Laurent Grasso, Studies into the Past. Photo by Adam Reich. Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York / Los Angeles.
The one thing everyone knows about Thomas Pynchon’s novels is that they are paranoid. We’ll get to that later. The other thing everyone knows about them is that they are overstuffed. Packed with a manic variety of subplots, original song lyrics, scientific arcana (both real and invented), pop-cultural detritus, zany character names, and stoner jokes, Pynchon’s books often feel as if they are on the verge of exploding under the pressure of their own contents.
Yet if any one Pynchon novel can seem chaotic and ramshackle, Pynchon’s body of work is among the most unified in postwar American fiction: all of his novels deal with Americans’ inability or unwillingness to understand the historical forces that built and continue to shape the world they inhabit. This has been Pynchon’s great subject from the beginning. In V., his 1963 debut, he put a miniature manifesto for his whole artistic project into the mouth of a character named Eigenvalue:
Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as [Herbert] Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it’s impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which comes to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroys any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the ’30s, the curious fashions of the ’20s, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.
The classic Pynchon protagonist struggles and fails to discern those deeper patterns. Earnest, paranoid, horny, high, and at once ingenious and hapless, these characters obsessively pursue some object of mystery, fear, or desire, and in due course they become entangled in webs of conspiratorial intrigue, whether geopolitical, corporate, sexual, supernatural, or otherwise. In V., the aforementioned Herbert Stencil embarks on a decades-long, worldwide search for a woman—she’s the titular “V.”—mentioned in his dead father’s journals. From chapter to chapter, Stencil travels (not always literally) to different spots on the globe during moments of historical crisis, from the Herero and Nama genocide carried out in German Southwest Africa between 1904 and 1908 to Malta during the Suez crisis of 1956. But he never comes close to finding what he is looking for.
More to the point, Stencil’s frenetic focus on V.’s identity and whereabouts leaves him unable to register much of the very consequential history that is actually unfolding around him. Toward the end of his travels, Pynchon writes, “Stencil himself . . . seemed more unaware each day . . . of what was happening in the rest of the world.” A few pages later, a different character, the discharged sailor Benny Profane, voices the same sentiment in a blunter way. Profane, who travels with Stencil in the book’s later chapters, is talking to a woman named Brenda. “You’ve had all these fabulous experiences,” she says. “Haven’t you learned?” “No,” Profane replies, “offhand I’d say I haven’t learned a goddamn thing.”
The same might be said of Oedipa Maas (The Crying of Lot 49), Tyrone Slothrop (Gravity’s Rainbow), Zoyd Wheeler (Vineland), and Doc Sportello (Inherent Vice). And now it can also be said of Hicks McTaggart, the Depression-era Milwaukee private eye at the center of Pynchon’s latest novel, Shadow Ticket.
Like Pynchon’s last two novels, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, Shadow Ticket is a detective story of sorts, and at a modest 293 pages (among Pynchon’s novels, only The Crying of Lot 49 is shorter), its plot is relatively easy to summarize. It is 1932. The conflict that isn’t yet being called the First World War has receded into the background, but the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression means that the present isn’t too enjoyable, and many people sense there is worse to come. McTaggart is tasked with tracking down Daphne Airmont—a local cheese tycoon’s daughter, who has run off with a clarinetist named Hop Wingdale—and returning her to the loving embrace of her fiancé. This should be simple enough work (your basic “matrimonial,” in PI parlance), but distractions abound: a local gangster is trying to steal McTaggart’s woman from him, and federal agents want to frame him for blowing up a shipment of bootlegged booze.
The search for Airmont soon draws McTaggart away from good old Milwaukee, putting him first on a train to New York, then on an ocean liner to the chaotic rump Kingdom of Hungary. There he meets a pair of British intelligence agents, is deputized into working for Interpol, searches for one of the cheese tycoon’s head cronies, encounters a ladies’ magazine correspondent with a developing interest in anti-fascist direct action, and tries to avoid the predations of various fascist motorcycle gangs. All the while, he longs to return home, but this will prove impossible, both because of his precarious legal situation in Milwaukee and because of the more encompassing reality that the world he longs for is disappearing forever. It’s a reality that McTaggart cannot, or will not, grasp. “Oh, dear,” one of the British spies tells him, pitying his naïveté. “Do you really not know? ‘Normal’? Things will never go back to the way they were, it’ll all just keep getting more, what the Chinese call, ‘interesting.’”
But these are venial rather than mortal sins, easy to forgive.
