Ever since his first novel V. came out in 1963, Thomas Pynchon has been a master architect of the “and so forth,” and we can count on him to roll pineapples and memos underfoot along the path to it. I remember from my teenaged years trailing after Mrs. Oedipa Maas in bewildered joy through that mirror-walled prison maze The Crying of Lot 49, then essaying Gravity’s Rainbow, whose hero Tyrone Slothrop was “obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name on it,” hence with meticulous dream-logic kept unconsciously calling Nazi V-2 rocket-bombs down on the sites of his recent, well, you know. 

As for the mysterious heroine of V. … — but like Pynchon himself, I digress, if not quite all the way to the haunted castle called And So Forth. The point is that you and I, caught up in Shadow Ticket, his latest novel, are now in Milwaukee, 1932, with another blizzard of pineapples about to fall, Prohibition still in hypocritical force and Al Capone’s heirs blowing up the competition. Although every now and then some sage may see fit to remark that “this caper’s got German storm kiddies written all over it,” for next year Hitler will become Chancellor, and he has sympathizers right here in the American heartland (if you don’t believe me, try bowling at New Nuremberg Lanes, where the doggerel is a cheerfully, idiotically vicious as anything out of Gravity’s Rainbow: “Hold yer flag up high, yeahh, / Let’s swing it, for the Nah-zis—”) — yep, dear old 1932! 

Our protagonist will be Hicks McTaggart, who for money used to crack strikers’ heads, because “at the time in Wisconsin not a week went by there wasn’t a strike at least being voted on someplace, plenty of opportunity to kick asses on behalf of management,” so that Hicks almost resembled one of Adolf’s Brownshirts, except that they kick ass gratis, for righteousness’s sake. Well, Hick surprised himself by getting softhearted. And rather like Slothrop not (consciously) knowing the baleful power of his penis, Hicks simply felt relieved when his sap somehow misplaced itself (nothing to do with him) just before it would have split some little Bolshevik’s skull. So he became a private eye. Now won’t that be just the ticket?

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By William T. Vollmann

His boss was a cards-to-his-chest type named Boynt Crosstown — and here I admit to having dropped that in as the merest excuse to revel right now in more of Pynchon’s christenings: Dr. Swampscott Vobe, Wisebroad’s Shoes, Connie McSpool, Glow Tripworth de Vasta, Cousin Begonia, “child sensation Squeezita Thickly” — for this author’s longstanding genius there on that private swivel chair of the Department of Character Appellations matches long-gone Lord Dunsany’s for imaginary gods and cities. I cast my grin back upon Tyrone Slothrop, who was first printed in 1973, and wonder to what extent my delight in Shadow Ticket derives from nostalgia. For I’m getting decrepit, while Pynchon is even older, so which will come first, the old lion’s last roar, or my last read? Enriching the nostalgia is Pynchon’s lyrically sad and squalidly beautiful Milwaukee, a place to which I have no connection, and at a time before my parents were born, so why should I care about it? But I do, because it’s a shadow Milwaukee, all the more worth missing for being unreal. 

There is a gentleness to Pynchon, and sometimes even a cynical sweetness (and so forth); then come prankish pineapples. We may discover ourselves “haunting given stretches of sidewalk just as the shops close down and the girls come out dazy and chattering, cigarette smoke and the slowly more intensifying light of the evening street” and believe in what we see, but what about when two fortune-telling penny scales in a row print out consistently insistent bomb warnings about the Christmas package received by Hicks from two of Santa’s elves? 

We can now commence tiptoeing or maybe goosestepping over bowling balls and rolling pineapples on the way to the “and so forth”. For this, you see, is a genuine “Milwaukee bildungsroman, as they call it locally” — I just bet they do. And there are many ways to get in trouble in Milwaukee, so why on earth would Hicks ever want to depart? But what happens in Milwaukee does not infallibly stay in Milwaukee, because Boynt Crosstown has handed him that real lulu of a ticket, whose invisibly inked purport reminds me of a certain refrain: “… oh get away / from me, you — /ol’ mid- / night… in Milwaukee…” Hence halfway through this thumb’s thickness of smooth, sly pages, Hicks will be glumly making the best of interwar Europe.

