This sort of thing in a movie would have Hicks reaching for the Kleenex, but out here in the daylight of normal civilian hypocrisy and fraud, having by now gained a dim idea of when and when not to dummy up, he finds it more helpful, as the Gumshoe’s Manual advises time and again, to try and appear professional, already knowing it’s no use, he’s in the soup once again and his job will be to get in the way of and absorb any violence that might arise, as if there’s some Private Dick Oath like the one doctors take, with a no-harm clause, which there isn’t.¹

As with any of Pynchon’s other novels, Shadow Ticket defies brief, meaningful explanation. The dust jacket summary claims it to be about one lone Hicks McTaggart, a strikebreaker-turned-private eye, who gets strong-armed into taking on a find-and-retrieve case of a wealthy cheese heiress. This is about as true as summarizing Mason and Dixon as being about the geographical adventures of the eponymous surveyors, or describing Gravity’s Rainbow as a story about a secret agent uncovering plans for a doomsday device. One comes away with no sense of what the book is, nor even whether one would desire to read it. And this is because Pynchon’s signature maximalism overwhelms with its imagery and, by first appearances, frivolous diversions. It is a style of mania too manic to intentionally draw attention to its own mania: a sincerity in postmodern fiction that at least deserves recognition.

Nonetheless, some brief summary is necessary if only for a reader’s orientation. As the jacket explains, the action of the novel kicks off when Hicks is the job to track down the cheese heiress, but the book begins nearly a hundred pages before that. The reader is introduced to fellow officialized low-lives like Skeet and Stuffy, as well as Hicks’ boss at the op Boynt. Hicks has a girlfriend, or something like one, in the form of April, a woman who takes after a flapper’s resemblance and hangs around him out of some sort of pitiable convenience. The bright neon and endless dive bars of Waukesha and Milwaukee, Wisconsin form a collage of musical syncopation and blinding after-images punctuated by Italian mafiosos, Hitler-interested German immigrants, cheese, and the rumor of a mysterious WWI U-boat that picks up those slated for death in the middle of the night.

As this generous introduction unfolds, the thought gradually occurs to the reader: this isn’t an introduction. This is the whole book. The dust jacket lied; it’s not a thriller at all, but rather a chaotic yet nonetheless deliberate study of character and setting. Typical of Pynchon, scenes come quickly and unannounced and pass with the comfort and ease of a drive-by shooting.

The reader is about a third of the way through the book before any mention of a missing cheese heiress is even made. Daphne Airmont, only daughter of Bruno Airmont, is missing; perhaps coincidentally the same Daphne Airmont that Hicks himself pulled out of an insane asylum some years prior. But Hicks doesn’t want to leave Waukesha and Milwaukee, despite the mob and the FBI both closing in. A week prior, a bomb had gone off downtown and a buddy of his was almost certainly involved. That same buddy skipped town, apparently abducted by a clandestine and independently operating U-boat in the middle of the night. The mob is after Hicks because of the bombing; the feds because of his connection, alleged or not, to the submarine.

He’s kidnapped and sent to Europe. He meets a pair of English double agent-assassins, a woman given a used gyrocopter by an enamored gyrocopter salesman, a mad scientist, an outlaw motorcycle gang, a golem. He also meets Daphne, and eventually, Bruno. It’s all rather complicated and is thrown at the reader with the speed and predictability of a shoot-out.

Narrative Style

Where Pynchon shines is in his prose. He brings the early 1930s to life with spontaneous, syncopated dialogue and rhythm that evoke not just the busy organized chaos of Glenn Miller or Benny Goodman, but the tight, raucous slang-laden back-and-forth of Michael Curtiz films. His prose alone is enough to offer a visceral, if ridiculous cross section of America, but this is neither America as it was nor as it existed in the memories of its survivors. This America is a papier-mâché representation made with the shredded remains of popular media, stereotypes, advertising—it’s an imitation nostalgia papered over with stories and imagery from people who never lived through the times. It’s a cartoon.

This is no deep insight. If one were to crassly describe Pynchon’s oeuvre with one word, ‘cartoon’ would be at or near the top of the list. But this would be painting with strokes too broad; most of his work seems to carry something with it that’s more than the sum of its more obvious parts. It might be a cartoon, but there’s a vividness to it that cartoons tend to lack. It might be a cartoon, but after a few pages, you’re engrossed enough that you start to forget you’re reading a cartoon. It might be a cartoon, but when you pause your reading to return to the day, the images of the book replaying in your mind don’t look at all like cartoons. They look real, or perhaps, hyperreal, in some distinct, exaggerated, but nonetheless sincere fashion.

