Pynchon-heads, This One’s for Us

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.