In the course of ordinary events, a novelist expects, however grudgingly, to compete with rivals, even acolytes. But to discover yourself outpaced by a reality that bears an uncanny resemblance to your own fiction seems to be a particularly painful indignity to bear, a kind of spiritual ransacking.
Pity Thomas Pynchon. Beginning with the cult novels “V.” (1963), “The Crying of Lot 49” (1966) and “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973), he unleashed a vision of America that now feels all too familiar — a world swathed in conspiracy and trawled by self-appointed sleuths parsing every passing signal and sign, their paths lit by the bright beam of their own righteousness. Everyone is enticed into this orgy of analysis, to feast and gorge on information, to go a little mad in the process.
Surely we don’t need Pynchon to paint us such nightmares today, not when a leisurely morning scroll takes you past so many seething snake pits of suspicion — here, a group performs a close reading of the messages that the man charged with killing Charlie Kirk etched into bullet casings; there, another masses to mock them for taking the inscriptions seriously. The director of the F.B.I. posts a list of open questions about the murder, promising to investigate each one, including “hand gestures” of those standing nearby and seemingly suspicious plane activity. Camps argue back and forth: Israel killed Charlie; it was a distraction from the Epstein files. A former Infowars host wades in: “It just feels like a cover-up on top of a cover-up on top of a cover-up.”
What do you do for your next act when reality has caught up to your imagination? At first glance, Pynchon’s new novel, “Shadow Ticket,” seems bluntly escapist — this is the author in entertainment mode, trying to give us a bit of a holiday. Much has been made of his difficulty, the density of his prose and plots; what’s often overlooked is his serious commitment to silliness and the pleasure principle — a kind of principled waywardness — that motors much of his fiction.
“Shadow Ticket” opens in Prohibition-era Milwaukee. Our hero: Hicks McTaggart — former union buster turned muscle for hire, sensitive lunk, good dancer. The job: a real lulu. The heiress to a cheese fortune has run off with a clarinet player in a swing band, and Hicks is dispatched to bring her home. Off he lopes into a Pynchonian maw of mayhem and slipped mickeys. He dodges bombs concealed as Christmas presents. Women melt into his brawny arms — “lunchmeat,” one breathes, an endearment. A nefarious cheese syndicate keeps him in its sights. So does Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation, keen on recruiting him. A U-boat is spotted cruising in Lake Michigan. Hicks’s assignment (the “ticket” of the title) morphs into another. Herds of supporting characters stampede past — a married pair of British spies, bootleggers, chorus girls and cameos from the expanded Pynchon universe — delivering a little aria or a red herring, then vanishing from the plot.
From the jump, “Shadow Ticket” is strangely hectic and meager; it is one of Pynchon’s shortest books, and it is certainly his shallowest. He has been justly celebrated for his supple imagination and vast knowledge of arcana — extolled as our Melville, our Joyce. (Certainly, he has no equal when it comes to making reviewers lose their minds. His novels have been compared to the Great Wall of China in terms of their human achievement — and that by one of his harshest critics.)
It’s true that Pynchon can construct a cathedral out of language, but he also seems to have no idea where the light switches are located. His fiction’s chief flaws include characters so flimsy they are dead on arrival, superficial plots, a tin ear for dialogue and an adolescent awe of spectacular violence. These are merely the charges that Pynchon cheerfully levies against himself, in the introduction to “Slow Learner” (1984), a collection of his early short stories. To them I would add: an unfortunate habit of delivering exposition through dialogue (“Let me guess, you’re wondering why are we sending you eight hundred miles out of town”); pacing so robotic it feels lifted from 1950s comic books; an almost compulsive busyness that feels like a kind of horror vacui, a fear of the empty page; flat jokes; wooden romances; ridiculous attempts at menace (“It’s OK, I’m a creature of the streets, all gatted up, don’t trust nobody”); and an uncomfortable fixation on Shirley Temple.
Can I confess that this list was compiled with affection, even admiration? To have the good luck of watching an artist work steadily for more than half a century permits a fondness for their tics and tricks and flaws — the way we notice that there is always something a little wrong in the way Matisse paints hands or that Van Gogh makes babies look insane and terrifying. Flaws are an integral part of an artist’s signature, perhaps even more so than strengths, for style is so often developed to mask incapacities. Pynchon’s reliance on the detective novel has done much to paper over his weaknesses. The hard-boiled mode he favors indulges stock types and clipped dialogue, and all the spectacular violence you can stomach.
