Shadow Ticket reviewed in the New Yorker

[Mike Weaver]

Well that sounds scrumptious - it'll be the aftertaste we'll be discussing.

On 22/09/2025 17:17, David Elliott wrote:
> Reading the New Pynchon Novel in a Pynchonesque America
>
> /“Shadow Ticket,” Pynchon’s first book in a dozen years, unfolds its 
> conspiracies in Depression-era Milwaukee and beyond, but it lands in a 
> moment when reality seems to have caught up with his fictions./
>
> *By Kathryn Schulz 
> <https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/kathryn-schulz>*
>
> September 22, 2025
>
> A silhouette of a man in a hat made out of old photographs
>
> From Prohibition-era Milwaukee to the Carpathians, “Shadow Ticket” 
> features nefarious cheese merchants, a missing heiress, a misplaced 
> U-boat, clarinetists, motorcyclists, and schemes within schemes—along 
> with a hardboiled detective trying to keep up.Illustration by Bill Bragg
>
> America, circa now. Things, most of which have been weird for a while, 
> are getting distinctly weirder. The President of the United States is 
> busy redecorating the White House and bent on buying Greenland. A new 
> wonder drug is making people skinny. Domestic affairs are increasingly 
> controlled by an upstart political entity whose official status is 
> murky but whose powers are all but limitless: DOGE, or the Department 
> of Government Efficiency, which was started by a multibillionaire with 
> a sideline in unusual forms of transportation—rocket ships, 
> Cybertrucks, Hyperloops—and named for an internet meme featuring the 
> Comic Sans typeface and a Shiba Inu. Tens of millions of people, 
> followers of a mysterious figure known only by the letter “Q,” believe 
> that many of the nation’s leaders are involved in a global 
> child-sex-trafficking ring that will one day be crushed in an 
> all-encompassing, all-cleansing event called The Event.
>
> Talking dogs, strange vehicles, conspiracy theories, stupid acronyms: 
> life imitates cult fiction, apparently, and somewhere along the line 
> our reality started to resemble, with uncanny specificity, the 
> collected works of Thomas Pynchon. This is not a welcome development, 
> as even his greatest fans would affirm. For sixty-two years—beginning 
> in 1963, with the publication of “V.,” and picking up momentum ten 
> years later, with “Gravity’s Rainbow”—the author has been offering up 
> worlds that seem much like our own except weirder and more lawless, 
> with respect to both criminal activity and physics. The ambient 
> atmosphere in Pynchon’s fiction is one of secrecy and bamboozlement, 
> the purported stakes are generally sky-high but silly, like an armed 
> game of Go Fish, and the possibility of violence on an epic scale is 
> often rocketing, sometimes in the Wernher von Braun sense, directly 
> toward you. Opinions vary on the merits and pleasures of these books, 
> but no one, it seems safe to say, has ever yearned to live in the 
> worlds they depict.
>
> Yet here we are—and here comes “Shadow Ticket” (Penguin Press), the 
> first new work by Pynchon in a dozen years. Although the author is 
> eighty-eight years old, his intellect, at least on the evidence of 
> this book, remains undiminished, which is to say, it is still 
> panoptic, exciting, abstruse, distractible, and, for good or ill, 
> unrestrained. But, if his powers are not dulled, neither are they 
> pointed; even if you squint, it’s difficult to determine whether 
> “Shadow Ticket” is a commentary on our current era—or, anyway, more of 
> a commentary than, say, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” which was published half 
> a century ago.
>
> <https://www.newyorker.com/best-books-2025>
>
> This will disappoint any fans who were hoping for a rousing Pynchon 
> riposte to our depressingly Pynchonesque era, but it’s hardly a 
> problem. Literature has no obligation to be responsive 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 our 
> reigning artist of paranoid convictions, of high crimes and deep 
> states, of the peculiar combination of depravity and absurdity found 
> in those who lust for power—if that guy hasn’t made use of the present 
> political moment to craft a satire or a survival manual or a swan song 
> or even an “I told you so,” then what has he come here, after a long 
> silence and in all likelihood for the last time, to tell us?
>
> “Shadow Ticket” is set in 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression 
> and during the waning days of Prohibition, though no one in the book 
> seems particularly hard up for money or booze. The first half takes 
> place in Milwaukee, where unofficial power is divided between the 
> Italian Mafia, spilling over from nearby Chicago, and the city’s 
> long-standing German population, large swaths of which are falling 
> under the spell of that ascendant political figure back in the home 
> country, Adolf Hitler.
>
> Our hero, however, is loyal to neither group, a fact that might be 
> inferred from his name, Hicks McTaggart. Like Doc Sportello, in 
> “Inherent Vice,” and Lew Basnight in “Against the Day” (who, aging but 
> unreconstructed, makes an appearance in this new book), Hicks is that 
> classic staple of fiction, a hardboiled detective with a softer side. 
> A former union buster who took the “busting” part literally enough to 
> make a lot of labor activists bleed, he is so reformed by the time we 
> meet him that he’s vaguely Buddhist, and practically a family man: he 
> has a girlfriend of 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 a sidekick who doubles as a surrogate 
> son, a sweet-tempered juvenile delinquent named Skeet Wheeler. He also 
