The prophecy of the present in Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel

A few months ago in "The New Yorker", the writer Kathryn Schulz warned us: we are wallowing “in a moment when reality seems to have caught up with Thomas Pynchon’s fiction”. On 7 October, Penguin published the latest novel by the great recluse of American literature, "Shadow Ticket", and the Italian edition, prepared by Einaudi Stile Libero, should also be available shortly. There is no shortage of the entertaining tour de force of old Pynchonian clichés: the postmodern detective story full of plot twists (Milwaukee, Hungary, Transylvania and Fiume), the touch of the paranormal, the reference to music (with the swing band The Klezmopolitans) and, above all, the flamboyant, sparkling and wild (from Detective Hicks McTaggart of the Unamalgamated Ops agency to the singer April Randazzo, from the boss Don Peppino to the Interpol agent Egon Praedinger, to Ace Lomax, Bruno Airmon’s right-hand man, and the Czech golem Zdenek).

An obsession with names is an immediately apparent feature of Pynchon’s fiction. In “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973), his undisputed masterpiece, which pushes the boundaries of readability to Derridean extremes, names that are so abstruse, jarring and yet striking reign supreme. The plot is impossible to summarise: in this immense, creaking chessboard of events set in Europe during the Second World War, characters such as Tyrone Slothrop, Katje Borgesius, ‘Blicero’ Weissman, Jeremy ‘Castoro’, Laszlo Jamf, Morituri, Džaqyp Qulan, Geoffrey ‘Pirate’ Prentice and Squalidozzi wander about. And they are listed here at random amidst a far vaster myriad that perhaps amounts to an ‘ette’, gradually thinning out. Or perhaps it borders on the hermeneutic flames of the Kabbalah. Why is this frenzied naming one of the most immediate and obstinate diegetic devices in the work of the 89-year-old New Yorker? One must venture into Lacanian psychoanalysis and the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, the fundamental unsymbolised signifier, the pivot that slips away with meaning and reality. Or, more specifically, is there a nostalgia in Pynchon—Max Horkheimer’s nostalgia for the Totally Other—which is crushed and overwhelmed by the multiplication of signs? Judging by the way it stirs, sizzles and crackles with fragmentation, one might say so. Walter Benjamin might speak of ‘pure language’, a lost origin in which words and things coincided. Yet, suggestions aside, the Pynchon of "Shadow Ticket" also turns his gaze towards the prophecy of the present. Amidst anti-democratic bowlers, dairy industries and ‘La Lampa Plej Malbongusto’ (a lamp of the worst taste), amidst motorbike couriers, international espionage, the ‘Business Plot’ and the ethereal Daphne, emblem of a femininity that slips away (as in ‘V.’, his debut novel), one can only find one’s bearings along the shadow line of that final, star-spangled upheaval leading to the counterfactual deposition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by General Douglas MacArthur. It is an alternate history in every sense, obviously seasoned with hysterical realism, flamboyant and sinister. The hook is 1932, the year in which – with Prohibition and the Depression in full swing – MacArthur led the violent military offensive against the Bonus Army, a protest by First World War veterans in Washington. This period coincides precisely with the rapid rise of European and American extremism, and with authoritarian excesses (and abscesses). Pynchon masks, evades and rewrites history anew: yet his finger is pointed squarely at that time, a hundred years ago. Follow him, reader.