Pynchon has never sounded quite so out of tune, however; his effects and humor have never felt so antique. Not much of a holiday after all — but just then Hicks McTaggart walks into a bowling alley. He stops short, and the reader does too. “All normal as club soda, yet somehow … too normal, yes something is making a chill creep across Hicks’s scalp, the Sombrero of Uneasiness, as it’s known in the racket,” Pynchon writes. “Something here is off. A bowling alley is supposed to be an oasis of beer and sociability. … But this crowd here, no, these customers are only pretending to bowl. Stepping through spare-conversion systems, the way movie actors pretend to dance.”
The way, perhaps, Pynchon is only pretending to write a detective novel? His pulp fiction has always had the feel of parody. The seamlessness of technique has never been a concern; it has been the potential of the form for staging the old, nagging questions: about the chase for meaning, the fun and futility of the endless interpretation. It’s the music that Pynchon — our prince of paranoia — has taught us to hear, and it lands now on a new and resonant note.
The critic Wilfrid Sheed once said that the only thing worse than author photos was meeting said authors in the flesh. Why must writers always affect the distant look in their portraits, or fondle their faces or glower at us, chin in hand, as if struggling to prop up their craniums, weighty with genius? Pynchon has spared us all that. To the uninitiated, he might be best known for being famously reclusive and famously difficult. He once jumped out a window to avoid a Time magazine photographer.
That said, I know more about his ancestors than I do my own. The invisible man left in his wake an inconvenient number of chatty ex-girlfriends, and ex-friends with scores to settle — not to mention a storied family history; one of his ancestors wrote a notorious critique of Calvinism, which became one of the first books banned in America.
Pynchonists pieced together something of a biography long ago. We know he was born in 1937 on Long Island, that he studied engineering physics and English at Cornell and served in the Navy. We know that he wrote a draft of “Gravity’s Rainbow” on engineering quadrille paper, and was known to sleep in bathtubs in his friends’ apartments. We have heard that he fell in love with the Beats and that his teeth embarrassed him, and that he worked for Boeing in the early ’60s. There are rumors of a stutter, a checkered romantic past (cf. a former friend’s essay in Playboy in 1977: “Who Is Thomas Pynchon … and Why Did He Take Off With My Wife?”), and reports of ordinary family life and fatherhood. If he has hidden, it has been in plain sight; he refused only to market himself or to help us decipher his work, to tell us what his novels mean.
When Pynchon’s first novel, “V.,” was published in 1963, The Times described him “as a young man of almost painful modesty who fled to the wilds of Mexico rather than face the usual hoopla that goes with publication of a book.” But he left us this enigmatic story, the first in a series of elaborate puzzle boxes with no apparent solution, or even center. It is never established just who or what V is — a person, a place? The early novels are like that — all labyrinth, no Minotaur, endless circles of dread.
The young writer met the mood of the moment. Months after the publication of “V.,” the historian Richard Hofstadter gave an influential lecture at Oxford, later published as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Hofstadter traced the long roots of paranoia on the left and the right, among nativists and abolitionists, anti-Mormons and anti-Masons, among conspiracy theorists and the press. He lamented the double suffering of the paranoiac, “afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”
Paranoia became the word of a decade shaken by assassinations and political violence, capped by the Manson murders in 1969 (“The paranoia was fulfilled,” Joan Didion wrote in “The White Album”). Many picked up the theme — those were the years of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” — but Pynchon held on and never let go. Paranoia belongs to Pynchon. It is the pulse in his novels and the secret to their design — the patterns and games, the weird coincidences he puts in the way of the reader, as if trying to cultivate in us the paranoid’s imaginative tremor.
We might need it. The world has done nothing but merit our paranoia, in Pynchon’s perspective. To read him now, in the age of the A.I. ascendancy and Trumpian politics, is to realize how necessary it might be, how fervently we might need to question every face, fact, story, voice we encounter. “Except for the succession of the criminally insane who have enjoyed power since 1945, including the power to do something about it, most of the rest of us poor sheep have always been stuck with simple, standard fear,” Pynchon wrote in “Slow Learner,” describing consciousness in the age of the atomic bomb. “I think we all have tried to deal with this slow escalation of our helplessness and terror in the few ways open to us. From not thinking about it to going crazy from it. Somewhere on this spectrum of impotence is writing fiction about it — occasionally, as here, offset to a more colorful time and place.”