Reader, what gives you your get-up-’n’-go? Are you a Jane Austen character hunting for marriage, a money-starved Dreiser protagonist, a Thucydidean demagogue, or would you rather get your love ticket punched? In Shadow Ticket there will be dancings, rubbings, copulations, flirtations, and yet we are far from the romantic mystifications of V.: Hicks’s heart does ache, but it’s more jealous than committed. In short, the motive power of his personal narrative, however greased up by dalliances, will not be his dancehall girl April Randazzo, because not only does he stay uncommitted, but the gangster Vumvum soon breaks it to him that she is the willing moll of a mobster titan. And if you still hope against hope that Shadow Ticket will turn into Love Story, let Vumvum set you straight: “Padrino, this far down the chain nobody gives ungazz about that emotional stuff.” — April stays behind to marry Don Peppino. What snatches Hicks out of Milwaukee is that lulu of a work ticket from Boynt Crosstown. And the pineapples roll. Sometimes they detonate.

To maintain narrative suspense I have sworn not to tell you that Hick’s not-quite-friend Stuffy Keegan has recently escaped gangsterous assassins thanks to an Austro-Hungarian U-13 submarine that snuck in beneath the midnight ice of Lake Michigan, which disappearing act a certain ominous new breed of policemen inexplicably threatens to blame on Hicks himself. Hence he accepts Boynt Crosstown’s dragooning of him into returning to her fiance and Mommy (Daddy being on the lam) Daphne the Airmont cheese heiress, whom Hicks once rescued from a mental asylum. Now this may be tricky to close out, because she would rather be in Europe with her mercurial boyfriend. Boynt does hint at a potentially generous expense allowance. He further advises Hicks to “better just be yourself — with you, not the perfect option, I agree…”

Well, so off goes our hero to the Airmont mansion, in what is almost a quasi-semi-parody of noble gumshoe Philip Marlowe meeting his fat cat employer at the beginning of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and in both books we know everything will become more sinister and complicated, because that’s what all discerning readers demand. Here for instance is one of Shadow Ticket’s complications: Cheese turns out to be “self-aware… maybe not exactly the way we are, but still more than some clever simulation… Long-time spiritual truth in Wisconsin”. And coincidentally, Daddy Airmont, forenamed Bruno, is “known in the industry as the Al Capone of cheese”. A Viennese policeman (who might be something else) refers to him “the way Dracula pronounces the name Van Helsing”. I am sorry to say that the battles and extortions of the Internationalist Cheese Syndicate run out of laughs, as do such easy digs at Nazi “culture” as “an unremitting suite of Wagnerian works transcribed for zither”.

But those are my only cavils with Shadow Ticket, and having made them I had best hasten on by padding out this essay with plot summary: drugged in New York, poor Hicks wakes up on an ocean liner bound for Europe, about which place one of his fellow passengers and mysterious keepers inspires him as follows: “With the old lot on their way out, there’s a second chance, not only for Germany but for all civilization.”

“Routine ticket, only over here for as long as it takes, till everything’s back to normal.” “OK, maybe this ticket is takin’ longer than it should, but that don’t mean—” Sorry, Hicks, but oh yes it does: routine ticket, runaway heiress ticket, extra ticket, unknown ticket, fishy ticket, shadow ticket…! “Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark.” Another secret I promised not to tell you is that pretty much every Pynchon novel entails cruises to and from Shadowland, as in the very first pages of The Crying of Lot 49: “I think it’s time Wendell Maas had a little visit from The Shadow.” If you distrust ambiguity and are masochistic enough to read this author regardless, why, sure, he knows how to project bright stillness, just to trick you — imagine an interrogation cell, or maybe a superego’s lightbulb glaring inflexibly in the prison of your very own frontal lobe —: “a good enough vision,” says Gravity’s Rainbow, “of what’s shadowless noon and what isn’t”. But noons never last very long for the hag-ridden victim of a shadow ticket. As Gravity’s Rainbow has it: “So much has to be left behind now, so quickly.”

