NO WAY OUT

In Thomas Pynchon's "Shadow Ticket," all the ends are loose.

- BY KATHRYN SCHULZ

America, circa now. Things, most of which have been weird for a while, are getting distinctly weirder. The President of the United States is busy redecorating the White House and bent on buying Greenland. A new wonder drug is making people skinny. Domestic affairs are increasingly controlled by an upstart political entity whose official status is murky but whose powers are all but limitless: DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, which was started by a multibillionaire with a sideline in unusual forms of transportation—rocket ships, Cybertrucks, Hyperloops—and named for an internet meme featuring the Comic Sans typeface and a Shiba Inu. Tens of millions of people, followers of a mysterious figure known only by the letter “Q,” believe that many of the nation’s leaders are involved in a global child-sex-trafficking ring that will one day be crushed in an all-encompassing, all-cleansing event called The Event.

Talking dogs, strange vehicles, conspiracy theories, stupid acronyms: life imitates cult fiction, apparently, and somewhere along the line our reality started to resemble, with uncanny specificity, the collected works of Thomas Pynchon. This is not a welcome development, as even his greatest fans would affirm. For sixty-two years—beginning in 1963, with the publication of “V.,” and picking up momentum ten years later, with “Gravity's Rainbow”—the author has been offering up worlds that seem much like our own except weirder and more lawless, with respect to both criminal activity and physics. The ambient atmosphere in Pynchon’s fiction is one of secrecy and bamboozlement, the purported stakes are generally sky-high but silly, like an armed game of Go Fish, and the possibility of violence on an epic scale is often rocketing, sometimes in the Wernher von Braun sense, directly toward you. Opinions vary on the merits and pleasures of these books, but no one, it seems safe to say, has ever yearned to live in the worlds they depict.