It was in Pynchon that I recall first seeing paranoia depicted not only as pathology but also as a strange and thwarted kind of love. “Unholy longing” is his term for it in “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Longing for what? For the life to be legible — to be able to trace not only the root systems of nefarious power around us but also the hidden harmonies and, in doing so, to feel ourselves sensitive and useful. Paranoia is the desire to possess something of the world, some special, secret understanding — it is knowledge eroticized.
Its pleasures are private and shared; it isolates as well as binds (how eerily some of his secret societies seem to anticipate QAnon’s unhinged group efforts). It can shut out the world but also invite it in. Oedipa Maas, the heroine of his second novel, “The Crying of Lot 49,” is saved from domestic drudgery when an ex-boyfriend names her as the executor of his will. She becomes caught in a web of strange coincidences and communications, or so she believes. She begins to notice the world, to really look at it, to want something from it, to believe there is something she has been called to do. She feels both saved and out of her mind. “There is something comforting — religious, if you want — about paranoia,” remarks Tyrone Slothrop in “Gravity’s Rainbow,” and “there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”
A common frustration with Pynchon is that his puzzles and games never neatly resolve. The books often end right before the moment of revelation; they leave us yearning. We never discover V’s true identity. Slothrop, the supposed hero, vanishes from “Gravity’s Rainbow” well before the book ends. There’s frequently a little gag too, with shattered glass in Pynchon’s novels; what are his paranoids searching for in the rubble, and what do they find? Answers or merely their own reflections, refracted a hundred times among the broken shards? In “The Crying of Lot 49,” Oedipa Maas, preparing to play a very Pynchonian twist on strip poker, goes into her closet and puts on all her clothes. Pynchon’s overstuffed novels feel a little bit like that — the layering of plots upon plots to dissuade us from any prospect of getting to the heart of the matter. In “Shadow Ticket” he plays with this theme by having Hicks’s assignments keep changing — he will never complete his labors.
With this book, has Pynchon, now 88, completed his? Has he said all he has come to say? It is difficult to attempt a satisfying story about his evolution — not just because he avoids publicity but because he reportedly works on a few books simultaneously, and for decades at a time. But I feel a difference, some change in the internal weather of his novels — a new warmth, even sweetness. For paranoia privileges secret knowledge, hidden knowledge. To live under its thrall, looking for what is concealed is to prize the leak, the exposé — and to risk losing the ability to register what is plain to see.
The sinister cabal will never lose its appeal to Pynchon, but ordinary life and consolation — children, dancing — start making a claim. He registers not just the bombs that fall from the sky but the rain, too, which he arranges to rinse clean the world and (briefly) the minds of his paranoids. “Everything changes. There’s that clean, rained-on smell,” he writes in “Bleeding Edge” (2013). “Average pushy Manhattan schmucks crowding the sidewalks also pick up some depth, some purpose — they smile, they slow down, even with a cellular phone stuck in their ear they are more apt to be singing to somebody than yakking. Some are observed taking houseplants for walks in the rain. Even the lightest umbrella-to-umbrella contact can be erotic.”
It is this turn that feels surprising in his later work, and especially in “Shadow Ticket.” Where contact was once mostly limited to sex — much of it unwanted and most of it fairly spooky — we are now permitted traces of connection. They arrive with a sudden shock as in that final scene in “Vineland” (1990), when Prairie Wheeler, another one of Pynchon’s characters on the run (just look at that name), wakes to find herself staring up into a face: not of her pursuer but of her dog, who has somehow tracked her down, his face “roughened by the miles, face full of blue-jay feathers, smiling out of his eyes.”
We cannot stop from searching, no matter that, in the world according to Pynchon, there may be no master key to uncover. But let us return to Hicks, toward the end of the book, in the embrace of a woman. She asks him if he likes her new perfume. He does, but before issuing judgment he tells her that he will need to ascertain exactly where on her body she has applied it, and he begins to search and sniff her playfully. It reads like a Pynchon quest in miniature — theatrical, ridiculous, earnest. It spoils nothing for me to tell you that we will leave him there — old Muscles McTaggart, wrapped in that woman’s arms, enjoying not a reprieve from paranoia but a new realization. Seek, as you must; seek all you want. The only satisfaction is in being found.
Source photographs for illustration above: Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images; William P. Gottlieb/Library of Congress; Anthony Angel Collection/Library of Congress; Blanton Owen/Italian Americans in the West collection, via Library of Congress.