The greatest “neglected book” ever, according to Thomas Pynchon
Peace and love’s days were numbered from the start. The zeitgeist had stepped one toke over the line, and as the 1960s turned to the ’70s in psychedelic Los Angeles, the onset of paranoia was appallingly apparent. This is the societal schism where Thomas Pynchon‘s prose has often happily picnicked.
Conspiracies, crime, carnal pleasures, and the uncanny are rife in his work, dancing with the workaday reality and its weary search for meaning. At 88, Shadow Ticket may well be his last excursion into modern history’s weird disposition, with the novel perhaps, ironically, teasing towards being his most accessible.
As the official premise states, “Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering.”
A simple detective for hire case of The Big Sleep variety so far, but it continues, “Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement – and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing.”
It concludes with the following perfectly Pynchian cacophony, “By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer.”
To break the fourth wall for a moment, that may well be the best blurb I’ve ever read – the pastries of Hungary proving particularly alluring. And within the welter of its odyssey, there is more than a whiff of a long-forgotten novel that, by contrast, Pynchon has been remembering for a very long time.
Back in 1965, when the reclusive oddity was just beginning his career as a mysterious writer, he wrote a piece about his favourite neglected novel for the long-defunct Holiday magazine. He opted for Oakley Hall’s barely printed Warlock.
The book had been published seven years earlier, and it perfectly captured the counterculture tone to come. It’s a comic revisionist western that borrowed from history, but subverted the John Wayne aggrandising of the era and instead presented the fictional town of Warlock in a frankly daft light. This satire and social realism stirred Pynchon when he first read it, and with Shadow Ticket, he evidently looks to revive the sordid intermingling of history and farce.
Speaking of which, when writing about Warlock in ‘65, he commented, “Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880’s is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust,” he writes, reflecting how Hall reframed history in a way that felt far more real and future facing that other depictions.
‘In his very fine novel,” he says of Hall, “Warlock has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity. Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who, partly because of his blown-up image in the Wild West magazines of the day, believes he is a hero.”
Pynchon concludes, “He is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him, but also, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the image to exist…. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels.”
Sadly, while it might have made the finals of the Pulitzer Prize upon release, thereafter it flagged for a few years as Wayne’s more mainstream, heroic approach to the West still held sway. But as the counterculture movement sought out subversive texts, Thomas Pynchon and Richard Fariña, who were students at Cornell University together, listening to the likes of Tiny Tim, The Beatles, and The Tornados, happened upon it, hailed it as a masterpiece, and almost became solely responsible for its subsequent status as a cult classic.
