Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.
Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.
Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.
Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.
Notes on Chapters 27-29 | We’re in for some dark ages, kid.
Notes on Chapters 30-32 | Some occult switchwork.
Notes on Chapters 33-34 | The dead ride fast.
Notes on Chapters 35-36 | Ghost city.
Notes on Chapters 37-38 | Our racket happens to be exile.
The last chapter of Shadow Ticket has three movements: one for Bruno, the novel’s erstwhile villain; one for Hicks, its anti-hero finding his way to becoming a hero; and one for Hicks’s young protege Skeet, who’s been sidelined Stateside and not present in the novel’s second, European half.
We begin the finale on the phantom submarine the Vampire Squid, “Somewhere out beyond the western edge of the Old World.” Shadow Ticket will end with the promise of a new edge of the New World.
Bruno Airmont, one-time dairy gangster, believes he’s headed home. The sub encounters a bizarre behemoth, “a statue hundreds of meters high, of a masked woman draped in military gear less ceremonial than suited to action in the field [wearing] an openwork visor of some darkly corroded metal protecting, some say hiding, her identity.” The full description of this statue is beautiful and strange, and culminates with the melancholic note that her visage recalls “somebody we knew once a long time ago.”
“Statue of Liberty,” guesses Bruno, which, okay. I mean, that’s a reasonable guess I guess.
The image Pynchon conjures of a surreal, armed Lady Liberty recalls the opening of Franz Kafka’s unfinished first novel Amerika, which begins with its hero entering the New York Harbor and encountering “the Statue of Liberty, which he had been observing for some time, as if in a sudden burst of sunlight. The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds” (trans. Mark Harman).
In the Pynchonverse, “It’s the U.S. but not exactly the one you left. There’s exile and there’s exile” for Bruno: “There is no Statue of Liberty, Bruno, no such thing, not where you’re going.”
Bruno’s episode–and the Vampire Squid’s—ends with a Dickinson dash: “Whatever counter-domain of exile this is they have wandered into, they will be headed not back into any sunrise but west, toward a frontier as yet only suspected, as the days sweep over them—”
The Vampire Squid is another bilocated ghost ship, like the Stupendica on which Hicks voyaged to Europe. In Against the Day, the Stupendica splits into two ships — its shadow double the Emperor Maximilian is off to war. Recall that the Vampire Squid is a reformed U-boat, set out on a “new career of nonbelligerence.” Shadow Ticket might be cynical about redemption, but it also posits second chances — even if those chances take the quester into unknown counter-domains of exile.
Ch. 39’s second movement is a scant few lines. Hicks, exiled to Europe, panics a bit and realizes “that what he thought mattered to him is now foreclosed.” Terike pulls up on her bike, teaches him the Hungarian phrase csókolj meg, and our boy is on another adventure, another romance. It’s a nice conclusion for Hicks — who, it’s worth noting, has not committed a single act of violence in the novel.
The real conclusion of Shadow Ticket is epistolary, a letter to “Hicksie” from his old pal Skeet Wheeler. Skeet’s “On the hop,” staying clear of “Paddy wagons, dogcatcher nets, arrest warrants, the works,” lamenting that there are “Not so many places to hide as there were.” Here again is a theme of Shadow Ticket: there’s only freedom on foot, on the run, on the hop. To escape the net, Skeet plans to head West with Zinnia, the gal who gave him a glow-in-the-dark watch back in Chapter 1: “There’s supposed to be plenty of work out on the Coast.” That would be the West Coast of course.
Skeet offers a wrap-up of the Wisconsin cast of Shadow Ticket, including Against the Day’s hero Lew Basnight, who agrees to give Skeet and “Zin the fare out to California.” Basnight advises the young couple in a mode that’s not so much benediction as it is ominous prophecy, warning of “forks in the road, close shaves, mistakes he wished he didn’t make.”
Basnight warns Skeet of California’s American promises: “Eternal youth, big Hollywood playpen, whatsoever—but someday they’ll lose that innocence. They’ll find out.”
“Maybe they’ll keep finding new ways to be innocent,” rejoins Skeet, to which Basnight replies: “Better if somebody tells you now—innocent and not guilty ain’t always the same.”
Skeet concedes he’s not sure what that riddle means, but figures he’ll solve it in time; for now, he writes to Hicks, it’s “Time to put them street kiddie days behind me.” Time to grow up, or at least to make a motion towards it.
The novel ends with Skeet en route to California via the Santa Fe Chief: “Right now, we’ve got a couple of sunsets to chase.” Like the crew of the Vampire Squid, Skeet and Zin are headed “not back into any sunrise but west, toward a frontier as yet only suspected.”
And while Pynchon’s conclusion follows a signal trope of US American literature — namely the promise of a new start Out West — I think there’s more here than the urge that Huck expresses at the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when he promises to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” to avoid the “sivilizin'” domesticity represented by Aunt Sally. Skeet’s Westward movement isn’t pure escapism or the fantasy of Manifest Destiny. It isn’t a rejection of domestic responsibility in lieu of a new frontier but rather a utopian dream of “finding new ways to be innocent,” even as he puts those “kiddie days behind.”
Lew Basnight, veteran of Against the Day‘s fantasia/nightmare of nineteenth-century history, provides a tempering wisdom to cool Skeet’s American Dream: “innocent and not guilty ain’t always the same.” Perhaps, like the narrator back in Ch. 35 documenting Hicks and Daphne’s last encounter, Basnight understands that the characters in Shadow Ticket are floating “in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree” before the horrors of WWII. Again, Shadow Ticket is a dance number, a chronological breeze floating between Pynchon’s titans Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow.
For me, the ending is sweet and then bittersweet and then bitter and then sweet again. We know Hicks will likely never see Skeet again — but he might. We know that this is probably Pynchon’s last novel — but maybe it isn’t.
And we know that Zoyd Wheeler is the hero of Pynchon’s California novel Vineland, and we know that Skeet’s last name is Wheeler. My presumption is that Skeet and Zinnia are Zoyd’s parents, and I presume it because I like to think that the Pynchonverse, although large and containing multitudes (and bilocations of every stripe) is somehow cozily discrete.
I should probably distill my thoughts on Shadow Ticket into a compact, “proper” review, but I’ve sat with the novel now for two months, reading it twice, and really, really enjoying it. I never expected to get another Pynchon novel; it’s a gift. I loved its goofy Gothicism; I loved its noir-as-red-herring-genre-swap conceit; I loved even its worst puns (even “sofa so good”). I loved that Pynchon loves these characters, even the ones he might not have had the time or energy to fully flesh out — this is a book that, breezy as it reads, feels like a denser, thicker affair. And even if he gives us doom on the horizon in the impending horrors of genocide and atomic death, Pynchon ends with the hopeful image of two kids chasing sunsets. Great stuff.
Biblioklept 