"Same as me, I hope not. Same as you, maybe you better hope not. But if a human soul can be defined as a structure of memories, if to read' an object is somehow to gain access to what it remembers, then how can we begrudge it a soul?"

Thomas Pynchon’s favorite subject might be the sentience of objects that seem inanimate. He wrote this book as he’s looking 90-years-old in the face and it was no exception to the theme. Shadow Ticket is rife with objects of questionable levels of consciousness. Cheese, motorcycles, submarines, blackjacks, clocks, bowling balls, golems, vampires, improvised explosive devices, and detective case tickets are just some of the collections of dead matter than Pynchon fixates on this time around.

As part of the question of free will around objects he’s introduced the ability for them to spontaneously leave or appear, given the circumstances in which they find themselves. A strikebreaker’s club goes poof from his hand as he brings it down with intention to kill a striker. These are the hopeful insertions that Pynchon makes into the landscape of 1930’s Milwaukee and Eastern Europe. As always he depicts his periods with loving hyperattention to detail right down to the last anachronistic cliche. His Milwaukee is a landscape of civil discord largely brought on by labor relations and through this lens he zooms out to show the state of the whole world. Nazis crowd German bowling alleys. Feds have newfound power to track people along the ley lines of the Earth, Fascist vampire biker gangs harangue people across countries and continents. And all along the way we’re left to wonder if the bombs they roll under bootlegger wagons (gyroscopically self-stabilized in perfect Pynchon cybernetic prose of course), blackjacks that they intend for skullbreaking, or cheese that they’ve hoarded into a cartel and pumped full of radium have any say in the strange technopolitical world in which they’ve been employed.

This is Pynchon at his most confusing and perhaps rushed. The second half of the narrative feels like the bowling ball has been allowed to strike all the pins and bring things clattering down. But this is the master of paranoia. What conspiracy warrants more bent over hurriedly writing than death itself? We’re in the Pynchonworld now and we know that the Feds have no concerns over jurisdiction. We know the highest crime is to shine a light on things and whether he comes in a suit or in a black robe, the punishment for some cursed knowledge has always been a quick lights out. We write with new fervor as the objects are blessed with strange and malevolent sentience.