Shadow Ticket reviewed in the New Yorker

[David Elliott]

 Reading the New Pynchon Novel in aPynchonesque America
“Shadow Ticket,”Pynchon’s first book in a dozen years, unfolds its conspiracies inDepression-era Milwaukee and beyond, but it lands in a moment when realityseems to have caught up with his fictions.

By Kathryn Schulz

September 22, 2025



>From Prohibition-eraMilwaukee to the Carpathians, “Shadow Ticket” features nefarious cheesemerchants, a missing heiress, a misplaced U-boat, clarinetists, motorcyclists,and schemes within schemes—along with a hardboiled detective trying to keep up.Illustration by BillBragg

America, circa now. Things, most of which havebeen weird for a while, are getting distinctly weirder. The President of theUnited States is busy redecorating the White House and bent on buyingGreenland. A new wonder drug is making people skinny. Domestic affairs areincreasingly controlled by an upstart political entity whose official status ismurky but whose powers are all but limitless: DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, which wasstarted by a multibillionaire with a sideline in unusual forms oftransportation—rocket ships, Cybertrucks, Hyperloops—and named for an internetmeme featuring the Comic Sans typeface and a Shiba Inu. Tens of millions ofpeople, followers of a mysterious figure known only by the letter “Q,” believethat many of the nation’s leaders are involved in a globalchild-sex-trafficking ring that will one day be crushed in an all-encompassing,all-cleansing event called The Event.

Talking dogs, strangevehicles, conspiracy theories, stupid acronyms: life imitates cult fiction,apparently, and somewhere along the line our reality started to resemble, withuncanny specificity, the collected works of Thomas Pynchon. This is not a welcomedevelopment, as even his greatest fans would affirm. For sixty-twoyears—beginning in 1963, with the publication of “V.,” and picking up momentumten years later, with “Gravity’s Rainbow”—the author has been offering upworlds that seem much like our own except weirder and more lawless, withrespect to both criminal activity and physics. The ambient atmosphere inPynchon’s fiction is one of secrecy and bamboozlement, the purported stakes aregenerally sky-high but silly, like an armed game of Go Fish, and thepossibility of violence on an epic scale is often rocketing, sometimes in theWernher von Braun sense, directly toward you. Opinions vary on the merits andpleasures of these books, but no one, it seems safe to say, has ever yearned tolive in the worlds they depict.

Yet here we are—and herecomes “Shadow Ticket” (Penguin Press), the first new work by Pynchon in a dozenyears. Although the author is eighty-eight years old, his intellect, at leaston the evidence of this book, remains undiminished, which is to say, it isstill panoptic, exciting, abstruse, distractible, and, for good or ill,unrestrained. But, if his powers are not dulled, neither are they pointed; evenif you squint, it’s difficult to determine whether “Shadow Ticket” is acommentary on our current era—or, anyway, more of a commentary than, say,“Gravity’s Rainbow,” which was published half a century ago.



This will disappoint anyfans who were hoping for a rousing Pynchon riposte to our depressinglyPynchonesque era, but it’s hardly a problem. Literature has no obligation to beresponsive to the times; indeed, at its best it often isn’t, which is why “timeless”is such lofty, if hackneyed, praise. But it does raise a question. If ourreigning artist of paranoid convictions, of high crimes and deep states, of thepeculiar combination of depravity and absurdity found in those who lust forpower—if that guy hasn’t made use of the present political moment to craft asatire or a survival manual or a swan song or even an “I told you so,” thenwhat has he come here, after a long silence and in all likelihood for the lasttime, to tell us?

“Shadow Ticket” is setin 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression and during the waning days ofProhibition, though no one in the book seems particularly hard up for money orbooze. The first half takes place in Milwaukee, where unofficial power is dividedbetween the Italian Mafia, spilling over from nearby Chicago, and the city’slong-standing German population, large swaths of which are falling under thespell of that ascendant political figure back in the home country, AdolfHitler.

