Starts with a bang ... His most urgent novel yet ... It is filled with his famously overstuffed paragraphs, often one thrumming sentence each. But his words go down a bit more smoothly than usual without sacrificing any of his crackle. The result is a Pynchonian reduction simmered to delectation.
It’s late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open ... Pynchon may not have lost a step in Shadow Ticket, but sometimes he seems to be conserving his energy. His signature long, comma-rich sentences reach their periods a little sooner now ... For most of the way, though, Shadow Ticket may remind you of an exceptionally tight tribute band, playing the oldies so lovingly that you might as well be listening to your old, long-since-unloaded vinyl.
Rollicking, genially silly and ultimately sweet ... If all of that (and there’s so much more) sounds a little goofy, it mostly is, in a winningly loopy way. It helps that the 88-year-old Pynchon’s prose is still as balletically dazzling as the trick shot Lew teaches Hicks, often in ways that can be hard to quote with any sort of brevity ... Pynchon may have the most distinct voice — a clipped tough guy patois delivered with the rhythms of borscht belt comedy, amplified by an endless appetite for linguistic play — that has proved largely inimitable.
If 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.
The novel itself is less persuasive. Pynchon’s timing and reflexes are not what they used to be. This can happen to old literary warriors, who tend to gear down their late work in compensation ... This is not a novel that will convert the Pynchon-averse. It’s the least notable thing he’s written ... Yet I was hardly unhappy to have Shadow Ticket as my companion for several days.
The plot, which unfolds far more obscurely than I’ve made it sound, shambles along in a roundabout, picaresque fashion ... The writing is where Mr. Pynchon plays the most ... The novel closes with a distorted image of the Statue of Liberty, the towering woman draped in what appears to be military apparel, her facial expression undefined, her identity now ambiguous. Readers will have to decide whether this is reflexive Pynchonian paranoia—the endless search for meaningful patterns—or an earnest warning
Lands with more of a soft thud than a bang. Pynchon’s latest (and possibly final) book is a lively, amusing yarn ... It may be Pynchon’s most purely comic novel to date. But at 304 pages, it is also his shortest ... The author bucking all those busy excesses. Yet, without that overabundant quality, it’s hard to place Shadow Ticket. What is a Pynchon novel without its sense of unruly bigness that builds, upon each encounter, with the mounting bafflements of an increasingly puzzling world? ... Though funny, and brisk, and occasionally astonishing, Shadow Ticket cannot help but feel a little warmed over.
It’s impossible not to harbor a soft spot for the old trooper, at 88 still turning out a pretty fun ride ... Pynchon’s fiction always executes a delicate balance between silliness and substance. Some of his jokes land with the splat of a wet rag ... Pynchon’s characters don’t have inner lives—at most, their personalities are organized around one or maybe two traits—but there’s enough going on in their outer lives to keep you interested.
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 ... 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.
His new novel has all the usual features to delight the faithful and frustrate those who mistake the tenets of realism for something more—for rules to read by, perhaps ... It is, in a word, splendid ... If Shadow Ticket turns out to be Pynchon’s final voyage, it’s hard to imagine one more poignant.
A very funny book ... I will be surprised if Shadow Ticket, a sentimental slapstick adventure novel, nostalgic to the point of gooeyness but never quite crossing over into the corny, a soft-boiled noir including a few too many jokes about cheese, isn’t met with general acclaim by reviewers.
The master pulls off a dizzying blend of gangsters, conspiracies, and fascism ... If sketching out conspiracies is classic Pynchon, he does something funny here: The stories stop before they get to the goods ... Who could ask for more.
Raises big questions about authoritarianism and freedom, but it doesn’t seem too concerned about answering them. This is unusual for Pynchon ... Most Pynchon books end frantically, as he hurriedly ties up the loose ends of the tapestries he’s been weaving in luxurious detail. Shadow Ticket is unusual because the entire second half is frantic, reading more like a detailed outline than a fleshed-out novel. Is this his version of late-style austerity and perplexity? Or was he just worried about running out of time? ... It is startling to see him pass so quickly through territory that would usually be catnip to his expansive curiosity and sympathy.
I had a difficult time with this novel ... It is perhaps aesthetically disappointing that the sentences Pynchon employs in Shadow Ticket are, comparatively, devoid of a similar poetics ... The novel’s discourse shuttles our characters from setting to setting, snappy dialogue exchange to snappy dialogue exchange, with very little in the way of concrete description ... Reified representations of history have a way of simply dissolving into background lore.
