His loose-limbed, jazzy, eggs-over-easy rhythms, a cocktail of Chandler, Twain and the Wizard of Oz, goes on slipping down a treat.

The good news about Thomas Pynchon’s new book, Shadow Ticket, is that at a mere 300-odd pages – his shortest by some measure – it can be held without discomfort by ordinary human hands. Literature graduates of a certain age might recall having to read the science-laden Gravity’s Rainbow at the speed of light even as gravity threatened to drag the novel from their grasp. And that book’s 760 pages were later topped by Mason and Dixon’s 773 pages, and were as nothing next to Against the  Day’s 1,085. (Before the Pynchon pedants revolt, he has always insisted that the admirably brief The Crying of Lot 49 – a snip at 183 pages – was a novella.)

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