Dwight Garner at the New York Times:
It’s not as if Thomas Pynchon has never written about cheese before. In his first novel, “V.” (1963), there’s an artist named Slab — he’s a “catatonic expressionist” — who obsessively paints cheese Danishes in various styles: Cubist, Fauvist, Surrealist, etc. In Pynchon’s second book, “The Crying of Lot 49” (1966), a woman named Oedipa Maas returns home from a Tupperware party suspecting her hostess had put “too much kirsch in the fondue.”
Little in Pynchon’s oeuvre, however, prepares the reader for “Shadow Ticket,” his first novel in 12 years and possibly (he is 88) his last. Alongside Émile Zola’s “The Belly of Paris,” it is perhaps Western literature’s Great Cheese Novel. (Though Pynchon often spells it “cheez.”) It’s as if he’s out to make America grate again.
Whereas Zola sang of Brie “like melancholy extinct moons” and compared a round of Gruyere to “a wheel fallen from some barbarian chariot,” Pynchon finds in the industrial production of curds and whey enough paranoia, satirical and otherwise, to power a midsize city, perhaps one in Wisconsin.
more here.
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