Thomas Pynchon's world of shadows His work embraces American surrealism

“‘Pineapples come and pineapples go, never mind that Santa Flavia Chamber of Commerce meeting, write me a memo, small change anymore, got us a ticket just in and it’s a lulu, I’m telling you, this is the one that’ll put us all swimming in the gravy…’ and so forth.”

Ever since his first novel V. came out in 1963, Thomas Pynchon has been a master architect of the “and so forth,” and we can count on him to roll pineapples and memos underfoot along the path to it. I remember from my teenaged years trailing after Mrs. Oedipa Maas in bewildered joy through that mirror-walled prison maze The Crying of Lot 49, then essaying Gravity’s Rainbow, whose hero Tyrone Slothrop was “obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name on it,” hence with meticulous dream-logic kept unconsciously calling Nazi V-2 rocket-bombs down on the sites of his recent, well, you know. 

As for the mysterious heroine of V. … — but like Pynchon himself, I digress, if not quite all the way to the haunted castle called And So Forth. The point is that you and I, caught up in Shadow Ticket, his latest novel, are now in Milwaukee, 1932, with another blizzard of pineapples about to fall, Prohibition still in hypocritical force and Al Capone’s heirs blowing up the competition. Although every now and then some sage may see fit to remark that “this caper’s got German storm kiddies written all over it,” for next year Hitler will become Chancellor, and he has sympathizers right here in the American heartland (if you don’t believe me, try bowling at New Nuremberg Lanes, where the doggerel is a cheerfully, idiotically vicious as anything out of Gravity’s Rainbow: “Hold yer flag up high, yeahh, / Let’s swing it, for the Nah-zis—”) — yep, dear old 1932! 

Our protagonist will be Hicks McTaggart, who for money used to crack strikers’ heads, because “at the time in Wisconsin not a week went by there wasn’t a strike at least being voted on someplace, plenty of opportunity to kick asses on behalf of management,” so that Hicks almost resembled one of Adolf’s Brownshirts, except that they kick ass gratis, for righteousness’s sake. Well, Hick surprised himself by getting softhearted. And rather like Slothrop not (consciously) knowing the baleful power of his penis, Hicks simply felt relieved when his sap somehow misplaced itself (nothing to do with him) just before it would have split some little Bolshevik’s skull. So he became a private eye. Now won’t that be just the ticket?

His boss was a cards-to-his-chest type named Boynt Crosstown — and here I admit to having dropped that in as the merest excuse to revel right now in more of Pynchon’s christenings: Dr. Swampscott Vobe, Wisebroad’s Shoes, Connie McSpool, Glow Tripworth de Vasta, Cousin Begonia, “child sensation Squeezita Thickly” — for this author’s longstanding genius there on that private swivel chair of the Department of Character Appellations matches long-gone Lord Dunsany’s for imaginary gods and cities. I cast my grin back upon Tyrone Slothrop, who was first printed in 1973, and wonder to what extent my delight in Shadow Ticket derives from nostalgia. For I’m getting decrepit, while Pynchon is even older, so which will come first, the old lion’s last roar, or my last read? Enriching the nostalgia is Pynchon’s lyrically sad and squalidly beautiful Milwaukee, a place to which I have no connection, and at a time before my parents were born, so why should I care about it? But I do, because it’s a shadow Milwaukee, all the more worth missing for being unreal. 

There is a gentleness to Pynchon, and sometimes even a cynical sweetness (and so forth); then come prankish pineapples. We may discover ourselves “haunting given stretches of sidewalk just as the shops close down and the girls come out dazy and chattering, cigarette smoke and the slowly more intensifying light of the evening street” and believe in what we see, but what about when two fortune-telling penny scales in a row print out consistently insistent bomb warnings about the Christmas package received by Hicks from two of Santa’s elves? 

We can now commence tiptoeing or maybe goosestepping over bowling balls and rolling pineapples on the way to the “and so forth”. For this, you see, is a genuine “Milwaukee bildungsroman, as they call it locally” — I just bet they do. And there are many ways to get in trouble in Milwaukee, so why on earth would Hicks ever want to depart? But what happens in Milwaukee does not infallibly stay in Milwaukee, because Boynt Crosstown has handed him that real lulu of a ticket, whose invisibly inked purport reminds me of a certain refrain: “… oh get away / from me, you — /ol’ mid- / night… in Milwaukee…” Hence halfway through this thumb’s thickness of smooth, sly pages, Hicks will be glumly making the best of interwar Europe.

Reader, what gives you your get-up-’n’-go? Are you a Jane Austen character hunting for marriage, a money-starved Dreiser protagonist, a Thucydidean demagogue, or would you rather get your love ticket punched? In Shadow Ticket there will be dancings, rubbings, copulations, flirtations, and yet we are far from the romantic mystifications of V.: Hicks’s heart does ache, but it’s more jealous than committed. In short, the motive power of his personal narrative, however greased up by dalliances, will not be his dancehall girl April Randazzo, because not only does he stay uncommitted, but the gangster Vumvum soon breaks it to him that she is the willing moll of a mobster titan. And if you still hope against hope that Shadow Ticket will turn into Love Story, let Vumvum set you straight: “Padrino, this far down the chain nobody gives ungazz about that emotional stuff.” — April stays behind to marry Don Peppino. What snatches Hicks out of Milwaukee is that lulu of a work ticket from Boynt Crosstown. And the pineapples roll. Sometimes they detonate.

