I found some of it, especially the recognition that the Klemzer band wouldn’t be playing music anytime soon in Europe, moving. And I laughed at the bit about the pig. But I haven’t read peak Pynchon.
I need to write at greater length about this book, but the problem is that when I write about Pynchon long becomes longer and longer. But as I said when the book came out:
> The essential point of this book is to trace a line that links the multiple timelines of Against the Day (2006) to the next-door-to-ours hippiecentric moral universe of Vineland (1990) — a connection made pretty explicit when in the final chapter we see a U-boat (“an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time”) that travels through an alternate dimension in just the way that the Chums of Chance travel in Against, and then read a letter from Skeet Wheeler, on his way to California, quite obviously the father of Vineland’s Zoyd Wheeler. This alternate history of our world runs from the Chicago World’s Fair to the Tunguska Event to Prohibition to the rise of European fascism and ultimately to Reagan’s America.
It's worth noting also that the travels of the Chums of Chance *and* the U-boat here map closely onto the travels into alternate dimensions of Mason and Dixon, especially Dixon.
My to-be-developed theory: All the Pynchon books before VINELAND are stand-alones, but all of the books since have been part of one narrative arc meant to illuminate something the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke writes: "These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one." Or the same point in expanded form:
> History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers, — nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other, — her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy and Taproom Wit, — that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever, — not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All, — rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common.
I think SHADOW TICKET is probably Pynchon's last effort to rescue "worlds alternative to this one" from the "Mnemonick Deep."
I thought you had written about the novel when it was published, but didn't read what you wrote then because I hadn't myself at that point read it -- but when I came to draft this I looked on your blog for what you'd said and couldn't find it. I should have looked harder.
I could have done with more of the U-Boat (though it's appearance, glimpsed beneath the ice, at the beginning is truncated: lots of potentially interesting stuff here is tossed-in and moved past) and your reading is a persuasive one. But the *style* is so scatty and random I just couldn't tune-in: I found the process of reading a chore, tiresome ... not something I could say of earlier Pynchon.
I don't disagree at all with your reading, though I guess I find the style inconsistent rather than simply bad. It certainly has some bad moments, or, as Mark Twain said about Wagner's music, some bad quarters-of-an-hour. I'm just saying that if you think of it as a contribution to a larger project it becomes more interesting, if not more accomplished as a novel.
I struggled with this book too, as a dyed-in-the-wool Pynchon lover (I've read Gravity's Rainbow and Against the Day TWICE!). One minor complaint I have is that this is the first book where the song lyrics don't "work" -- usually I can find my way into what the song would sound like pretty easily, but I almost never could in this novel.
I'll probably forfeit my Pynchon Fanclub Membership Card for saying so, but I've never much liked the song lyrics. They've always struck me as more fun to write than to read. But I agree the ones in this novel are particular poor.
I reviewed "Against the Day" for a science fiction venue when it came out (it is, after all, a science fiction novel) and one of the comments I got was praise that I had "evidently actually read the novel all the way to the end." As I had!
Well I found the prose here to be a cool drink of water. Maybe it's partially because I read it immediately after Samuel Richardson's Pamela, which I might describe as astylistic, but regardless: loved the writing. Also, the prepositions-at-the-end of sentences thing: I know you don't like that, but you talk about it as though it isn't clearly something that he's doing on purpose as part of the general affect. You don't like what you don't like, but you seem to be suggesting that he's just screwing up, which I don't think is the case.
I can't deny that there isn't much of a plot here, but I enjoyed just basking in the general vibe. What did you think of Bleeding Edge? I liked this a lot more than that. One thing I noted: absolutely no sex scenes, which, given his his usual ways is clearly a very intentional choice. On the one hand, that absence may mean we're missing part of the human experience yadda yadda, but on the other, as much as I love most (or all? There are a few I haven't read in a long time) of his novels, it was something of a relief to not have to deal with the dubiously-consensual sadomasochistic stuff he often traffics in.
I don't think the prepositions-at-the-end-of-sentences thing is him screwing up. I think he just doesn't care.
The no-sex-scenes is striking, I agree, not least because the female characters here are all so randy. When Hicks drinks the mickey-finn and ends up on the Stupdendica ocean liner, and meets Glow Tripforth del Vasto, whose kink (we are specifically told) is amnesiac men, we expect sex scenes to follow. But they don't! Not sure what's going on with that.
When writers, especially young newbie writers, start parsing acknowledged authors' sentences, looking for nits, or a voice they no longer like, or em dashes, or semicolons, or whatever, I get a feeling. I'll just leave it at that. (Shit, I had a fellow reader recently who was supposed to review my work in progress, and she did not, saying it had too many 'thats' in it.
Yeah, sorry for that. I didn’t know anything about you. But these days I see a lot of new writers getting too close to see clearly. There is obviously a big divide between clear prose that ‘disappears’ and what I call ‘fancy writin’ that calls attention to itself.