Pynchon is eighty-eight, and his age shows a bit in Shadow Ticket,
which strikes several chords that readers of Inherent Vice will have already heard. Thessalie Wayward, a psychic and secretary at Hicks’s PI firm who provides him with platonic, sisterly life advice, recalls Inherent Vice’s Sortilège, the thoughtful hippie who counsels Doc Sportello on spiritual matters. And Shadow Ticket’s Vic Durbow—a self-loathing Prohibition agent whose “trademark routine is to throw pool balls at speakeasy mirrors, not off-axis or anything, but straight at his own image”—is reminiscent of Doc Sportello’s foil, Detective Lieutenant Bigfoot Bjornsen. Both Shadow Ticket and Inherent Vice also spend time meditating on the apocryphal Native American belief that if you save someone’s life, you become responsible for it. In neither book do these meditations have much of an impact on anything; Pynchon just seems to like chewing on the idea.
The science-fictional details that accessorize Pynchon’s scene-setting, a long-standing feature of his novels, are also rendered more clumsily than in earlier novels. In a labyrinthine club called Night of the World, each table “has a small circular cathode-ray tube or television screen set flush in the tabletop, throbbing more than flickering with shaggy images of about 100 lines’ resolution. . . . Numbered push-button switches allow you to connect to any other table in the place and watch each other as you chat.” Someone explains that this is called “Face-Tube,” and that it is “the future of flirtation.” OK, so Pynchon has teleported the invention of a primitive video-call/social-media technology back to an imaginary nightclub in interwar Europe. So what? (If he’s trying to highlight the fact that he sees parallels between the interwar period and our contemporary historical moment, this is a ham-fisted way of doing it.) The stoner logic of Pynchon’s humor has long been one of the real pleasures of reading him, but in Shadow Ticket, despite the presence of a few really good jokes, it is hard to ignore the increased frequency with which Pynchon missteps in deploying it.
But these are venial rather than mortal sins, easy to forgive. If Shadow Ticket does turn out to be Pynchon’s last novel, it will be a fitting capstone to his art, and its relative simplicity, compared with books like Gravity’s Rainbow or Mason & Dixon, shines a spotlight on certain political aspects of Pynchon’s earlier books that sometimes get overlooked.
As one example of an illuminating contrast between Shadow Ticket and its predecessors, consider the fact that McTaggart is much less enthusiastic about his search than your standard Pynchon protagonist. In Lot 49, Oedipa Maas demonstrates an authentic, obsessive zeal, even a willingness to go insane, in her quest to understand the meaning of the muted post horn symbol. In Mason & Dixon, the eponymous characters pursue their surveying project despite the fact that doing so requires evading both marauding Native Americans and a murderous gang of white settlers. Even in Inherent Vice, Doc Sportello would rather smoke on the beach than get mixed up with an international smuggling cartel, but the missing person he’s after is an ex he can’t get over—he really does want to know if she’s OK.
McTaggart, though, just wants to go back home. He leaves Milwaukee for New York only after strenuous protest, and he winds up on the boat to Europe because someone slips him a mickey and then drags him on board while he’s unconscious. It doesn’t quite do McTaggart justice to say that he is buffeted along by forces beyond his comprehension—it’s more like he’s right in the middle of one of world history’s great upheavals, and can’t manage to get interested. Adrift in Europe and increasingly marginal to the main action of the book itself, McTaggart’s thoughts constantly return to local comforts:
Sometimes all Hicks wants is to be back in Milwaukee, restored to normal life, to a country not yet gone Fascist, a place of clarity and safety, still snoozy and safe, brat smoke from a lunch wagon grill, some kid practicing accordion through an open window, first snow coming into town off the prairie, barrooms where the smell of beer is generations deep, women in round little hats. Penny scales, newsstands run by war veterans named Sarge, everyday street doors that lead to nothing deeper than friendly speakeasies.
This reverie, this “fantasy of old-time Milwaukee,” continues for quite a bit longer. The first time I read it, I thought that Pynchon was dragging on, that he had piled detail upon detail until the larger picture collapsed under the weight of its constituent parts. The second time I read it, I came to believe that it’s McTaggart’s longing that is excessive, not Pynchon’s rendering of it. Remember what Pynchon wrote in V.—that people situated at the bottom of history’s folds console themselves with “a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were.” That’s what McTaggart is doing here. The rosy urban landscape McTaggart paints for himself in no way corresponds to the Milwaukee that would actually be waiting for him back home, a city at the economic nadir of the Great Depression, where jobs are scarce, organized crime is running amok, and terror bombings are a regular occurrence. Life in the U.S. may not be as grim as it is in Hungary, but it is still pretty miserable. McTaggart’s nostalgia is not just misplaced; he is lying to himself.
