Lucky day | Stray thoughts on the announcement of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Shadow Ticket

For about a decade, a common social media joke (common enough among a certain stripe of nerd) has run something like, Thomas Pynchon seems to be writing the U.S.A. reality right now; another common (enough) social media rejoinder amounts to something like, No way Pynchon would write this reality—too sloppy, too lazy, too obvious. Too stupid. 

I just deleted an entire paragraph on Too stupid. I think we’re all attuned to the unfunny absurdity of the zeitgeist, and I think that as zany and goofy as Pynchon is in his byzantine plots, he wouldn’t muck with, say, RFK’s kid’s brain worm telling him to remove fluoride and bring back the plague. Just too stupid! And the stupidity is all bound up in evil, cruelty, pain. I hate it! Maybe you hate it too. The news, whatever “the news” means, seems to be uniformly bad. One might apply this statement throughout history, I suppose, so maybe I just mean: It (all of it) just gets worse.

So I take any good news as a gift.

And on Wednesday morning there was some, at least in my book, very good news: Penguin Random House announced a new novel from Thomas Pynchon. I had not expected another novel from Pynchon, who will turn 88 next month. If I’m really honest, I might have expected, like, a different headline about Pynchon.

The new novel, to be published this fall, is titled Shadow Ticket. Shadow Ticket is a rad title for a novel! I’ve had it rattling around my head. Pynchon has a history of using phrases from his novels for titles of future books, but as far as I can tell by searching ebooks, the phrase shadow ticket doesn’t appear in his published oeuvre. Simple internet searches for the phrase return publisher Penguin Random House’s announcement of the novel Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon; the OED database has nothing. Unlike inherent vice or leading edge, shadow ticket seems to have no clear corollary to the uh, real world.

Perhaps the title might be a reference to the shadowy voyage of the novel’s purported protagonist, Hicks McTaggart, whom the blurb (presumably penned by TP) declares finds himself “shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline.” I suppose that’s one kind of shadow ticket.

There’s a lot of predictably Pynchonesque picaresquery in the blurb: an “heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune,” “swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists,” and pastries. The novel is set in 1932 and the blurb notes that Hicks will find himself “entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies.” The blurb also tells us that Hicks is “a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye” — one of Them, or at least, a one-time agent of Them. Perhaps Shadow Ticket might read as a bridge between Pynchon’s grand opuses on the emerging 20th-century—the critique of labor and capital in Against the Day segueing into the explosion of Gravity’s Rainbow. 

But we’ll just have to wait. The announcement for Shadow Ticket came on a week of lucky days for me, or lucky-feeling days, I suppose I mean. I watched my alma mater’s basketball team win the national championship for the third time on Monday night — I’d watched almost all of their games since November — and woke up on Tuesday feeling elated (I also won my work’s March Madness pool). News of forthcoming albums by bands I’d loved in my youth like Pulp, Stereolab, and Tortoise also gave me that odd feeling of something to look forward to, something on the horizon that wasn’t just more horrible shit.

And I can wait in hope, I suppose, or at least in absurd appreciation like Sluggo in Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy strip of 23 Oct. 1954, who finds surreal intercession in the form of a potted plant descending from the heavens to land upon his bald crown. I too wish I could crack this walnut.