Our hero, however, isloyal to neither group, a fact that might be inferred from his name, HicksMcTaggart. Like Doc Sportello, in “Inherent Vice,” and Lew Basnight in “Againstthe Day” (who, aging but unreconstructed, makes an appearance in this new book),Hicks is that classic staple of fiction, a hardboiled detective with a softerside. A former union buster who took the “busting” part literally enough tomake a lot of labor activists bleed, he is so reformed by the time we meet himthat he’s vaguely Buddhist, and practically a family man: he has a girlfriendof sorts, a lounge singer named April Randazzo—the two met because Hicks,despite his slab-of-beef self-presentation, is a first-class swing dancer—and asidekick who doubles as a surrogate son, a sweet-tempered juvenile delinquentnamed Skeet Wheeler. He also has a steady job, working for a detective agencycalled Unamalgamated Ops, where—see again that soft spot—he generally takes onthe kind of two-bit clients whose desperation is inversely proportional totheir ability to pay for his services.

This is a source ofannoyance to Hicks’s boss, who wants to assign him to a different kind ofcase—or, as it’s known in the business, a ticket, so called for the paperworkthat comes with accepting a job. This one involves the disappearance of thesemi-scandalous young heiress Daphne Airmont, who’s the daughter of BrunoAirmont, a dairy tycoon—we’re in Wisconsin, remember?—so ruthless and feloniousthat he is known as the Al Capone of Cheese. Bruno himself is preëxistinglymissing, having vanished some years earlier, when things started gettinguncomfortably hot in the cheese underworld. Now Daphne, unhappily affianced,has run off with one Hop Wingdale, a clarinet player for a band called theKlezmopolitans, and her mother and her would-be future husband have engagedUnamalgamated Ops to bring her home.

Advertisement

That’s plenty of lift to get a story off theground—but this is a Pynchon novel, so why have one reason a hero must go on ajourney when you could have four? Elsewhere in Milwaukee, someone has blown upa truck belonging to a small-time booze runner, and Hicks learns that the copsplan to pin the job on him. Not long after, he discovers that April istwo-timing him with a local mafioso named Don Peppino Infernacci, who is notthe type to deal honorably with a romantic rival. Meanwhile, some F.B.I. agents,having concluded that Hicks is neither a Bolshevik nor a Nazi, want to hire himto serve his country, by which they might mean fighting Hitler but might alsomean sabotaging the political career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, plus anyoneelse “to the left of Herbert Hoover.” Should he not want the job, theypleasantly inform him, the Bureau will happily make room for him at a federalpenitentiary down in Georgia.

What Hicks longs to do,in the face of these multidirectional threats to life and liberty, is persuadeApril to run away with him, hitchhiking from Wisconsin to who knows where, likea pair of Depression-era hoboes, out of range of anyone who wishes them ill.Instead, he reluctantly agrees to go to New York to look for Daphne, figuring ashort spell out of town will cool things off. Alas, by then the cheese heiresshas skipped the country, and one Mickey Finn later our gumshoe comes toconsciousness aboard an eastbound ship on the Atlantic. Soon, we have swappedMilwaukee for the shattered fragments of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire,from Budapest clear out to the Carpathians, as Hicks’s pursuit of Daphne slowlyturns into something else: the shadow ticket of the title, a search for otherthings and people, one of them, two of them, six million of them, who have gonemissing, or soon will.

It goes without sayingthat I am leaving out almost everything. As anyone who has ever written aboutPynchon knows, his books are all but impossible to summarize, partly becauseplot, per se, seldom seems like the point and partly because of the sheer quantityof stuff going on, even in a relatively compact book like “Shadow Ticket,”which is considerably shorter than its predecessors except “The Crying of Lot49.” Pynchon is sometimes compared to Melville, for his ambition andmaximalism, and to Nabokov, for his love of wordplay and artifice, but hisclosest artistic kin is Hieronymus Bosch, and each of his novels is a kind of“Garden of Earthly Delights”: crammed full of figures both realistic andfantastical, many of them engaged in morally compromising behavior, all of thempresumably serving some overarching but endlessly debatable organizingprinciple. For readers, much of the aesthetic experience of engaging witheither artist involves simply attending to this profusion of details, theinfinitely diverse offspring of technical excellence and an inexhaustibleimagination.

