PanThe New YorkerMany books about the future are ways of thinking through the problems of the present. One of the difficulties with Ply is that it seems to want to do this but never quite settles on what to say ... Both more emphatic and more confusing ... he more time we spend with them, the more The book’s inchoate political energy dissipates ... You can’t fault Diaz for lack of ambition. As a title, Ply is a slippery, clever choice ... Regrettably, the grand intellectual ambitions of Ply finally overwhelm the other desiderata of fiction ... The narrative energy of Ply keeps getting derailed, not least because two of its main characters exist mostly to lecture us.
PanThe New YorkerIf his powers are not dulled, neither are they pointed; even if you squint, it’s difficult to determine whether Shadow Ticket is a commentary on our current era ... This will disappoint any fans who were hoping for a rousing Pynchon riposte to our depressingly Pynchonesque era, but it’s hardly a problem. Literature has no obligation to be responsive to the times ... But it does raise a question. If our reigning artist of paranoid convictions...hasn’t made use of the present political moment to craft a satire or a survival manual or a swan song or even an \'I told you so,\' then what has he come here...to tell us? ... The author is....confident that he can do ten things at once and still catch the omelette on its way down. And sometimes, he can ... For a while, all this is perfectly enjoyable ... But, the further into Shadow Ticket you get, the more it starts to suffer, as many of Pynchon’s later novels do, from the presence of its predecessors ... Patches of unintelligibility are nothing new in Pynchon, but usually a coherent world view gleams upward from the murk.