Pynchon may have written cartoons for novels, but in all of them there is never a sense that he is somehow lying to his readers, or that he hates them, or that he is even hiding himself at the story’s expense. Quite the opposite. The mania of excess is his mania put on full display without the burden of a fixated sense of self-reflection. The excess may not be polite, but his style engages with the reader such that one can only receive it with amused acknowledgment rather than ironic consumption or disregard.

That this seriousness comes out in the form of what looks like a cartoon is perhaps what has made Pynchon’s work authentic American literature in the first place. One reads Shadow Ticket and comes out with a bizarre appreciation for the times and the places, the shape of the country, the world it depicted which, although a cartoon and therefore false, in a certain sense, depicts with such vividness the world’s approximation as to maintain an unclear-minded, busy and chaotic, bizarre veracity to it all. It’s messy and it’s certainly a matter of taste, but the chaos and, again, mania are the point.

As the book unfolds and Hicks travels to Europe, Pynchon’s descriptive passages drop the neon and jazz for alleys and stone facades, Waukesha for Budapest, friendly speakeasies housing the mafia for bars where either Nazi sympathizers or militant Jewish smugglers lurk waiting for violence. The distinction between a sort of venomous continental violence natural to Europe and a strangely mirthful but no less deadly violence of the American mid-west comes across specifically because of Pynchon’s deployment of his style.

One of the great ironies of Shadow Ticket is indeed that Pynchon’s prose has its own character to it, and as one reads, one feels as though the narrative itself is picking you up and pulling you around, shaking you down, egging you on to take your best shot with either your best pickup line or your best right hook. The irony here is that this stands in stark contradiction to the protagonist which it depicts: Hicks is an uneducated stiff, a man with marbles for brains whose entire experience in life is, seemingly, every bit as uncoordinated and wrenched around as the prose reads.

An astute reader here should pause. Pynchon does this on purpose, and it doesn’t seem like it’s just to drag the reader into a more personal experience with the story. It does this, of course, but one can’t shake that it’s not the story one is connecting with. The novel comes across as strangely intimate, almost, in some sense, autobiographical. But before that dimension should be explored, one should address first the novel’s broader themes of the era’s transformation.

Passage of Time and the Sign of the Times

The lengthening shadow of mid-century German unrest hangs about this book in threatening shadows but never comes out into a dominant threat; only its possibilities, its pretenses. This is only appropriate considering the story’s setting, and Hicks’ personal acquaintances and proclivities play into its depiction.

When Hicks runs into an old acquaintance of his at a gathering of German National Socialists northwest of Waukesha, the topic of the Nazi threat first peeks into the novel’s story. The twenties have ended and priorities have evolved; Hicks’ efforts to remain politically disinterested in a rapidly hyper-politicizing world disintegrate by the day. “Enjoy it while you can, pal,” Schaufl tells him, “Don’t wait too long. Leavin th’ station, now’s the time to climb on board, later maybe it won’t be so easy…”²

As the novel approaches its close, however, Nazism comes quite a bit more alive than some roudy merrymakers operating a bowling alley in Wisconsin. Daphne spends so much time in Europe that she held front row seats to the passing of the age, so to speak, where the friends she traveled with settled down, ceased their adventures, got married, moved on with life. Moreover, the continent’s players and movements changed; speakeasies she once frequented turned grim with malicious laughter and hyper-nationalist German furor. At one point, she’s nearly assaulted by what Pynchon describes as

Hitler-happy adolescents, faces already familiar by way of the newsreels, imagining themselves predators but when observed more closely, fated after all to suffer, to be brought down as prey, even at the hands of those they thought were brothers in a struggle for which they themselves were always too fragile.³

Pynchon illustrates Europe’s youth transitioning from carefree maniacs who danced too much into National Socialist maniacs doped up on amphetamines. One may accuse it of being cartoonish, but as mentioned above, that seems like it would miss the point; what’s more worrisome is the possibility that Pynchon was trying to say something of any value about the current, contemporary, present-day intersection of social norms and political activism. In the interest of charity, this reader instead presumes that any pessimism regarding carefree wunderkinds throttled into stiffdom is part of the broader autobiographical themes discussed below.

Before that, however, the distinction between America and Europe deserves one more point to be made. Europe transforms under the swastika while America under a shield. Pynchon may be trying to draw correlations here, but the contrast is quite a bit more interesting: Nazism is shown more socially, more on the level of the common man, distinct from positions of power despite the time and the place, whereas the FBI is comprised of government agents, squares, surveillance goons. Both are considered agents or vehicles of transformation; consider an FBI’s words to Hicks as he attempts to strong arm the PI into taking the cheese heiress case:

“Your country calls.”

