Shadow Ticket
It’s late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open ... Pynchon may not have lost a step in Shadow Ticket, but sometimes he seems to be conserving his energy. His signature long, comma-rich sentences reach their periods a little sooner now ... For most of the way, though, Shadow Ticket may remind you of an exceptionally tight tribute band, playing the oldies so lovingly that you might as well be listening to your old, long-since-unloaded vinyl.
Read Full Review >>
Starts with a bang ... His most urgent novel yet ... 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.
Read Full Review >>
Rollicking, genially silly and ultimately sweet ... If all of that (and there’s so much more) sounds a little goofy, it mostly is, in a winningly loopy way. It helps that the 88-year-old Pynchon’s prose is still as balletically dazzling as the trick shot Lew teaches Hicks, often in ways that can be hard to quote with any sort of brevity ... Pynchon may have the most distinct voice — a clipped tough guy patois delivered with the rhythms of borscht belt comedy, amplified by an endless appetite for linguistic play — that has proved largely inimitable.
Read Full Review >>