 

Consider the characterof Thessalie Wayward, a successful stage mentalist until the Depression and thetalkies killed off vaudeville. Now she’s working as a secretary atUnamalgamated Ops and, off the books, for the Milwaukee police, whose officersturn to her when they fail to solve their cases by more conventional means. Herarea of expertise is “ass and app”—that is, asporting and apporting, the suddendisappearance or appearance of objects seemingly from thin air, as she explainsto Hicks at a lunch meeting during which she never cedes the upper hand.Although Thessalie herself basically vanishes after this four-page scene, itwould be churlish to suggest that she’s superfluous, not because she paves afew linear feet of plot (Budapest turns out to be ass-and-app central) butbecause, like Bosch’s ice-skating platypus, she’s one of a kind and wonderfullydrawn.

These lavishly createdminiatures take every possible form: characters, plot devices, props, settings,scenes. There is a bar in Budapest whose variously bizarre and thuggishclientele calls to mind the “Star Wars” cantina. There is a First World War U-boatthat somehow glides from underneath Lake Michigan all the way to Croatia,commandeered by its captain, post-Armistice, for new and clandestine uses. Icould go on; Pynchon does, with unstoppable and quasi-manic energy. At onepoint, inside the diner where Hicks and Thessalie meet up, we see “lunch dramaspassing like storm fronts, pies in glass cases slowly losing their a.m. allure, grill artists takingcare of various counterside chores while whatever they’re flipping is in midairrotating end over end”—that’s the author, of course, staging a sly cameo forhimself, confident that he can do ten things at once and still catch theomelette on its way down.



“I’m not an extrovert,I’m just an introvert who can’t stand being alone with her thoughts.”

Cartoonby Emily Flake

And, sometimes, he can.The first page of “Shadow Ticket” is a master class in skills many writerswon’t master in a lifetime: tone, rhythm, pacing, how to establish a character,how to prime a narrative engine, how to convince your reader in six paragraphsor fewer that you know what you’re doing. Much of the rest of the book ispropelled forward, or whichever direction it’s going, by long stretches offast-paced dialogue, and Pynchon’s ear for the way people actually speak isunerring. (“Whole different tax bracket up there in Shorewood, you people,ain’t it.”) His comedic sense is considerably more fallible—“Shadow Ticket” isnot the first of his novels with a sophomoric smegma joke—but, when it lands,it lands. One character has a pig for a spirit animal. Another describes theport city now known as Rijeka as “the Milwaukee of the Adriatic.” The Al Caponeof Cheese, meeting the real Al Capone, asks, “And what is it you’re theAl Capone of again?”

Advertisement

As for pace, “Shadow Ticket” reads like one ofits subplots, about the Trans-Trianon 2000, a two-thousand-kilometre motorcyclecircuit through the disputed territories of Central Europe, all speed andvroom. Uncharacteristically for Pynchon, the book never eddies off to exploresome branch of science or mathematics or philosophy, and the moments when itslows down enough to let the reader actually look around are few and farbetween—a pity, because, when he wants to, Pynchon is wonderful at showing us theworld. Here is a Nazi front disguised as a bowling alley, in the outer reachesof Milwaukee, the wintry Wisconsin night lit up for miles by the sign outside:“four or five different colors from deep violet to blood orange, bowling ballsflickering left to right, pins scattering, reassembling, again and again,silently except for an electrical drone fading up slowly louder the closer youget to it.”