Zany ... This is goofy stuff. It keeps Shadow Ticket on the edge of the absurd, as do the song lyrics liberally sprinkled throughout, another Pynchon specialty ... Not a chilly performance. Instead the emotional heat comes from the author’s haunted vision of history. That vision is predominantly dark ... Thomas Pynchon seems to leave the door open – to imagination, art, honesty. On that note, Shadow Ticket fades out, up, away. There is, appropriately, no finish line.
Zany ... One thing you’ll take away from this novel is that it’s really, really funny. Pynchon delights in verbal acrobatics ... If you’re a general lit-fic reader, this book is probably going to annoy you a little at times and a lot at others. Sure, it has its charms, but it begins to wear on you after a while ... Probably a mid- to lower-tier Pynchon—a novel that will almost certainly wind up categorized as a minor work in his overall oeuvre. Still, in the now, Shadow Ticket is unquestionably a major publishing event and an absolute gift if it is indeed the aging writer’s last hurrah.
I want to be careful not to reduce Shadow Ticket to a political parable ... Despite a tendency to meander (as might be said of every Pynchon novel), is similarly full of wisdom, the more so, perhaps, for its insistence to engage.
Fleet-footed ... The story comes tailored as a dime-store whodunnit, complete with red herrings, plot twists and reams of hard-boiled dialogue. But classifications, like people, are never entirely to be trusted. Pynchon inhabits the genre like a hermit crab inside a mollusc shell, periodically peeking out from the gloom to remind us that he’s there ... All things are connected; that doesn’t mean they add up. Pynchon’s livewire prose hops from subject to subject, joins the dots and makes patterns. There is a pleasing logic to patterns, but they rarely provide explanations, never mind neat solutions; every fresh leap kicks up still further questions ... Runs wide but not deep ... The book is an antic mixed bag, a diverting tour of old haunts. Pynchon’s yarn sets out with a song in its heart and mischievous spring in its step, but it edges into darkness and its final forecast is bleak.
Seems far longer than its 300 pages ... Pynchon’s fans will be delighted to make the acquaintance of such zany-monickered characters ... There are flashes of his genius in Shadow Ticket but, as it fizzles out in a sequence of tall stories and narrow escapes, Pynchon comes across like a latterday Falstaff on his deathbed babbling of green force fields.
This new novel reads like an aftershock, images of fireworks looping on a screen, announcing nothing ... Pynchon contends with a culture that has caught up to him ... Dense and mostly pleasureless prose ... Pynchon’s willingness to introduce and abandon dozens of plotlines may have been a mark of sophistication in the 1970s, but to my screen-addled subjectivity, it reads as indifference ... A writerly novel—a slow, labyrinthian satire packed with back alleys and digressions, with none of the shock-jocking or narrative immediacy on offer from writers like Castro and Castillo ... All the empty calories of genre fiction with none of the sugar rush.
Coasts merrily along in its detective genre ... Maybe the octogenarian Pynchon wanted what predictable editors and many readers want. Or he didn’t have the time or energy for—or, of course, interest in—transforming his surface-skimming detective story into something 'deeper,' to use the operative word here. If you’re a fan of Pynchon, you’ll probably want to read Shadow Ticket. But be warned.
While hardly free of skill, or amusing touches...Shadow Ticket feels crabbed ... Perhaps once Pynchon’s prominence fades, along with his peerless mystique, he will mutate into an example of the literary subtype he may have intended and surely expected to be: the cult writer.
Shadow Ticket gleefully proves that [Pynchon's] intelligence, erudition, energy, wit, and humor have survived intact as he tap dances, cane and all, into his ninth decade. And it reminds us that he has never been sufficiently celebrated for the sheer beauty of his writing ... One of his strengths is his ability to lovingly sketch the world ... It is folly, trying to outline the plot of any Pynchon novel. The drama and meaning reside in the language—sentences gyrating, streaming multiple, tail-chasing clauses ... Uncannily pertinent ... In Shadow Ticket's final pages, Pynchon—without losing his lyricism—comes as close as he’s ever dared to sounding didactic ... If you give yourself over to [Pynchon], the novels are tremendously entertaining. Intellectually and emotionally stimulating.
Casually playful and chillingly resonant ... The novel’s heart-freezing finish is as plaintively moving as anything he’s ever done. Irresistible and deeply satisfying, this makes clear Pynchon’s powers remain undiminished.
