all news is local

[Erik T. Burns]

Thomas Pynchon's 'Shadow Ticket' a complex view of Milwaukee in 1932
<https://eu.jsonline.com/story/life/2025/10/07/thomas-pynchon-shadow-ticket-a-complex-view-of-milwaukee-in-1932/86497937007/>

Thomas Pynchon's 'Shadow Ticket' offers a complicated view of
Depression-era Milwaukee
------------------------------
Jim Higgins <https://www.jsonline.com/staff/2647460001/jim-higgins/>
Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel

*Wisconsin Book of the Month highlights a book — new, newish or neglected —
by a state writer or on a Milwaukee or Wisconsin subject that Journal
Sentinel book editor Jim Higgins recommends you read this month. This
feature appears in the newspaper the second Sunday of each month and is
usually posted online the preceding Wednesday. Want to suggest a book?
Email jhiggins at journalsentinel.com <jhiggins at journalsentinel.com>.*

Milwaukee references begin flowing on the first page of "Shadow Ticket"
<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316427/shadow-ticket-by-thomas-pynchon/>
(Penguin
Press), the new novel from the famously brilliant and equally famously
privacy-guarding Thomas Pynchon.

The story begins with private investigator Hicks McTaggart on a job in the
Third Ward in 1932, and a passing reference to the late Vito Guardalabene
(1845-1921), widely considered an early crime boss of the city.

But the sign that Pynchon is serious about setting the novel here comes on
Page 2 with these words: "… even at the combination drug and hardware store
plus lunch counter known as Oriental Drugs, heart and soul of the East Side
and Hicks's usual source of reliable lowdown in Milwaukee."

Since the surprise announcement
<https://www.jsonline.com/story/life/2025/04/09/thomas-pynchon-shadow-ticket-milwaukee-setting/83013428007/>
of
the now 88-year-old author's book, I've had to educate and sell some
younger friends and colleagues on who Pynchon is and why he matters. For
literary-minded Boomers like me, Pynchon is the towering postmodernist who
won the National Book Award in 1974 for "Gravity's Rainbow." In college
many of us read "The Crying of Lot 49," the rare early Pynchon novel short
enough to be taught in survey courses.

Fans of "The Simpsons" may remember Pynchon for voicing himself in two
episodes, <https://www.cbr.com/the-simpsons-thomas-pynchon-cameos/> with
his character wearing a paper bag over his head. In the current moment,
reviewers lauding Paul Thomas Anderson's new movie "One Battle After
Another" are reminding people it's directly inspired by Pynchon's novel
"Vineland."

Pynchon for the TL;DR crowd: A torrent of antic narrative hijinks, a
mishmash of high and low culture, conspiracy theories, secret movements,
funny character names and parodic song insertions (he's read many issues of
Mad magazine).

"Shadow Ticket" has all of those ingredients.

McTaggart, a former strikebreaker turned operative for the Unamalgamated
detective agency, is investigating a mysterious explosion that blew up a
hooch wagon (Prohibition is still the law) when he's assigned to find a
cheese heiress, Daphne Airmont, who has run away with a swing musician.
Pynchon's 'Shadow Ticket' is filled with Milwaukee references

The first half of this novel, set in our fair city, frequently reads like
the manic, erudite prose equivalent of Firesign Theatre's "The Further
Adventures of Nick Danger," an affectionate, genre-savvy sendup of private
eye stories. (There are frequent references to a mythical Gumshoe's Manual.)

Period Milwaukee references flow like Korbel brandy on payday: Shorewood,
Ideal Pharmacy, Yankee Hill, Bronzeville, Schuster's, Billie the Brownie,
West Allis, North Division High School, lake effect snow, the Holton Street
Viaduct, the QWERTY typewriter, the young Les Paul, Polish flats, Brewer's
Hill.

Comically, there's a Don DeLillo-style mention of a Department of Cheese
Studies at the University of Wisconsin branch in Sheboygan.

When McTaggart is handed a suspicious package, he knows where to take it
for a peek inside. Milwaukee is "also the birthplace of the shoe-store
X-ray machine," the novel's omniscient narrator notes. The machines were
real.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20081217103205/http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/shoefittingfluor/shoe.htm>
Multiple
claimants asserted inventing or developing shoe-fitting fluoroscopes in
Milwaukee.

The explosion and McTaggart's past bring in serious references to the 1917
Milwaukee police station bombing,
<https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2017/11/22/1917-milwaukee-bombing-worst-loss-police-life-until-9-11/886589001/>
the
largest loss of American police life in a single event until the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks; and the Rolling Mills Massacre in Bay View in 1886.

Pynchon also includes a scene where a runaway is aided by friends living on
a "secret" Ojibwe reservation up the Lake Michigan coast from Milwaukee.
This might be a case of Pynchon writing into his fiction a popular rumor of
the time.

In a startling passage, McTaggart's Uncle Lefty quotes the Milwaukee
Journal calling Adolf Hitler "that intelligent young German Fascist." A
version of this quote actually appeared in the Dec. 8, 1931, Milwaukee
Sentinel, in a column by well-known editor and wheeler-dealer Arthur
Brisbane, who referred to Hitler as "the intelligent young German Fascist."
Brisbane had some Milwaukee history. He bought a Milwaukee newspaper called
the Evening Wisconsin in 1918, then flipped it to compadre William Randolph
Hearst in 1919. (Hearst bought the Sentinel in 1924 and merged the other
paper into it.) But this 1931 comment seems to be part of a syndicated
column of observations by Brisbane.

This quotation is no throwaway; it may help a reader understand one of the
reasons Pynchon chose Milwaukee as a setting. Another early passage states,
"This being Wisconsin, where you find more varieties of social thought than
Heinz has pickles." It would have been easy to find both socialists and
fascist sympathizers in Milwaukee in the early 1930s.

In the weirder, darker back half of the novel, McTaggart — still nominally
in pursuit of the cheese heiress — is dragged off to Europe, where he gets
mixed up with government agencies, spies, fascists, con men and weird
mystics. He lands in Fiume, a battered remnant of the Austro-Hungarian
empire, cheekily described as "the Milwaukee of the Adriatic," for the
denouement.

Pynchonian weirdness continues: there's discussion of an international fake
cheese conspiracy, and of obsessed collectors sexually attracted to lamps.
But it's not all fun and games. "This is the year when it all begins to
come apart … a violent collapse of civil order," a character tells
McTaggart. A fascism is growing that cares nothing for the frequently
redrawn borders of states.

It would be reductive to say that "Shadow Ticket" either is or isn't a
comment on the power grabs of our time. Pynchon has always written about
fascism, conspiracy theories and anarchy. But it is not hard to find
resonance with the present.

If you've never read Pynchon, would you enjoy this book? Do you enjoy
listening to a Robin Williams monologue? His narration comes at you with
that kind of speed of thought and play. If you'd like to see what
Depression-era Milwaukee looked like to a great 20th-century American
writer, give it a try.