In yet another mark of my lack of sophistication, I have to confess to only ever having read two Pynchon novels. And what’s worse, they’re his two shortest. Spaced about twenty years apart, there was quite a lot of anticipation involved both before starting The Crying of Lot 49 as an undergraduate and, now, Pynchon’s latest, Shadow Ticket. On both occasions, I was left disappointed, and for the same reason – a reason that I can only, and shamefacedly, term sentimental.
But let’s look at Shadow Ticket. Because there is a lot of what better informed people than I would term typical Pynchonian brilliance. His 1932 Milwaukee is peopled by a cast of shimmering wackiness, from our protagonist, the burly, Astaire-toed private eye, Hicks McTaggart, through teen informants like, ‘Skeet Wheeler, a flyweight juvenile in a porkpie hat’, ‘the Al Capone of Cheese’, Bruno Airmont, his daughter, ‘the Cheez princess’, Daphne Airmont, bootleggers, jewel-thieves-cum-auto-gyro-salesmen, Austro-Hungarian submarine captains, and on and on seemingly forever. The plot takes in what should be a simple case for Hicks: locate and return Daphne Airmont, who has absconded to Hungary with jazz musician/undercover anti-Fascism operative Hop Wingdale. Of course, that doesn’t take into account the presence of a semi-invisible decommissioned WWI U-boat rescuing people from death squads, or rampaging Nazi ‘Vladboys’, or Hicks’ love for a singer betrothed to an organised crime kingpin, or the shady operations of the International Cheese Syndicate, of whom Bruno Airmont has fallen foul, or bowling (and there’s a surprising amount of bowling).
Confusing? Yep. Comically madcap and dazzlingly inventive? Yep. And it goes without saying that Pynchon is obviously incredibly gifted: the book weaves historical fact with emphatic fictionality in prose that is musical, highly stylised, but never pretentious or unwieldy.
And I admire that. I have no problem with a book that is digressive, or that demands re-reading, or that enjoys its own cleverness (provided it does so generously, as Pynchon’s does). But, and here’s the kicker; that’s not enough for me.
Getting my brain going is fine, but it’s not what I come to literature for. Tragically, it seems I need to feel. And Pynchon doesn’t appear to worry about that. His writing, at least what little of it I have read, engages the brain and the ear, but not the emotions.
So it comes down to this. If, like me, you’re a sentimentalist who demands some kind of emotional resonance with individual characters and their fictional experiences in order to get maximum readerly satisfaction out a book, read something else.
If you just want a cerebrally stimulating comic adventure ride, you’ll have a great time with Shadow Ticket.
Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon is published by Penguin Random House.
