Cascadia Calling, 2025.12.08
"best stick to English and there’s a chance they’ll take you for an idiot and leave you alone."
“Whatever it is that’s just about to happen, once it’s over we’ll say, oh well, it’s history, should have seen it coming, and right now it’s all I can do to get on with my life. I don’t care to know more than I need to about the mysteries of time.”
As is our personal tradition, my partner and I went out to a Christmas tree farm on the outskirts of Duvall, Wasington yesterday to pick out a tree for her. We’re lucky that the fated day fell at the start of the current storm that’s meant to drench the coastal Pacific Northwest. Instead of flooding, we merely had to contend with torrential rains.
That night, the rains had been replaced with strong winds blowing broken clouds up off of Elliott Bay. I sat in Meekong Bar and finished Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket over a bowl of pho. It was suitably chaotic weather for such a chaotic book. Pynchon’s latest (and likely last) novel tells the story of Hicks, a fate-blown private detective from Milwaukee, and his attempts to retrieve a cheese fortune heiress who has run off with a clarinetist. It won’t do any good to ask any questions about that premise, though, because it’s largely immaterial to the book itself. The framing story serves to produce a thin, bouncing narrative clothesline to hang the rest of the story off of.
The plot is actually driven not by Hicks or even really by his quarry, Daphne Airmont, but by shadowy international forces. It’s a fitting play of Pynchonian paranoia, featuring an International Cheese Syndicate (InChSyn), the mafia, various national governments, and transnational cabals. While every character has their own motives at any given point, those motives are downstream of and primarily influenced by forces existing just beyond the edge of the page. Hicks, then, isn’t so much a protagonist, but rather just the projectile whose path we spend most of the book tracing.
Which isn’t to say the characters aren’t well-developed. Hicks, for all his dumb-guy schtick, is a relatable and fully realized tragic figure. He spends the book dealing with things that aren’t his fault, but become his problem (most clearly in Daphne Airmont’s insistence that, since Hicks saves her life at one point, he’s forever responsible for her). His romance with April, a mob-betrothed lounge singer off on her own ballistic course, is at turns flirtatious and heartbreaking. I’m normally not one for romance in literature, as I’ve seldom seen it done well, but Pynchon vibrantly renders a cynical chemistry between the two.
One thing that Pynchon nails in the book is the libidinal nature of the forces tearing the world apart at the seams. The impulsivity and venal desire of all the principal characters is a microcosm of a larger grinning madness of the world around them. Pynchon casts scenes of rising fascism as a series of chaotic and libidinal explosions. He threads the fascist need for motion and power for the sake of motion and power throughout the book, culminating in a constant circling motorcycle ride around, where else, Hungary.
This culminates in two characters, Ace Lomax and Hop Wingdale (the clarinetist with whom the heiress has absconded) performing for the fascists and hoping they don’t get burned, which one of them very nearly does. The whole thing felt apropos to our own contemporary era in America. It reminded me of the enthusiastic capitulation of pundits and titans of industry discarding any pretend virtue they had to toe the line for the modern American fascists.
Of course, it’s not a book about modern American politics. It’s not a pastiche or satire. Its exploration of paranoia and fascism resonates because it builds its world from the same human clay that made the current mess we’re in. Shadow Ticket feels perfect for our era exactly because it highlights the universal rot that just happens to be more ascendant now than it has been since a decade or so after the book is set. We can see it in America’s resurgent obsession with conspiracy, the unshakeable idiotic lure of fascism over almost half the country, and the febrile, spasmodic violence that seems to arise from and recede to nowhere.
Alongside the urge for fascist violence, however, Shadow Ticket also masterfully explores the need to survive despite it. And more than anything, it is a work of praise for the petty and stupid human desires that get us in trouble and also make life worth living, no matter how bad things get.