Oh, and you have more hair than I. Maybe that's why I was so cranky.
Library of America typically doesn't publish collections of writers' works unless or until the writers are deceased (Philip Roth excepted, for some reason). So we still have to wait.
Background: loved TCOL49, hated Gravity's Rainbow, loved Mason & Dixon and Vineland, and bounced off Against the Day hard. I mostly enjoyed this one on a sentence-to-sentence basis, both the careering narrative and the unpredictable lurches into some kind of sublime - although admittedly neither of those work as well as they did in Vineland. (I wasn't bothered by "the kind they use to make butter and cheese and ice cream out of", though, any more than by "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" - and surely that Churchill line was guying prepositional pedantry, not endorsing it.)
My big problem with the book is that it doesn't go anywhere, other than 'from here to there'; by the end I'd got tired of waiting for a resolution (or even a satisfactory dissolution), which (sure enough) never came. But that was also my problem with G's R, so maybe I'm just not a sufficiently Pynchonian reader.
The Churchill line was uttered in jest, I agree, but the thing is: "This is the kind of usage up with which I will not put" just strikes me as a really beautiful sentence. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" is only half the sentence: "and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
GR does "go" somewhere (though it is largely peregrinations, I agree) in the sense that it goes up, arcs and comes down again, like a V2. This one, though, really *doesn't* go anywhere.
How much might all the danglers be an attempt to capture the vernacular? I only ask because I found a lot of the syntax in GR which looked imparsable on the page would make sense if I read it out-quiet, at which point it sounded naturally messy but plausible. Same for M&D for that matter.
It was really difficult to stick with this one so my impressions may be off.
I think TP tried really hard to describe The Current Moment using the specter of rising fascism in pre-WWII Europe. The overlay simply didn’t work. Who knows, maybe we’re headed towards fascism in the US and elsewhere right now, but Shadow Ticket did not convince me of this. It just made me want to eat too much cheez (sic).
I found some of it, especially the recognition that the Klemzer band wouldn’t be playing music anytime soon in Europe, moving. And I laughed at the bit about the pig. But I haven’t read peak Pynchon.
You should give Lot 49 a go: it's short, and will give you a sense of Pynchon at his best.
Oh, I’ve read it. I really enjoyed it. And I can see that Shadow Ticket isn’t a patch on that.
I completely agree with you that Against the Day is his best work and Shadow Ticket is his worst.
I need to write at greater length about this book, but the problem is that when I write about Pynchon long becomes longer and longer. But as I said when the book came out:
> The essential point of this book is to trace a line that links the multiple timelines of Against the Day (2006) to the next-door-to-ours hippiecentric moral universe of Vineland (1990) — a connection made pretty explicit when in the final chapter we see a U-boat (“an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time”) that travels through an alternate dimension in just the way that the Chums of Chance travel in Against, and then read a letter from Skeet Wheeler, on his way to California, quite obviously the father of Vineland’s Zoyd Wheeler. This alternate history of our world runs from the Chicago World’s Fair to the Tunguska Event to Prohibition to the rise of European fascism and ultimately to Reagan’s America.
It's worth noting also that the travels of the Chums of Chance *and* the U-boat here map closely onto the travels into alternate dimensions of Mason and Dixon, especially Dixon.
My to-be-developed theory: All the Pynchon books before VINELAND are stand-alones, but all of the books since have been part of one narrative arc meant to illuminate something the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke writes: "These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one." Or the same point in expanded form:
> History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers, — nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other, — her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy and Taproom Wit, — that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever, — not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All, — rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common.
I think SHADOW TICKET is probably Pynchon's last effort to rescue "worlds alternative to this one" from the "Mnemonick Deep."
I thought you had written about the novel when it was published, but didn't read what you wrote then because I hadn't myself at that point read it -- but when I came to draft this I looked on your blog for what you'd said and couldn't find it. I should have looked harder.
I could have done with more of the U-Boat (though it's appearance, glimpsed beneath the ice, at the beginning is truncated: lots of potentially interesting stuff here is tossed-in and moved past) and your reading is a persuasive one. But the *style* is so scatty and random I just couldn't tune-in: I found the process of reading a chore, tiresome ... not something I could say of earlier Pynchon.
I don't disagree at all with your reading, though I guess I find the style inconsistent rather than simply bad. It certainly has some bad moments, or, as Mark Twain said about Wagner's music, some bad quarters-of-an-hour. I'm just saying that if you think of it as a contribution to a larger project it becomes more interesting, if not more accomplished as a novel.
I struggled with this book too, as a dyed-in-the-wool Pynchon lover (I've read Gravity's Rainbow and Against the Day TWICE!). One minor complaint I have is that this is the first book where the song lyrics don't "work" -- usually I can find my way into what the song would sound like pretty easily, but I almost never could in this novel.
