Books
Thomas Pynchon
Shadow Ticket
Consider Pynchon’s titles: The Crying of Lot 49? Not really about crying (auctioneering) but about trying to sell oneself on the idea of an orderly universe. Vineland sent vicious growths around the remains of Reagan’s America. Gravity’s Rainbow is queer enough, sure, but it’s less kaleidoscopic systems, more physics as Faustian pact, the enlightened world as irretrievably fallen. Against the Day? A warning to the reader about what you’d need to do with your calendar in order to complete it, perhaps.
At the dark, Depression-era heart of Shadow Ticket, his ninth novel, we have Hicks, a Milwaukee private detective and former industrial goon squad operative. Once accustomed to breaking strikes and enabling business as usual, the gumshoe is tasked by Wisconsin cheese tycoon Bruno Airmont with recovering his daughter, a runaway heiress, lest she end up becoming a “darling of the scandal sheets”. Syndicates of shadowy string-pullers converge as Hicks eventually ends up travelling the former Austro–Hungarian empire, encountering along the way supernatural phenomena, anti-Semitic biker gangs, Bolshevik dairy farmers and the rise of Nazism.
A private dick gone sleuthing is the kind of set-up Pynchon relishes. Shadow Ticket serves up goofy songs, adverbs unmoored from actions, non sequiturs, gee-whiz comic book pacing, occasional moments of impenetrability. There is, too, some of the colour of Pynchon’s third novel, Gravity’s Rainbow. Here, there is patois aplenty: goombahs and tomatoes, copacetic dummkopfs keeping shtum and stumblebums.
Shadow Ticket is dialogue-heavy, its narrative voice talky, boppy. Chapters open with what amount almost to stage directions, the scene setting efficient and angular. Yet too often Pynchon cuts from any sustained depiction of human affect, like a puritan backing away from a porn convention. His mode is vaudeville. You could also add: farce, burlesque, theatrics.
Given this may be his last novel, Shadow Ticket has a lot riding on it. If Pynchon is offering a commentary on contemporary America and/or contemporary American fascism, it’s a loaded one. When Hicks longs for Milwaukee as a place of normalcy in “a country not yet gone Fascist”, of “clarity … still snoozy and safe”, the sense of longing for lost normalcy here could equally imply a complacent acceptance of the virtues of sleepwalking.
The sherbet-coloured qualities of Pynchon’s writing, the cartoonish and frequent resort to frat boy picaresque and facetiousness, undermine some of the moments in the book when things slow down and Pynchon sits with the passage of time, attending to ordinary details without all of the maximalism and flashing lights. They were few – and mostly in the final quarter – yet they were moments I cherished. You punch your ticket, you get to ride. Best enjoy it.
Jonathan Cape, 304pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 1, 2025 as "Shadow Ticket".
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