“Line’s busy.”

“I’m afraid it isn’t optional,” explains T. P. O’Grizbee. “Like I says on the subpoena we haven’t served you yet, laying aside all and singular your business and excuses. A federal rap, not to be shrugged off. Potential wrongdoers might keep in mind as yet little-known lockups such as Alcatraz Island, always looming out there, fogbound and sinister, and the unwelcome fates which might transpire therewithin. The Drys can seem like the violent ward at Winnebago sometimes, but this is the next wave of Feds you’re talking to. We haven’t even begun to show how dangerous we can be, and the funny thing? Is, is we could be running the country any day now and you’ll all have to swear loyalty to us because by then we’ll be in the next war fighting for our lives, and maybe that’ll be all you’ve got.”⁴

The temptation to cast the politics of this book as Pynchon attempting to characterize, in his own fashion, the mania of the present day is quite strong. But although you don’t need to really look for the politics in order to find them, the book doesn’t, for the most part, preoccupy itself with politics, with commentary, or with overt signaling to Current Year analogues. There’s something else of greater interest going on with Shadow Ticket, though it requires some amount of daring on the part of the reader.

Cheese Industries and Self-Recollection

Pynchon’s manic style makes it easy to dismiss the chaos as random, the allusions as arbitrary, the sudden details of obtusely aligned set pieces as odd quirks of a mind grasping at everything and in all directions. But this would render the novel worse than incomprehensible, as one would be unable to draw a coherent line as to where Pynchon’s story ended and the reader’s hallucinations began. Like any other narrative, this decision on the part of the reader is zero-sum; one either expects a story to make sense and therefore makes his best effort at interpreting it, or he undermines the very purpose of reading and surrenders to the void. Pynchon’s prose might be hectic and his story might be manic, but it should be obvious that he is indeed telling a story and that the story is quite a bit more than a PI’s bumbling job tracking down a dame in over her head.

Pynchon knows what he’s doing when he casts Daphne as a cheese heiress. That she is an heiress is a narrative device, a structural element, a cliché. That she’s an heiress for a cheese empire that rivals Velveeta seems like a stroke of quirky randomness, but it probably isn’t. Cheese is a diary product, comes more varieties than wine does, and is something that just about everybody likes. It’s also mass produced, usually homogenized, and sold on shelves. But this isn’t quite solving the riddle as to why Pynchon chose cheese to be the industry of Daphne’s family background, especially in a period of history where oil, motorcar, railroad, and just good old fashioned organized crime—each of which have their day in the novel—are much better established in American consciousness with respect to hardboiled genre fiction. In order to solve the riddle, one’s thoughts must be more crass, as Pynchon’s are:

Cheesy: adjective. 2. [Informal] cheap, unpleasant, or blatantly inauthentic.

Daphne’s character stands before a bigger idea: not a cheese industry, but a cheesy industry. One that specializes in manufacturing cheesy things, cheap things, inauthentic things. If a reader dared consider this book within the author’s personal context, to whatever degree he’s able considering Pynchon’s notorious aversion to public inquiry, then he must recognize how long Pynchon has been operating as a published author of some renown, that his wife is an experienced literary agent, and that he’s not exactly short in tooth or nail. In other words, this might be his last book, or the last one published while he still draws breath, and one can easily imagine how aware of this fact he’d have to be.

Presuming this and these factors may be stepping too liberally across an unspoken and poorly demarcated line of professionalism between artist and audience, but, in fashion characteristic of this piece’s subject matter, it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. With that in mind, one can only speculate that the cheesy industry in question is an indirect analogue for the publishing industry.

Daphne herself isn’t somehow a proxy for publishing, however. Pynchon uses characters as characters, not as analogies, but like any skilled writer, characters are efficient tools for writers to communicate, intentionally or otherwise, their thoughts and feelings on particular subjects. Daphne’s connection to the cheese industry, then, can be interpreted as in some way analogous to how Pynchon considers his own connection to the publishing industry.

This can paint the book in very dark strokes. Daphne irresponsibly gambled and flirted her way into the hearts of everyone she encountered, all while she pursued an unsuccessful jazz drummer across the old continent for fun. Despite her appearance, she remained an elusive and frightened daughter without a clue of what she’s doing in life and, in the end, returns home with the keys to the kingdom, so to speak: all of her father’s assets and wealth, for one thing, but more importantly, all of the paranoid intel on the cheese industry that the man had accumulated when he went on the lam.

