Il caso ombra

Through his work, Thomas Pynchon has succeeded in giving the nebulous definition of ‘postmodern’ the clear contours of stories in which reality is dismantled and reassembled into unprecedented forms. At almost ninety years of age, and twelve years on from his previous work "The Crying of Lot 49" – an unsurpassed elegy on what 11 September 2001 changed forever – Pynchon has published "The Shadow Case" (translated by Gianni Pannofino), a concrete example of the gulf that separates the contrived postmodernism which, from a certain point onwards, has been a near-permanent fixture in much literature – and not just in the English-speaking world – from the mastery of an author who, starting with V. in 1963, has constructed a skewed world in which the blackest humour mingles with apocalyptic tones, pop culture is boldly scrutinised, and timelines are distorted to suit the narrative. Even in "Il caso ombra", set in the 1930s during Prohibition, Pynchon takes the past in hand and reinterprets it through the lens of the present, constructing a story once again centred on a somewhat eccentric protagonist who constantly oscillates between moments of insight and paranoia, the detective Hick McTaggart, who turns to private investigation following a bizarre clash with a Bolshevik protester and who works for an agency whose defining characteristics are suffocating control and strict adherence to protocol (a synecdoche for conspiracy theories which, in Pynchon’s work, becomes a hermeneutic paradigm of reality). Yet the shadow case of the title seems to elude the officialdom that normally prevails within the investigative organization, and this ambiguity of the assignment spills over into an intricate plot that tosses the reader between different places and times (from the United States to Europe and on to the city of Fiume) in an endless series of real or supposed red herrings that create an atmosphere making the setting resemble our own world, yet one inhabited by creaks and anarchic deviations that constantly unsettle the reader. This approach lies at the heart of one of the most important characteristics of Pynchon’s work; like the great writers, he has no need to set a novel in the present to describe a timeless reality, which therefore also resembles our own, amidst conspiracies, the deep state and extremist fury. McTaggart’s pursuit of a cheese heiress catapults him from Milwaukee to Nazi-occupied Europe, teeming with spies and secret agents amid big bands and the dispossessed, in a noir-style jumble that, in a single instant, demolishes any genre-based narrative, establishing itself in the luminous realm of works destined for a long life. Even with The Shadow Case, Pynchon transforms himself into a friendly pioneer who sets off towards unknown horizons and, upon his return, hands the future over to his readers.

Thomas Pynchon
, "The Shadow
Case", Einaudi, 400 pp., 21 euros