I'll probably forfeit my Pynchon Fanclub Membership Card for saying so, but I've never much liked the song lyrics. They've always struck me as more fun to write than to read. But I agree the ones in this novel are particular poor.
I reviewed "Against the Day" for a science fiction venue when it came out (it is, after all, a science fiction novel) and one of the comments I got was praise that I had "evidently actually read the novel all the way to the end." As I had!
Well I found the prose here to be a cool drink of water. Maybe it's partially because I read it immediately after Samuel Richardson's Pamela, which I might describe as astylistic, but regardless: loved the writing. Also, the prepositions-at-the-end of sentences thing: I know you don't like that, but you talk about it as though it isn't clearly something that he's doing on purpose as part of the general affect. You don't like what you don't like, but you seem to be suggesting that he's just screwing up, which I don't think is the case.
I can't deny that there isn't much of a plot here, but I enjoyed just basking in the general vibe. What did you think of Bleeding Edge? I liked this a lot more than that. One thing I noted: absolutely no sex scenes, which, given his his usual ways is clearly a very intentional choice. On the one hand, that absence may mean we're missing part of the human experience yadda yadda, but on the other, as much as I love most (or all? There are a few I haven't read in a long time) of his novels, it was something of a relief to not have to deal with the dubiously-consensual sadomasochistic stuff he often traffics in.
I don't think the prepositions-at-the-end-of-sentences thing is him screwing up. I think he just doesn't care.
The no-sex-scenes is striking, I agree, not least because the female characters here are all so randy. When Hicks drinks the mickey-finn and ends up on the Stupdendica ocean liner, and meets Glow Tripforth del Vasto, whose kink (we are specifically told) is amnesiac men, we expect sex scenes to follow. But they don't! Not sure what's going on with that.
When writers, especially young newbie writers, start parsing acknowledged authors' sentences, looking for nits, or a voice they no longer like, or em dashes, or semicolons, or whatever, I get a feeling. I'll just leave it at that. (Shit, I had a fellow reader recently who was supposed to review my work in progress, and she did not, saying it had too many 'thats' in it.
That's where some people are at.
You're rebuking me, although the mere thought that my old bald wheezing self could be considered a "young newbie writer" is strangely flattering.
Yeah, sorry for that. I didn’t know anything about you. But these days I see a lot of new writers getting too close to see clearly. There is obviously a big divide between clear prose that ‘disappears’ and what I call ‘fancy writin’ that calls attention to itself.
Oh, and you have more hair than I. Maybe that's why I was so cranky.
Be well over there in jolly olde England!
Library of America typically doesn't publish collections of writers' works unless or until the writers are deceased (Philip Roth excepted, for some reason). So we still have to wait.
They've done some DeLillo (which I own), so I wonder if there's a specific issue with Pynchon. But yes: wait, we must.
Likely copyright issues with his publishers.
Background: loved TCOL49, hated Gravity's Rainbow, loved Mason & Dixon and Vineland, and bounced off Against the Day hard. I mostly enjoyed this one on a sentence-to-sentence basis, both the careering narrative and the unpredictable lurches into some kind of sublime - although admittedly neither of those work as well as they did in Vineland. (I wasn't bothered by "the kind they use to make butter and cheese and ice cream out of", though, any more than by "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" - and surely that Churchill line was guying prepositional pedantry, not endorsing it.)
My big problem with the book is that it doesn't go anywhere, other than 'from here to there'; by the end I'd got tired of waiting for a resolution (or even a satisfactory dissolution), which (sure enough) never came. But that was also my problem with G's R, so maybe I'm just not a sufficiently Pynchonian reader.
The Churchill line was uttered in jest, I agree, but the thing is: "This is the kind of usage up with which I will not put" just strikes me as a really beautiful sentence. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" is only half the sentence: "and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
GR does "go" somewhere (though it is largely peregrinations, I agree) in the sense that it goes up, arcs and comes down again, like a V2. This one, though, really *doesn't* go anywhere.
How much might all the danglers be an attempt to capture the vernacular? I only ask because I found a lot of the syntax in GR which looked imparsable on the page would make sense if I read it out-quiet, at which point it sounded naturally messy but plausible. Same for M&D for that matter.
Your estimation of Against the Day might compel me to read it. I own it and it looks so nice on my shelf ...
Against is a bear but so worth it.
It was really difficult to stick with this one so my impressions may be off.
I think TP tried really hard to describe The Current Moment using the specter of rising fascism in pre-WWII Europe. The overlay simply didn’t work. Who knows, maybe we’re headed towards fascism in the US and elsewhere right now, but Shadow Ticket did not convince me of this. It just made me want to eat too much cheez (sic).
This is right, I think.
I agree with your great Pynchon novels and I add V. to the list. Shadow Ticket is a tedious yawn, sadly.
You're right: I should not neglect V.