No Swan Song

Thomas Pynchon refines his style in a timely new novel.

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SHADOW TICKET STARTS with a bang. "The explosion when it comes seems to be from somewhere across the river and nearer the Lake,"

Thomas Pynchon writes. "Nobody seems surprised." In language and sentiment, the lines closely echo the opening of 1973's Gravity's Rainbow, his best-known book: "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." Both are about bomb blasts, expectations, and-if you squint-war. Shadow Ticket depicts the path to Gravity's Rainbow's phantasmagoria of World War II horrors, and none of the book's characters is confused about the sadistic direction things are heading.

At 88, Pynchon has written his most urgent novel yet thanks to a newfound narrative grounding that maintains his distinctive style of cartoonish maximalism and high-flown beauty. It is filled with his famously overstuffed paragraphs, often one thrumming sentence each. But his words go down a bit more smoothly than usual without sacrificing any of his crackle. The result is a Pynchonian reduction simmered to delectation.