Thomas Pynchon has never been all that interested in coherent plot, let alone in positing some definitive master plotter authoring it. If his work traffics in the conspiratorial, it does so by suggesting that all possibilities are true at once, even if they conflict with one another, which scrambles any impression of emergent order and thereby short-circuits the reassurance that conspiratorial fantasies offer.

The mafia, or something like it, exists in his new Prohibition-era novel, “Shadow Ticket,” but so do disquietingly genial Nazi policemen, scheming spymasters and, perhaps most important of all, the International Cheese Syndicate (InChSyn), an outfit at once menacingly omnipresent and bumbling. It’s true that InChSyn is sometimes pulling the strings, but most of them are made from lo

See Full Page