Brian Dillon
Absurdities, conspiracies, homegrown fascists: in Thomas Pynchon’s novel set in 1932, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Shadow Ticket, by Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press, 293 pages, $30
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Who’d have thought that what we needed in this mean literary-political season, now that American fascism has entered its Reichstag fire and “Action Against the un-German Spirit” phase, was a new novel by Thomas Pynchon, set in the US in 1932 and populated by Nazis, gangsters, corrupt businessmen, and technological novelties? The answer: pretty much everyone who paid attention when Shadow Ticket—Pynchon’s ninth novel, and his first since Bleeding Edge in 2013—was announced, and when heavily embargoed proof copies began to circulate months ago. In some ways, the hoped-for mirror of today is present, if angled away by almost a century’s distance and a lot of ancillary (and highly entertaining) narrative business. There are the homegrown fascists for whom it’s a comfortable slide from ordinary American fear and prejudice to full-on thuggery and faux-military getups. The proliferation of conspiracy: everything dementedly connected and mobile, truth a matter of noir shadows and bright sham. The sheer absurdism of the principals who vie for power—their appearances, their names, their idiot jargon. And the sort of violence not yet called domestic terrorism. But good or great novels are rarely quite of their time.
Pynchon’s protagonist is Hicks McTaggart, a Milwaukee private detective apt to crack wise in prime Raymond Chandler style, but not nearly so confident in the role as Philip Marlowe, let alone his cinematic stand-ins. In Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality, the late Fredric Jameson wrote that novels like The Big Sleep and The Little Sister are partly about work and workplaces. Taxi drivers, cigarette girls, alluring bookstore clerks, criminal kingpins and their minions: everybody has their station or office—including Marlowe, the freelance drifter who sees all. But in Shadow Ticket, there is poor Hicks, a strikebreaker turned shamus who, to get through the day’s trials with sundry broads and gats, has to consult (or wishes he could consult, unclear) a professional manual for the private dick. In which capacity he is hired by one Bruno Airmont, “the Al Capone of cheese”—cue an extremely Pynchonesque disquisition on the cheese wars then raging up and down the Lake Michigan shore. Hicks’s task: to find Airmont’s missing daughter, Daphne. In his chase for the cheese heiress, Hicks is shown a number of heaters and saps, gets sidled up to by some slinky tomatoes, encounters a misplaced Austro-Hungarian U-boat, and finds himself shanghaied and transported to Yugoslavia, where the rich plot is further thickened with double-double-agents and their unctuous spycraft.
In hardboiled fiction and film noir, the private detective’s question—who’s really calling the shots here?—is typically directed first at gang politics both intra and inter. But the gumshoe inquisitor later finds (though he’d rather not know) that the malign power and moral rot are civic, mayoral, extending from penthouse to police precinct. The genre’s boundaries are the city limits, no further. Here instead the geographic scope is more that of the spy novel, especially when Hicks takes his less than grand European tour and finds himself in the company of a couple of English spooks nostalgic for sticky-toffee pudding (a dessert that wasn’t invented, or at least common, till decades later) and a Viennese policeman with a cocaine habit to rival Sigmund Freud’s. As often with Pynchon, such characters are hard to believe or believe in: caricature at the level of their fictional construction is all bound up with the lies they may or may not be telling Hicks. And lurking out of shot, defining cartoon figure of the era, still a joke to many in 1932, is the little man who’s about to turn all to cinders: the Chaplinesque creep with the stache.
Many of Shadow Ticket’s pleasures come from immersion in its period, to a point way beyond parody or pastiche and into some wildly imagined but sedulously recalled (or researched) level of precision. The action is soundtracked by popular song both real and imagined: “Midnight in Milwaukee, / Not exactly Paris. . . .” Genuine jazz musicians ply the clubs: “Jabbo Smith and Zilner Randolph going after high F’s and G’s not without some jugular risk.” There is a craze for radioactive foods and medicines, and (mimicking spiritualist vibes of the day) apparently paranormal weirdness afoot when objects start vanishing into thin air. But most impressive is the language, a mix of authentic slang and Pynchon’s own coinages that makes every page a joy and just demands to be noted and recited: “ya ten-minute egg, you . . . a jazz drummer on temporary booby-hatch leave . . . Hicks bringing out a fin as several hands reach simultaneously . . . Have you been to the company brain-croakers about this yet? . . . Hicks can hear sounds of noodle-flexing sociability”—and so on. Then there are the trademark ludicrous names: Thessalie Wayward, Hoagie Hivnak, G. Rodney Flaunch “of the Glencoe Flaunches.”
But what of the zeitgeist-poking relevance hoped for in Shadow Ticket? There is no precise Trumpian analogue, no Origins of Totalitarianism newly cast in the prose of mid-century pulp. Instead, a novel that peddles an ever thus comedy of horrors, including a fantastic (but largely historical) array of technologies both lethal and frivolous—the intricacy of design and geekery of Pynchon’s descriptions standing in for the moronic but infernal corporations and institutions that foist them on the young twentieth century. Here is an America in 1932 (or a rapt and persnickety narrative voice) that is distracted by radio, dazzled by neon, amazed by the invention of the autogyro, overly impressed by distinctions between various types of small firearm—delineated with Wikipedia-style obliviousness to purpose—and terribly interested in variations of the massive Czech-built Böhmerland touring motorcycle. If there’s a Pynchonian response to our tech-brokered present and its dimwit geniuses, it’s surely here, in a century-long veneration of the gizmo and gadget.
Brian Dillon is an Irish writer based in London. His books include Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, Essayism, and In the Dark Room. His memoir Ambivalence is forthcoming from New York Review Books and Fitzcarraldo Editions.