Her father Bruno’s part in this again seems to be drawing from something very deep to his writer. Bruno is the cheese magnate, but he’s at the end of his career and he’s hunted by mysterious agents the world over, having earned the moniker “Al Capone of cheese.” Applying the same interpretive method here turns Bruno into something of a grim foil for both Hicks and Daphne; if Daphne embodies a mania tinged with youthful exuberance that irresponsibly play-acts at adulthood, Bruno’s mania is an experienced mania, battered, forged by the mistakes and action of his youth but now running out of time and terrified that his work was all a waste. As he nears the end, it’s increasingly apparent that the generation to succeed him isn’t just insane, it’s destitute of competence, and the only ones with a shred of that left seem to be government agents or some such other malicious force bent on putting him away.

Hicks, too, comes across as something of an analogue into which largely negative traits have been thrown. He’s a slothful hedonist, clueless but without the typical charm one might associate with a bumbling fool, satisfied with being talked at rather than talked to yet interiorly aware that he’s made too many mistakes and that there’s no way to avoid whatever consequences are in store for him. Still, he runs and desires a past that might not have ever really existed except in his imagination.

This comes to a particularly grim conclusion as the Daphne plot comes to a close near the end of the book, the two of them having one last interchange before the cheese heiress returns to America and Hicks finds that he has no way of getting home:

What one of them should have been saying was “We’re in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree anybody’s around to remember. Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark. Until finally we turn to look back the way we came, and there’s that last light bulb, once so bright, now feebly flickering, about to burn out, and its well past time to be saying, Florsheims, let’s ambulate.

“Stay or go. Two fates beginning to diverge—back to the U.S., marry, raise a family, assemble a life you can persuade yourself is free form fear, as meanwhile, over here, the other outcome continues to unfold, to roll in the dark as the end of time. Those you could have saved, could’ve shifted at least somehow onto a safer stretch of track, are one by one robbed, beaten, killed, sized and taken away into the nameless, the unrecoverable.

“Until one night, too late, you wake into an understanding of what you should have been doing with your life all along.”

Something like that. If anybody was still there to hear it. Which there isn’t.⁵

On one hand, the political implications to this foreboding are obvious: the story takes place toward the end of the interwar years and they were speaking to each other then in Austria, a few penultimate moments before the continent again consumed itself in a storm of fire and steel. But on the other hand, within the context of a shadow biography, the implications seem even darker, as if this is depicting a man not battling criminals or G-men but his own conscience, his own regrets, and possibly even his own demons. That light flickering, about to burn out turns from a metaphor about the free license of the Roaring Twenties and instead into one of a singular soul slipping toward the cold darkness of death.

Conclusion

What Pynchon depicts in Shadow Ticket is an ensemble of characters watching and reacting as the world around them approaches the end. One might attempt to find optimism in the end of the novel, casting the foreboding image of the mysterious U-boat sailing under the Statue of Liberty toward a west unknown as some sort of turn toward an adventurous spirit, but the scene is too dark to stay buoyant. Likewise, Hicks seems to find comfort in another woman’s arms, but after the events of the novel, whatever charm his hedonism carried has worn away.

Pynchon does not concern himself with the depictions of Europe’s leaders or America’s politicians in Shadow Ticket. The choices of the people in power seem to make little difference to what the story concerns itself with, even as those choices led to the social tensions of the time. Instead, these tensions seem as if they’re just emergent qualities of a mysterious zeitgeist, as if people just start acting this way because of something in the air, as if frenzy and suspicion were aerosols that affected brain chemistry.

If the book is indeed a reflection on his own literary career, then the outlook is bleak, packed with regret, and, perhaps again in Pynchon’s fashion, distracted. But it’s also rather nuanced, pitted against itself, extremely mature despite wrapping itself in Pynchon’s signature banality, and above all, sincere. One might find himself baffled by a barrage of dialogue or momentarily confused by a change of scenery, but one never comes to believe that Pynchon is pulling a fast one. It comes across as a sincere parting gift from a man whose head might not be on straight.

Some readers might not know what to do with such a thing, and others may pretend to like it because the guy was a little famous, even if they find it disorienting, confusing, or unpleasantly cryptic. But there are other readers who might convince themselves that they kind of get it in some intuitive, inexpressible sense. The mania, perhaps. The intuition behind its characters. The expectation that the reader’s willing to keep up with it. Who knows.

Some German once mentioned that when one stares into the void, it stares back. When one reads Shadow Ticket, one stares not into a void but into bright city neon, nautical searchlights, and the headlamps of motorbikes. They don’t stare back, but when the book is set down and one drifts his gaze to the waking world, their afterimages remain. Like portholes.

191.

266.

3258.

474.

5269.

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