Old Tommy “The Recluse” Pynchon hangs out somewhere maybe New York maybe not, pops up now and then in shady rumour attending a baseball game, did a comic turn on a popular TV show with a bag over his cartoon head, writes novels that are apt to resemble obscene doodles on men’s room walls drawn by paranoid psychotics, calls his characters stuff like Benny Profane or Zoyd Wheeler or Boynt Crosstown, makes lame jokes like “Check’s in the mayo” or having a Depression-era gangster drive a car called an REO Speedwagon, likes to spin a shaggy-dog plot that goes nowhere, really likes scenes in which people drive speedboats, guy’s only weakness the unavoidable fact that all of his paragraphs sound like this one, gets pretty deadening pretty fast, dude could use a crash-course in the full stop, assuming you could find him, which missing-persons work of the old school availing you bupkis in this case, you’re apt not to.
To pause the parody for a spell: 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. The reviews of Shadow Ticket, his ninth novel (a surrealist pastiche of 1930s detective fiction), have not troubled the consensus view. “A masterpiece,” said the Telegraph. According to the Washington Post, Pynchon’s prose is “balletically dazzling”. Megan Nolan, also in the Telegraph, said Pynchon’s sentences are “so alive, so dazzling”. The Guardian praised Shadow Ticket’s “livewire prose”.
Bear with me, therefore, 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: the back-story-and/or-gag-heavy run-on sentence. Is this good prose? “Skeet was to bounce his way through a string of his mother’s domestic arrangements, motherly enough instincts but little to no judgement in the matter of boyfriend material, with unintended consequences few of which worked out well, though there were exceptions.”
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That’s from Shadow Ticket. To be fair, it represents late Pynchon at his worst. But it also reflects a prose tic present since the opening pages of V. (1963), where we find this: “Dog into wolf, light into twilight, emptiness into waiting presence, here were your underage Marine barfing in the street, barmaid with a ship’s propeller tattooed on each buttock, one potential berserk studying the best technique for jumping through a plate glass window (when to scream Geronimo? Before or after the glass breaks?), a drunken deck ape crying back in the alley because last time the SPs caught him like this they put him in a strait jacket.”
Is this dazzling? Being dazzled means you can’t see clearly. 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 (if you can’t be good at both, choose the other way around). Because of these faults, Pynchon’s novels are neither lifelike nor, really, lively. They are merely animated.
Pynchon’s defenders will say that this is the point: his novels critique an America gone hyperreal in the age of finance capital. They satirise a world in which the bastards have won and in which the empty referent – the denatured cartoon – is king. But the samey prose texture isn’t a minor flaw. Tolerable in V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, positively enjoyable in The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), by Vineland (1990) the Pynchon prose manner has become a starved repertoire of stereotypical gestures. Five novels have followed since then. They are increasingly difficult to tell apart.
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Shadow Ticket is sort of about Hicks McTaggart, a former strikebreaker who now works for the Unamalgamated Ops detective agency (the allusion is to Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op). It’s Milwaukee, the 1930s. Prohibition is in effect. Speakeasies, bootleggers. Al Capone has a walk-on part. Everybody talks like they’re in a movie. Everybody tells everybody else that they talk like they’re in a movie. Meta! Haunting images: an “Austro-Hungarian” U-boat looming beneath the ice of a frozen lake (“dim haloes each slowly sharpening”). Good gags: a fake bowling alley in which Nazis meet. A trip by speedboat. Daphne Airmont, heiress to a corrupt cheese fortune, disappears. Hicks goes looking, ends up in New York, Belgrade, Hungary, Croatia. Red herrings. MacGuffins. Characters called Dr Swampscott and Dr Zoltan von Kiss. A political conspiracy.
Narrative traction dissipates and then falteringly coheres. Pretty much every paragraph is the same shape. It’s wearying. Which is to say that while there are pleasures here, the prose is seldom one of them. Like Oedipa Maas at the end of The Crying of Lot 49, we await silent Thomas’s empire. Will his reputation stand or fall? Place your bets.
Kevin Power is an assistant professor in English at Trinity College Dublin
