Booksology These lavishly created miniatures take every possible form: characters, plot devices, props, settings, scenes. There is a bar in Budapest whose variously bizarre and thuggish clientele calls to mind the “Star Wars” cantina. There is a First World War U-boat that somehow glides from underneath Lake Michigan all the way to Croatia, commandeered by its captain, post-Armistice, for new and clandestine uses. I could go on; Pynchon does, with unstoppable and quasi-manic energy. At one point, inside the diner where Hicks and Thessalie meet up, we see “lunch dramas passing like storm fronts, pies in glass cases slowly losing their a.m. allure, grill artists taking care of various counterside chores while whatever they’re flipping is in midair rotating end over end”—that’s the author, of course, staging a sly cameo for himself, confident that he can do ten things at once and still catch the omelette on its way down.
And, sometimes, he can. The first page of “Shadow Ticket” is a master class in skills many writers won’t master in a lifetime: tone, rhythm, pacing, how to establish a character, how to prime a narrative engine, how to convince your reader in six paragraphs or fewer that you know what you’re doing. Much of the rest of the book is propelled forward, or whichever direction it’s going, by long stretches of fast-paced dialogue, and Pynchon’s ear for the way people actually speak is unerring. (“Whole different tax bracket up there in Shorewood, you people, ain’t it.”) His comedic sense is considerably more fallible—“Shadow Ticket” is not the first of his novels with a sophomoric smegma joke—but, when it lands, it lands. One character has a pig for a spirit animal. Another describes the port city now known as Rijeka as “the Milwaukee of the Adriatic.” The Al Capone of Cheese, meeting the real Al Capone, asks, “And what is it you’re the Al Capone of again?”
As for pace, “Shadow Ticket” reads like one of its subplots, about the Trans-Trianon 2000, a two-thousand-kilometre motorcycle circuit through the disputed territories of Central Europe, all speed and vroom. Uncharacteristically for Pynchon, the book never eddies off to explore some branch of science or mathematics or philosophy, and the moments when it slows down enough to let the reader actually look around are few and far between—a pity, because, when he wants to, Pynchon is wonderful at showing us the world. Here is a Nazi front disguised as a bowling alley, in the outer reaches of Milwaukee, the wintry Wisconsin night lit up for miles by the sign outside: “four or five different colors from deep violet to blood orange, bowling balls flickering left to right, pins scattering, reassembling, again and again, silently except for an electrical drone fading up slowly louder the closer you get to it.”
For the duration of that sentence, Pynchon is less Bosch than Edward Hopper, making us feel this scene by making us see it: the night and the neon, the gust of loneliness, the dangerous electric edge. On the whole, though, the author is not in the business of making anyone feel things. (The shining exception to this rule is “Mason & Dixon,” the only one of his novels that is not merely brilliant but also character-driven, thematically lucid, and profoundly moving.) His customary genre is farce—the rest of his characters are subordinate to the absurd situations they find themselves in—and his customary mode is that of the comic book, full color but two-dimensional. At one point, someone hands Hicks a live bomb on the streets of Milwaukee, which he barely manages to chuck into a fishing hole on iced-over Lake Michigan before it goes kaboom; later, a pair of spies escape a near-assassination in Transylvania by climbing the mooring lines of a departing zeppelin. In both cases, you can practically see the Benday dots and speech balloons. And the emotional register of the book stays mostly within the realm of the comic book, too: the good guys are good-guy-proofed against mortal danger; the bad guys are sinister but not frightening. Even the literal Nazis are never chilling, though they are sometimes chillin’. (Over beer and bratwurst: “We’re National Socialists, ain’t it? So—we’re socializing. Try it, you might have fun.”)
More important: What is all this doing in this work of fiction? From the beginning, Pynchon has put his readers in the position of his characters, encouraging us to see hidden significance and obscure connections within (and, later, among) his books, and as a result to grow steadily more paranoid with each passing page. Surely, we’re supposed to think, this cheese business must mean something—maybe even, as Pynchon teases, “something more geopolitical, some grand face-off between the cheese-based or colonialist powers, basically northwest Europe, and the vast teeming cheeselessness of Asia.” Or maybe Pynchon, who nearly killed off one of the title characters of “Mason & Dixon” with a giant wheel of Gloucester, is what you might call lactose intolerant. Or maybe he just thought it would be funny to write about the big cheese of Big Cheese.