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Pynchon passes out shadow tickets left and right, just as God does, because that’s how life goes, right? We all long to know what the rules are, in order to stay out of trouble by following them or else get ahead by breaking them. For instance, why did those two sleazy Christmas elves present Hick with a ticking package? — “In the business,” a bomb-cooker explains, “we understand that an explosive… is actually somebody with something to say… a message we aren’t so much receiving as overhearing” — because had Hicks been exploded, the message could hardly have been to him (no more Hicks to receive it) but about him. But what is it? It garbles itself, on purpose, or maybe gets parasitized, à la William Burroughs, by unimaginably alien cipher-mongers, and so the shadowless noon turns shady, then as opaque as cuttlefish ink; until, just as in the very last sentence of V. the Mediterranean Sea “showed nothing at all of what came to lie beneath, that quiet June day,” namely THE END, so Hicks McTaggart sleepwalks blind in blackness, wondering where the next pineapple will catch him. What can he do but keep pretending compliancy? 

To cope with alogical, amoral and possibly inescapable shadow tickets, The Crying of Lot 49 advises “silence, impersonation, opposition masquerading as allegiance,” which will be Hicks’s exact way of getting by in Europe’s fear-spiced “desire for what has almost arrived… [in] a long erotic buildup before the shuddering instant of clarity, a violent collapse of civil order which will spread from a radiant point in or near Vienna,” which I take to mean Berlin. The foreplay includes a kind of paranormal pre-Cold War between Nazis and Soviets, while Ustasha terrorists and Hungarian Jew-killing “Vladboys”, “small, nimble, predatory, full of pep”, operate between Pynchon’s lines. 

Meanwhile, where the hell are we? In a line which could have been lifted from Philip K. Dick retails the possibility of getting “thrown by some occult switchwork into an alternate branch line…, where Stalin and crew are no longer possibilities…” It almost seems as if this could happen to anyone, even you and me! What if it did? Lot 49 ends with Oedipa Maas still waiting for answers, Gravity’s Rainbow with another rocket about to come down on us, and in V. we never find out for certain who V is; while right back here in Shadow Ticket, when the cheese monster Bruno Airmont gets kidnapped onto Stuffy’s submarine so that he can be safely exiled instead of bumped off, they take him to a New York whose Statue of Liberty has become now someone else. “It’s the U.S. but not exactly the one you left. There’s exile and there’s exile.” That sounds slightly unnerving but not necessarily worth dreading, for at least we’re not trapped in William Burroughs’s Ticket That Exploded. 

The bottom line is that Hicks McTaggart’s Milwaukee is hopelessly far away. Fortunately, when hailed by Stuffy Keegan’s submarine he was informed, maybe even guaranteed, that thanks to some “swell beer joints”, the home base of Fiume (AKA Rijeka) is “the Milwaukee of the Adriatic”. Anything can happen in one Milwaukee or another, maybe even something good, for even “as Hicks begins to understand that he’s not going back to the States right away,” Pynchon gives him one lulu of a ticket, because his ever closer friend Terike starts teaching him Hungarian, which necessarily involves kissing lessons.

And that greed could prove fatal. China’s “civilisation state”, deeply rooted in thousands of years of history, represents the most profound philosophical challenge to liberal values since the end of the Cold War. But our oligarchs choose to ignore this, preferring instead to genuflect to Beijing for financial gain.

The cost of such avarice is slowly coming into focus: China’s economy may surpass the US by as early as 2028, and by some measurements already has. Of course, China deserves credit for its remarkable performance, which is mostly thanks to the efforts of its citizens, in particular its rural migrants, the key fodder for the country’s dominant manufacturing base.

But the Middle Kingdom’s ascendency would not seem as inexorable if not for the efforts of the West’s ‘kowtow crowd’, a group of self-interested cheerleaders and enablers of China’s autocratic state. At the height of the Cold War, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev threatened that the USSR would “bury” the West. China’s President Xi can count on the West burying itself.

Some of this can be traced to naivety and an underestimation of Chinese capabilities. Rather than recognising a potential threat, our political and financial elites saw a potential economic partner and huge market. China was still a poor, developing country; when welcomed into the World Trade Organisation 20 years ago, it dutifully supplied cheap products to a welcoming market. In the meantime, it was hoped that exposure to the West would create an increasingly liberal China.

Yet for at least a decade, particularly since Xi Jinping assumed control of the Communist Party, these assumptions have been proven fatally wrong. Xi and the Party have clearly made clear that their ambition is not any old seat at the table, but the one at its head.  