For the duration of thatsentence, Pynchon is less Bosch than Edward Hopper, making us feel this sceneby making us see it: the night and the neon, the gust of loneliness, thedangerous electric edge. On the whole, though, the author is not in the businessof making anyone feel things. (The shining exception to this rule is “Mason& Dixon,” the only one of his novels that is not merely brilliant but alsocharacter-driven, thematically lucid, and profoundly moving.) His customarygenre is farce—the rest of his characters are subordinate to the absurdsituations they find themselves in—and his customary mode is that of the comicbook, full color but two-dimensional. At one point, someone hands Hicks a livebomb on the streets of Milwaukee, which he barely manages to chuck into afishing hole on iced-over Lake Michigan before it goes kaboom; later, a pair ofspies escape a near-assassination in Transylvania by climbing the mooring linesof a departing zeppelin. In both cases, you can practically see the Benday dotsand speech balloons. And the emotional register of the book stays mostly withinthe realm of the comic book, too: the good guys are good-guy-proofed againstmortal danger; the bad guys are sinister but not frightening. Even the literalNazis are never chilling, though they are sometimes chillin’. (Over beer andbratwurst: “We’re National Socialists, ain’t it? So—we’re socializing. Try it,you might have fun.”)

For a while, all this isperfectly enjoyable—Elmore Leonard meets Stan Lee, a kind of Technicolor noir.But, the further into “Shadow Ticket” you get, the more it starts to suffer, asmany of Pynchon’s later novels do, from the presence of its predecessors.Consider the cheese underworld, a sphere of criminality so consummatelyPynchonesque that it reads like self-parody. In who else’s fiction would youfind price-fixing on the Wisconsin Cheese Exchange, bandits invading creameriesup and down America’s Cheese Corridor, innumerable nefarious purveyors ofcounterfeit Emmental and Gruyère?

More important: What isall this doing in this work of fiction? From the beginning,Pynchon has put his readers in the position of his characters, encouraging usto see hidden significance and obscure connections within (and, later, among)his books, and as a result to grow steadily more paranoid with each passingpage. Surely, we’re supposed to think, this cheese business must meansomething—maybe even, as Pynchon teases, “something more geopolitical, somegrand face-off between the cheese-based or colonialist powers, basicallynorthwest Europe, and the vast teeming cheeselessness of Asia.” Or maybePynchon, who nearly killed off one of the title characters of “Mason &Dixon” with a giant wheel of Gloucester, is what you might call lactoseintolerant. Or maybe he just thought it would be funny to write about the bigcheese of Big Cheese.

Your appetite mightdiffer, but for me, nine novels in, all this code-cracking and jigsaw-puzzlingis no longer thrilling. The same goes for the other bells and whistles ofPynchon’s style; even a seventy-million-trick pony is still a trick pony, andmuch of what once seemed clever in his canon now seems tiresome. You will find,in “Shadow Ticket,” countless texts within the text, including the usual LP’sworth of songs—“Midnight in Milwaukee,” “Bye-Bye to Budapest.” (“Boo, hoo,hooo-dapest,” the singer croons.) You will find golems. You will find ghosts.You will find, if you bother to investigate, real-life oddities poached fromthe past because they come across like pure Pynchon invention—among them ClaraRockmore, a famous theremin player (Pynchon presumably appreciates her name),and a shoe-store X-ray machine for superior fittings, which not only reallyexisted but really was produced by a Milwaukee company. You will find theaforementioned weird forms of transportation: that appropriated U-boat, an autogiro,an enormous motorcycle built to accommodate three German sleight-of-handartists—Schnucki, Dieter, and Heinz, who collectively sound like a Minnesotapersonal-injury firm. And you will find, inevitably, characters with strangernames: Dr. Swampscott Vobe, Assistant Special Agent in Charge T. P. O’Grizbee,the noted illusionist or possibly genuine article Zoltán von Kiss. (As for ournomenclaturally modest hero, Hicks McTaggart, he is presumably named forJ. M. E. McTaggart, an influential British philosopher who espousedthe quasi-Pynchonesque beliefs that time is an illusion and that the humansoul, connected to others of its kind by love, is the fundamental unit ofreality.)