To maintain narrative suspense I have sworn not to tell you that Hick’s not-quite-friend Stuffy Keegan has recently escaped gangsterous assassins thanks to an Austro-Hungarian U-13 submarine that snuck in beneath the midnight ice of Lake Michigan, which disappearing act a certain ominous new breed of policemen inexplicably threatens to blame on Hicks himself. Hence he accepts Boynt Crosstown’s dragooning of him into returning to her fiance and Mommy (Daddy being on the lam) Daphne the Airmont cheese heiress, whom Hicks once rescued from a mental asylum. Now this may be tricky to close out, because she would rather be in Europe with her mercurial boyfriend. Boynt does hint at a potentially generous expense allowance. He further advises Hicks to “better just be yourself — with you, not the perfect option, I agree…”

Well, so off goes our hero to the Airmont mansion, in what is almost a quasi-semi-parody of noble gumshoe Philip Marlowe meeting his fat cat employer at the beginning of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and in both books we know everything will become more sinister and complicated, because that’s what all discerning readers demand. Here for instance is one of Shadow Ticket’s complications: Cheese turns out to be “self-aware… maybe not exactly the way we are, but still more than some clever simulation… Long-time spiritual truth in Wisconsin”. And coincidentally, Daddy Airmont, forenamed Bruno, is “known in the industry as the Al Capone of cheese”. A Viennese policeman (who might be something else) refers to him “the way Dracula pronounces the name Van Helsing”. I am sorry to say that the battles and extortions of the Internationalist Cheese Syndicate run out of laughs, as do such easy digs at Nazi “culture” as “an unremitting suite of Wagnerian works transcribed for zither”.

But those are my only cavils with Shadow Ticket, and having made them I had best hasten on by padding out this essay with plot summary: drugged in New York, poor Hicks wakes up on an ocean liner bound for Europe, about which place one of his fellow passengers and mysterious keepers inspires him as follows: “With the old lot on their way out, there’s a second chance, not only for Germany but for all civilization.”

“Routine ticket, only over here for as long as it takes, till everything’s back to normal.” “OK, maybe this ticket is takin’ longer than it should, but that don’t mean—” Sorry, Hicks, but oh yes it does: routine ticket, runaway heiress ticket, extra ticket, unknown ticket, fishy ticket, shadow ticket…! “Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark.” Another secret I promised not to tell you is that pretty much every Pynchon novel entails cruises to and from Shadowland, as in the very first pages of The Crying of Lot 49: “I think it’s time Wendell Maas had a little visit from The Shadow.” If you distrust ambiguity and are masochistic enough to read this author regardless, why, sure, he knows how to project bright stillness, just to trick you — imagine an interrogation cell, or maybe a superego’s lightbulb glaring inflexibly in the prison of your very own frontal lobe —: “a good enough vision,” says Gravity’s Rainbow, “of what’s shadowless noon and what isn’t”. But noons never last very long for the hag-ridden victim of a shadow ticket. As Gravity’s Rainbow has it: “So much has to be left behind now, so quickly.”

Pynchon passes out shadow tickets left and right, just as God does, because that’s how life goes, right? We all long to know what the rules are, in order to stay out of trouble by following them or else get ahead by breaking them. For instance, why did those two sleazy Christmas elves present Hick with a ticking package? — “In the business,” a bomb-cooker explains, “we understand that an explosive… is actually somebody with something to say… a message we aren’t so much receiving as overhearing” — because had Hicks been exploded, the message could hardly have been to him (no more Hicks to receive it) but about him. But what is it? It garbles itself, on purpose, or maybe gets parasitized, à la William Burroughs, by unimaginably alien cipher-mongers, and so the shadowless noon turns shady, then as opaque as cuttlefish ink; until, just as in the very last sentence of V. the Mediterranean Sea “showed nothing at all of what came to lie beneath, that quiet June day,” namely THE END, so Hicks McTaggart sleepwalks blind in blackness, wondering where the next pineapple will catch him. What can he do but keep pretending compliancy? 

To cope with alogical, amoral and possibly inescapable shadow tickets, The Crying of Lot 49 advises “silence, impersonation, opposition masquerading as allegiance,” which will be Hicks’s exact way of getting by in Europe’s fear-spiced “desire for what has almost arrived… [in] a long erotic buildup before the shuddering instant of clarity, a violent collapse of civil order which will spread from a radiant point in or near Vienna,” which I take to mean Berlin. The foreplay includes a kind of paranormal pre-Cold War between Nazis and Soviets, while Ustasha terrorists and Hungarian Jew-killing “Vladboys”, “small, nimble, predatory, full of pep”, operate between Pynchon’s lines. 

Meanwhile, where the hell are we? In a line which could have been lifted from Philip K. Dick retails the possibility of getting “thrown by some occult switchwork into an alternate branch line…, where Stalin and crew are no longer possibilities…” It almost seems as if this could happen to anyone, even you and me! What if it did? Lot 49 ends with Oedipa Maas still waiting for answers, Gravity’s Rainbow with another rocket about to come down on us, and in V. we never find out for certain who V is; while right back here in Shadow Ticket, when the cheese monster Bruno Airmont gets kidnapped onto Stuffy’s submarine so that he can be safely exiled instead of bumped off, they take him to a New York whose Statue of Liberty has become now someone else. “It’s the U.S. but not exactly the one you left. There’s exile and there’s exile.” That sounds slightly unnerving but not necessarily worth dreading, for at least we’re not trapped in William Burroughs’s Ticket That Exploded. 

The bottom line is that Hicks McTaggart’s Milwaukee is hopelessly far away. Fortunately, when hailed by Stuffy Keegan’s submarine he was informed, maybe even guaranteed, that thanks to some “swell beer joints”, the home base of Fiume (AKA Rijeka) is “the Milwaukee of the Adriatic”. Anything can happen in one Milwaukee or another, maybe even something good, for even “as Hicks begins to understand that he’s not going back to the States right away,” Pynchon gives him one lulu of a ticket, because his ever closer friend Terike starts teaching him Hungarian, which necessarily involves kissing lessons.

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