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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
There’s something unusual about Shadow Ticket...a tonal change that at least one critic of note has found frustrating. The book, you see, starts off funny and stays funny for a good while ... Before the reader has time to realize it, Shadow Ticket has undergone a tonal change, replacing much of the comedy and fun with confusing narratives that are all rather…dry ... Rather jarring ... A rather unnerving, mysterious, and even sensitive conclusion saves Shadow Ticket from its own quicksand. Thomas Pynchon is a masterful writer, and his ability to become somber and chilling simultaneously without slipping into sappiness or hyperbole is as effective as it is notable. This new novel of Pynchon’s, should it be his last, showcases that, even when he’s not at his very best, the man can pack an artful wallop.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reader, I couldn’t read it — and trust me, I tried. There are sentences here that go on for half a page and still go nowhere ... There are good gags and decent puns, but I do like a coherent plot — even if, as in the case of Hammett and Ambler, I don’t understand what’s going on — and there isn’t a plot here.
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.
The entire novel is written in the swaggering, zingy lingo of hard-boiled detective fiction and vintage caper movies, which can be both charming and tiresome.
The novel lacks a developing plot. It’s much more a collection of incidents, some involving characters who have appeared in previous chapters, but others free-floating ... I still recommend reading the novel, even though it is far from Pynchon’s best. It offers the pleasures of his very inventive imagination in chapters that are, in effect, separate episodes to be consumed in a manner similar to a collection of short stories ... Like the sentences, the novel offers an intense rhythm of revelation that is an end in itself, more important than plot.
Shadow Ticket, in addition to being extremely fun and almost indecently readable, is also replete with edges left conspicuously unsanded ... In the ease with which he wields genre and technique to make good on the countervailing populisms he’s been expressing for decades, the Pynchon of Shadow Ticket—inviting, avuncular, and confidently economical, though no less footloose—has much to teach us about what the larger project has always been.
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.
The literary, metaphysical heft of Pynchon's work is important, though just as critical to the experience of reading him is the matter of how he accomplishes all of this. Which is to say: More than anything, Pynchon is funny ... That's never been more apparent than in the case of Shadow Ticket ... The mainstream literary press has largely characterized Shadow Ticket as Pynchon-lite, a fair reading of the book's relatively scaled-back depth and ambition. I would argue that's a matter of Pynchon having been proven right by reality to the point that all the once-hidden malignancy he obsessed over is now in the indisputable foreground of American life.
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 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.
Pynchon is eighty-eight, and his age shows a bit in Shadow Ticket ... The stoner logic of Pynchon’s humor has long been one of the real pleasures of reading him, but in Shadow Ticket, despite the presence of a few really good jokes, it is hard to ignore the increased frequency with which Pynchon missteps in deploying it ... But these are venial rather than mortal sins, easy to forgive. If Shadow Ticket does turn out to be Pynchon’s last novel, it will be a fitting capstone to his art.
The answer for those who find reading Pynchon too much like slogging your way to an “A” in English 101 is to sit back and enjoy the man’s enormous talent for hitting the literary nail on the head through wordplay. Don’t worry about trying to understand the plot; instead, read Shadow Ticket to absorb and appreciate the beauty of the language ... There is a serious, important story lurking in Shadow Ticket ... Unfortunately, those flashes of brilliance are dulled by an absurd cast of characters spinning their wheels and a cumbersome plot that leads nowhere.
Shadow Ticket is undoubtedly minor Pynchon, though for me the pleasures of even a minor Pynchon novel are, to borrow a baseball term, above replacement compared to the predictable, league-average novels cranked out by the US publishing industry.
At this stage in his career Thomas Pynchon’s reputation largely immunises him against critical assault ... His greatness is taken universally, and monotonously, for granted ... Bear with me…as I shoulder the lonely burden of suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Pynchon isn’t actually all that great ... Peculiar that people should praise Pynchon for his prose, which has basically one move ... Too often, Pynchon’s prose is merely muddy ... He has a remarkable grasp of the American vernacular and no ear for prose rhythm whatsoever ... He is a big-time thinker and a small-time technician ... Because of these faults, Pynchon’s novels are neither lifelike nor, really, lively. They are merely animated ... Pretty much every paragraph is the same shape. It’s wearying ... While there are pleasures here, the prose is seldom one of them.
Elaborately detailed, shrewdly satirical, rapid-fire, hilarious, and keenly revealing ... Pynchon dynamically and incisively renders the atmosphere of each setting, bringing technology and transport into the mix ... The slang and banter are quick and hilarious, a bracing cocktail of historical lingo and Pynchon’s coinages. The cultural allusions are provocative ... The soundtrack is jazzy and the archly choreographed action is madcap and suspenseful. For all the frenzy, multidimensional strategy, and wit, there is deep longing here for truth, light, and peace as unlikely yet crucial alliances and love persist in spite of chaos, cons, betrayals, and bloodshed ... Pynchon’s rollicking, virtuoso, knowing, subtly philosophical private-eye caper is a fun-house-mirror reflection of a treacherous and tragic time unnervingly relevant to our own ... Legendary Pynchon’s first novel in a dozen years, one of his most readily relished, is major literary news.
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.
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.
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.
As with Inherent Vice, this ranks as easygoing Pynchonesque private eye plotting ... The comparatively modest expectations Pynchon builds up in Shadow Ticket mean readers may settle contentedly for a trademark tale told in his stage patter (allowing for the indelibly bizarre). Yet the rather somnolent conclusion and the lack of dynamic payoff once Hicks lands overseas amid the rise of the Great Dictators leaves po-mo fans sitting outside of what is in hindsight an inconsequential late-season away game.
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.