This one-man-band blarenever quiets, but the music darkens considerably toward the end of “ShadowTicket.” Jew hatred spreads and intensifies, Europe becomes a place to flee,and unrest over the price of milk in the United States results in a coup in whichF.D.R. is toppled and General Douglas MacArthur seizes power. Stuck in exile,Hicks takes up with a motorcycle-riding Hungarian hottie but longs forMilwaukee, where the air smells like grilled bratwurst and sounds likeaccordion lessons and life “seldom gets more serious than somebody stolesomebody’s fish.”

By then, I longed forMilwaukee, too—for the antic early pages of “Shadow Ticket,” when somethingcoherent seemed to be forming beneath the fun. Instead, we get a darkness thatis not just moral but epistemological. A suicide in a Budapest bathroom, a secretcommunity of people sexually attracted to tasteless lamps, a movie plotentirely about violence and overeating: this stuff isn’t Bosch; it’sbosh—absurdity for absurdity’s sake, with no discernible aesthetic orintellectual purpose.

Advertisement

Patches of unintelligibility are nothing new inPynchon, but usually a coherent world view gleams upward from the murk. Modernlife, in his grim estimation, is entirely controlled by capitalism andtechnology, forces relentlessly destructive to the human soul. Those whoperceive this total control are prone to paranoia, leaving them mistrustful andlonely, while those who seek to profit from it are dragged into depravity. Youcan’t beat this system and you shouldn’t join it, so the only option is to somehowduck out of its range. That’s why Pynchon is drawn to drifters and dropouts, toborderlands and hidden worlds, like the Zone in “Gravity’s Rainbow,” and theinterior of the hollow earth in “Mason & Dixon” and “Against the Day.”

You can see the outlinesof this world view in “Shadow Ticket,” where capitalism Got Milk, the cheese isradioactive (really), and fugitives retreat to strange pockets of freedom,including a secret Indian reservation (“mentioned only once in a rider in aphantom treaty”) and that rogue U-boat (“an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascistspace-time”). But the grab bag of parts—cheese barons, Nazis—never comestogether, and the old obsessions never acquire new force. In Pynchon’s bestworks, his bleakness is brightened, in both senses—illuminated and madelighter—by the sweep of his vision and his affection for his fallible,foolhardy, well-meaning, wildly outmatched main characters. One finishes thosebooks unclear on the particulars but certain that this whole wild world wasbuilt to teach us something, which is pretty much the human condition.

No such experienceattends the completion of “Shadow Ticket.” The book ends with a letter fromSkeet Wheeler, that bit player last seen a hundred and seventy-five pages ago,who writes to his former mentor to say that he’s setting off to ride the railswestward with his sweetheart, as Hicks had once longed to leave town withApril. The revolt that reconfigured America goes unmentioned. If Skeet cares,he doesn’t let on; he’s just looking forward to catching the next train.

Is this act of ridingoff into the sunset ironic, a comment, as with “Mason & Dixon,” on theevils committed in America by the allure of westward expansion? Or is it whatHicks should have done many plot twists ago—escape the forces scheming to controlhim by running away with the woman he loves? Or is it just Pynchon turningaround in the saddle to wave farewell? Who knows. The ticket, the shadowticket, “Shadow Ticket”: all these remain unresolved, leaving us with theenduring hope of the Pynchon universe, that everything in it means something.At some point, though, meaning that is sufficiently cryptic becomesindistinguishable from no meaning at all. ♦

Published in the print edition of the September29, 2025, issue, with the headline “No Way Out.”

 


    On Monday, September 22, 2025 at 12:07:10 PM EDT, Mike Weaver via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:  
 
 Only available to subscribers. Do tell what she thinks.

cheers

mike

On 22/09/2025 15:49, Erik T. Burns wrote:
> Reading the New Pynchon Novel in a Pynchonesque America | The New Yorker
> <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/29/shadow-ticket-thomas-pynchon-book-review>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
--
Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l