Pynchon’s new book is a brilliant exercise in the allure of fiction

FICTION

Shadow Ticket

Thomas Pynchon

Jonathan Cape, $34.99

Thomas Pynchon is one of the walking wonders of literature since the publication of his first major novel The Crying of Lot 49 in 1966 which is the card-carrying postmodern novel many have read because it has the advantage of being short. There’s Gravity’s Rainbow , which intermingles WWII airmen, psychedelic drugs and the moral ambiguities of the German, then American scientist Wernher von Braun, and then there is Mason & Dixon which manages to be complexly far out though it is full of the kindled warmth of the 18th-century pastiche which it uses with a glowing brilliance.

Now we have a new novel and it is full of a scintillating confusion even as it insinuates the postmodern rhetoric that is Pynchon’s trademark. It b