Given what seems a clear and present danger to the West and its East Asian allies, one would expect our ruling class to seek ways to fight back. Donald Trump may have been a blustering fool but at least he saw, and identified, the threat. President Biden, to his credit, has also proposed some steps to reinforce US competitiveness, and there is rare bipartisan consensus, including on the Left, to resist China’s hegemony.

Yet prospects for standing up to China from the White House are limited. As recently as 2019 Biden, a stalwart cog in the Washington consensus, minimised the Chinese threat to our economy, recently claiming, incredibly, that: “you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” More worrisome still has been the Biden family’s close business ties with Beijing. The somewhat dissolute Hunter, in particular, has profited hugely and gained expensive gifts working for the Chinese. Most recently, he helped a Chinese firm to corner the cobalt market, a key component in the administration’s  green energy strategy.

But kowtowing is hardly a partisan phenomenon. Prominent figures from both parties, including former GOP Speaker John Boehner, and many connected Washington think tanks receive funding from Beijing. Even members of the Bush family have cosied up to CCP apparatchiks, including one with strong ties to that country’s rising military.

Europe’s leaders, if anything, are even less committed to confronting the Chinese challenge. Some, including Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, seek to play the US against the Chinese civilisational challenge by treating them as moral equivalents of their long-time American allies. Meanwhile, Beijing is busily extending its presence on the continent with infrastructure investment to weak European countries such Greece, Hungary, and Romania.

Nowhere is the ineptitude of the Western policy towards China more evident than in climate change. Like its human rights record, China’s environmental footprint should be a source of embarrassment and condemnation. While the West hamstrings itself with its eco-commitments, China, not mandated to reduce its carbon emissions till 2030, continues to build coal plants to maintain its industrial engine. By 2030, when China will be able to shift to nuclear and other alternatives, the West will be effectively de-industrialised, and hopelessly dependent.

But such dependency is nothing new. For decades American companies have been handing Beijing the basis for economic hegemony: since 1990 US deficit in trade goods with China has ballooned from under $10 billion annually to $419 billion last year. China’s ratio of imports to exports was four to one in 2018. This has enriched many of our leading manufacturing companies — notably Apple — while costing an estimated 3.4 million job losses in the US since 2001.

Meanwhile, these corporate kowtowers actively promote China’s model. Apple, for instance, props up and profits from China’s ever-expanding surveillance state. Acting as if it were its own country, Apple has essentially negotiated its own $275 billion deal with China, promising to keep production there while assisting with the country’s unhidden goal is to supplant the West as a tech leader.

For its part, Wall Street, even amid the threat of government interference, plays its part the kowtow crowd. Ray Dalio, founder of giant Bridgewater Associates hedge fund and self-promoting author, has dismissed China’s repression of its Uighur population as the result of a “sacrosanct” desire for sovereignty. Even powerful figures such as Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan have decided to publicly apologise after upsetting the CCP. It’s in their interest, after all. Xi knows fully well that Western investment bankers and tech companies will do his bidding, as long as they get what Mafia dons may call “a taste”. China may be miffed if US diplomats boycott the 2022 winter games, but they can be sure that the corporations and investment bankers will likely be there, heads bowed on the floor.

All of this is made even more humiliating by the fact that China’s rise may not be as unstoppable as its Western admirers believe. China’s economic growth rate is slowing, its bloated real estate markets are showing signs of implosion, and industrial production has slowed to the lowest level since 2004. Meanwhile, its tech and innovation sector is being pummelled by continued government crackdowns.

More serious still are demographic forces. By 2050, China is projected to have 60 million fewer people under age fifteen, a loss approximately the size of Italy’s total population. The ratio of retirees to working people is expected to have more than tripled by then, one of the most rapid demographic shifts in history. By 2050 it will be roughly 20% higher than that of the US; 15 years after that, according to the South China Morning Post, China’s population will be very old and about half its current size.

None of this suggests resisting China will be easy, particularly given the disposition of our rulers. But it does mean it’s possible.

That is the real tragedy of the kowtow crowd. Just as in the Thirties, their prostration only makes their adversary stronger and more confident. Inevitably, it will be the rest of us, and future generations, who pay the price.