SHADOW TICKET, by Thomas Pynchon
It’s not as if Thomas Pynchon has never written about cheese before. In his first novel, “V.” (1963), there’s an artist named Slab — he’s a “catatonic expressionist” — who obsessively paints cheese Danishes in various styles: Cubist, Fauvist, Surrealist, etc. In Pynchon’s second book, “The Crying of Lot 49” (1966), a woman named Oedipa Maas returns home from a Tupperware party suspecting her hostess had put “too much kirsch in the fondue.”
Little in Pynchon’s oeuvre, however, prepares the reader for “Shadow Ticket,” his first novel in 12 years and possibly (he is 88) his last. Alongside Émile Zola’s “The Belly of Paris,” it is perhaps Western literature’s Great Cheese Novel. (Though Pynchon often spells it “cheez.”) It’s as if he’s out to make America grate again.
Whereas Zola sang of Brie “like melancholy extinct moons” and compared a round of Gruyere to “a wheel fallen from some barbarian chariot,” Pynchon finds in the industrial production of curds and whey enough paranoia, satirical and otherwise, to power a midsize city, perhaps one in Wisconsin.
“Shadow Ticket” is set in Milwaukee in the early 1930s, just before the repeal of Prohibition. In the almost pastoral calm before this novel’s storm, we learn of a “Dairy Metaphysics Symposium” in Sheboygan, and a character comments, “Spend your whole day around ice cream, you can begin to grow philosophical.” Another says (Pynchon rarely says “says” when he can say “sez” instead), “Wisconsin is possessed by some vast earth-scented spirit of Bovinity.”
The remainder of the plot reads like a series of 80-point tabloid headlines. Cheese fraud is rampant; “Bolshevik” farmers in collectives threaten to upset the big-money status quo; an incident known as the Cheese Corridor Incursion has made a lot of mafioso types nervous. The “Roquefort police” and “the Gorgonzola squadri” are on the move. The rind is peeled off many people’s nerves.
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