Consider the line “restored to a normal life, to a country not yet gone Fascist.” It is not the case that McTaggart’s America is “a country not yet gone Fascist.” Milwaukee is lousy with fascists, including literal Nazis, the fascist-adjacent mobsters who rule the city’s streets and illegal bars at gunpoint, and the federal agents and local cops who view FDR as the most dangerous man in America. Early in the novel, McTaggart pays a visit to some relatives and finds that “the chief topic of supper conversation is going to be Adolf Hitler, children present or not.” His Uncle Lefty (ha, ha, ha) predicts serious violence between local “Reds” and “the Hitler movement,” and “real blood on the streets of Milwaukee . . . till one party prevails.” McTaggart gently asks which side Lefty would like to see prevail. “Der Führer,” Lefty replies, “is der future, Hicks. Just the other day the Journal calls him ‘that intelligent young German Fascist.’” Later, Lefty takes McTaggart to a German bowling alley where Nazis gather in the basement and sing “an American swingtime version” of the “Horst Wessel Song.”
One detects a writer who has finally lost patience with Americans’ persistent failure to understand the obvious consequences of their own country’s actions.
McTaggart thinks of himself as skeptical of these right-wing fanatics, but Pynchon makes clear that this, too, is a delusion. Before he started private investigating, McTaggart was a strikebreaker, which seemed “the logical field to get into” after high school. “At the time in Wisconsin,” he rationalizes, “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.” Before long, McTaggart’s enthusiasm for the work, which asked nothing of him “but to be solid and in the way,” won him “a certain notoriety as a corporate thug.” He wasn’t an ideologue about it, which made it easier for him to focus on the work. “Bolshevik,” to McTaggart, meant only “people whose heads he was being paid to bust.” On the job one night in Sheboygan County, he was barely prevented from beating a striker to death by what was either an amazing stroke of luck or supernatural intervention. “It would take a couple of days,” Pynchon writes, “for Hicks to understand that the strange feeling he couldn’t get a handle on was relief at not having killed somebody.”
McTaggart soon left strikebreaking for his career in private investigation, but making a truly clean break with his reactionary past turns out to be harder than he might have imagined. At the Nazi bowling alley with his fascist uncle, McTaggart runs into his erstwhile mentor in anti-labor violence, Ooly Schaufl—now going by Ulrich—and finds that he can’t help but try to impress him: “Ulrich, I’m as bad as I ever was,” he says. With others, McTaggart sings a different tune, insisting that he’s a changed man. But they aren’t buying it. When he expresses confusion as to why the FBI is attempting to co-opt him into working on its behalf, a federal agent tells him, “It’s your job history. All those labor radicals you sent to the accident ward.”
When he says to Boynt Crosstown, his boss back at the PI offices, that he can’t believe the feds would bring up the old days like that, Crosstown’s response is scathing. “Of course they’re trying to turn you,” he says. “Back to what you never stopped being. . . . You think you’re reformed now. Not just a normal tough guy but a saintly one. . . . But he’s still in there, Hicks, still the same dirt-stupid gorilla always ready to take short pay for beating up whoever he’s told to.” Talking to a mobster-turned-anarchist-bombmaker in the course of an investigation, McTaggart says he wouldn’t be interested in going to Italy, due to its being “a Fascist dictatorship.” “What makes you private dicks any different?” the bombmaker replies. “Study your history, gabadost,
you started off, mosta yiz, breakin up strikes, didn’t ya, same as Mussolini’s boys.” Even in Europe, McTaggart can’t find anyone who will lend him a sympathetic ear. “Have you ever really looked at your employment history?” an Interpol agent asks him. “One high-risk orangutan job after another, always in the service of someone else’s greed or fear?”
All of McTaggart’s troubles—a nearly successful attempt on his life, an assignment in Europe on behalf of mysterious interests, and, eventually, permanent exile from the U.S.—stem from his refusal to accept what he was doing all those years back. To put it bluntly, if you think the “logical” thing to do after graduating from high school is to get paid to beat up striking workers on behalf of their rich bosses, you are part of the problem. Back in the early 2000s, the British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb produced a sketch in which a Nazi suddenly notices that his uniform cap has a skull on it. “Hans,” he asks his fellow S.S. officer, “are we the baddies?” McTaggart can’t even ask that basic question, much less provide himself with the obvious answer.
