Wauwatosa, West Allis, and Wonewoc. Shadow
Ticket is surely being proclaimed “slight” by certain critics and readers
by virtue of it’s sub-300 page count and seeming lack of grand literary
pretentions beyond its simple quasi-metaphysical detective plot, but man if I
didn’t thoroughly enjoy reading this more than almost anything in recent memory.
The ‘30s setting lets Pynchon go crazy inventing dialogue that’s like a more
literarily tangled version of pre-Code Hollywood existentialism, and the way he
wields language in general is just a line-by-line treat. He does this thing
with vernacular phrases where he’ll throw in little clauses, sometimes offset
by commas sometimes not, that shake up a sentence and keep everything just humorously
off-balance enough to keep the writing from ever being anything less than
alive. It’s very funny without ever diffusing the stakes—to the degree that the
actual stakes can be ascertained, an aspect of the book that makes it slippery
and mysterious and, again, very funny. If I had to nail down one of Pynchon’s
main themes, it would simply be that History is Weird, and that living through
it is even weirder. Weird as in funny but also concerning, confusing, and so
forth (a phrase Pynchon never gets tired of appending to the end of sentences
or paragraphs in Shadow Ticket, and which I never got tired of enjoying
the deployment of.) Accusing Pynchon of turning a blind eye to the (very Pynchonian,
you know) present day for a tale of conspiracy and confusion in 1932 instead is
not just very funny but also to miss the fact that the world has always been
Pynchonian: 18th-century early America was Pynchonian, WWII-era
Europe was Pynchonian, ‘60s & ‘80s California was Pynchonian, 1930s
Milwaukee and pre-WWII Europe was Pynchonian, and, yes, the present day is rather
Pynchonian. I’d even argue that Shadow Ticket is not inconsequential to
present-day concerns at all, but in fact might be useful for articulating and
therefore navigating whatever proto-fascist malaise you might feel we are
currently living under.
.png)