Pynchon isn’t just writing about McTaggart here. Though his novels are filled with fantastical hijinks and science-fictional elements, Pynchon is genuinely a writer of historical fiction, one who has spent his life investigating how certain historical moments came to be. What gives this project a political valence is the fact that many Americans are—and always have been—committed to remaining ignorant of the way their country’s wealth, culture, and geopolitical strength were, and are, founded on violence carried out in defense of capital accumulation and white supremacy. Pynchon has previously written characters who could be duped or bewildered by history without losing their author’s sympathies (Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow comes to mind), but in his depiction of the blank stupidity that one finds just behind the screen of Hicks McTaggart’s energetic charm, one detects a writer who has finally lost patience with Americans’ persistent failure to understand the obvious consequences of their own country’s actions.
The relevance of the interwar years to our own historical moment isn’t hard to puzzle out, and the current state of American society and politics should seem ominous to anyone who remembers what the 1930s were building up to. Amid economic stagnation and malaise, a rising global right is gleefully dismantling the institutional foundations of a crumbling world order, blaming our economic problems on poor migrants and rootless cosmopolitan elites, and touting as a solution a cleansing, nationalistic, punitive violence that will restore our lost civilizational purity. Shadow Ticket doesn’t try to set up a rigid historical parallel between then and now—Pynchon isn’t doing anything so vulgar as telling us to expect the outbreak of World War III by 2035, or whatever. But he does set McTaggart up as an analogue of contemporary Americans who still hold out hope that our recent experiences of social and economic crisis will ultimately blow over, that the fever will break, that Trump’s eventual exit from power will augur the return of “normal life.”
What lends Shadow Ticket a particularly bitter edge is that McTaggart is not just ignorant of what’s happening but also largely indifferent to it.
In McTaggart, one finds a forebear of all the “dirt-stupid gorillas,” to borrow Pynchon’s phrasing, who are now joining ICE because (among other reasons) they’re excited about the pay and opportunities for work-related travel. Or one sees Joe Biden, who took office promising to save the rules-based international order and then, by supporting Israel’s genocide in Palestine, ushered in that order’s final disintegration. Or one sees George W. Bush and Barack Obama, both of whom decided that the benefits of waging unlimited war across the globe while wielding unchecked executive authority would outweigh any potential longer-term negative consequences. Shadow Ticket is about the role that this kind of willful ignorance has played in American life over the past century, particularly our ignorance of the extent to which the normal functioning of the country’s political, military, and economic machinery has abetted and continues to abet the rise of reactionary politics that now threaten to destroy that machinery’s ability to function.
What lends Shadow Ticket a particularly bitter edge is that McTaggart is not just ignorant of what’s happening but also largely indifferent to it. At one point, an old private eye named Lew Basnight—he also appears in Against the Day—cautions Hicks against being “one of these metaphysical detectives, out looking for Revelation. Get to reading too much crime fiction in the magazines, start thinking it’s all about who done it. What really happened. Hidden history.” McTaggart replies, “I have enough to worry about in real life.” This makes him, as we’ve seen, different from the various paranoiacs who populate Pynchon’s other books. The paranoiac is, by definition, ignorant of what’s actually going on; after all, you are not paranoid if you’re correct. Paranoiacs like Pynchon’s protagonists badly want to know what’s happening, but either can’t solve the mystery or find the truth unacceptable, and therefore end up substituting a conspiracy for what they would rather not know.
McTaggart, though, is strikingly un-paranoid by Pynchon’s standards. He lacks the energetic curiosity that propels Oedipa Maas and Pynchon’s other protagonists, and he isn’t that interested in figuring out what’s happening. Why is that? It could be that Pynchon has mellowed over the course of his later years; Inherent Vice did seem to herald a kind of chilling-out process, after all. But Shadow Ticket is a pessimistic and even angry novel, and McTaggart’s lack of interest in the global disaster unfurling around him feels like a statement: there is less motivation to be curious when you can sense that the world you live in has already gone over the edge, and that catastrophe is now inevitable even if it hasn’t yet arrived. This was certainly the case in Europe in 1932, and it may be the case in the United States in 2025. Is that kind of speculative despair its own form of paranoia? I suspect that in the coming years, all of us are going to find out.