> has a steady job, working for a detective agency called Unamalgamated 
> Ops, where—see again that soft spot—he generally takes on the kind of 
> two-bit clients whose desperation is inversely proportional to their 
> ability to pay for his services.
>
> This is a source of annoyance to Hicks’s boss, who wants to assign him 
> to a different kind of case—or, as it’s known in the business, a 
> ticket, so called for the paperwork that comes with accepting a job. 
> This one involves the disappearance of the semi-scandalous young 
> heiress Daphne Airmont, who’s the daughter of Bruno Airmont, a dairy 
> tycoon—we’re in Wisconsin, remember?—so ruthless and felonious that he 
> is known as the Al Capone of Cheese. Bruno himself is preëxistingly 
> missing, having vanished some years earlier, when things started 
> getting uncomfortably hot in the cheese underworld. Now Daphne, 
> unhappily affianced, has run off with one Hop Wingdale, a clarinet 
> player for a band called the Klezmopolitans, and her mother and her 
> would-be future husband have engaged Unamalgamated Ops to bring her home.
>
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>
> That’s plenty of lift to get a story off the ground—but this is a 
> Pynchon novel, so why have one reason a hero must go on a journey when 
> you could have four? Elsewhere in Milwaukee, someone has blown up a 
> truck belonging to a small-time booze runner, and Hicks learns that 
> the cops plan to pin the job on him. Not long after, he discovers that 
> April is two-timing him with a local mafioso named Don Peppino 
> Infernacci, who is not the 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 him to serve his country, 
> by which they might mean fighting Hitler but might also mean 
> sabotaging the political career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, plus 
> anyone else “to the left of Herbert Hoover.” Should he not want the 
> job, they pleasantly inform him, the Bureau will happily make room for 
> him at a federal penitentiary down in Georgia.
>
> What Hicks longs to do, in the face of these multidirectional threats 
> to life and liberty, is persuade April to run away with him, 
> hitchhiking from Wisconsin to who knows where, like a 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 a short spell out of town will cool things off. Alas, by then 
> the cheese heiress has skipped the country, and one Mickey Finn later 
> our gumshoe comes to consciousness aboard an eastbound ship on the 
> Atlantic. Soon, we have swapped Milwaukee for the shattered fragments 
> of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, from Budapest clear out to the 
> Carpathians, as Hicks’s pursuit of Daphne slowly turns into something 
> else: the shadow ticket of the title, a search for other things and 
> people, one of them, two of them, six million of them, who have gone 
> missing, or soon will.
>
> It goes without saying that I am leaving out almost everything. As 
> anyone who has ever written about Pynchon knows, his books are all but 
> impossible to summarize, partly because plot, per se, seldom seems 
> like the point and partly because of the sheer quantity of stuff going 
> on, even in a relatively compact book like “Shadow Ticket,” which is 
> considerably shorter than its predecessors except “The Crying of Lot 
> 49.” Pynchon is sometimes compared to Melville, for his ambition and 
> maximalism, and to Nabokov, for his love of wordplay and artifice, but 
> his closest artistic kin is Hieronymus Bosch, and each of his novels 
> is a kind of “Garden of Earthly Delights”: crammed full of figures 
> both realistic and fantastical, many of them engaged in morally 
> compromising behavior, all of them presumably serving some overarching 
> but endlessly debatable organizing principle. For readers, much of the 
> aesthetic experience of engaging with either artist involves simply 
> attending to this profusion of details, the infinitely diverse 
> offspring of technical excellence and an inexhaustible imagination.
>
> Consider the character of Thessalie Wayward, a successful stage 
> mentalist until the Depression and the talkies killed off vaudeville. 
> Now she’s working as a secretary at Unamalgamated Ops and, off the 
> books, for the Milwaukee police, whose officers turn to her when they 
> fail to solve their cases by more conventional means. Her area of 
> expertise is “ass and app”—that is, asporting and apporting, the 
> sudden disappearance or appearance of objects seemingly from thin air, 
> as she explains to Hicks at a lunch meeting during which she never 
> cedes the upper hand. Although Thessalie herself basically vanishes 
> after this four-page scene, it would be churlish to suggest that she’s 
> superfluous, not because she paves a few linear feet of plot (Budapest 
> turns out to be ass-and-app central) but because, like Bosch’s 
> ice-skating platypus, she’s one of a kind and wonderfully drawn.
>
> These lavishly created miniatures take every possible form: 
> characters, plot devices, props, settings, scenes. There is a bar in 
> Budapest whose variously bizarre and thuggish clientele calls to mind 
> the “Star Wars” cantina. There is a First World War U-boat that 
> somehow glides from underneath Lake Michigan all the way to Croatia, 
> commandeered by its captain, post-Armistice, for new and clandestine 
> uses. I could go on; Pynchon does, with unstoppable and quasi-manic 
> energy. At one point, inside the diner where Hicks and Thessalie meet 
> up, we see “lunch dramas passing like storm fronts, pies in glass 
> cases slowly losing their a.m. allure, grill artists taking care of 
> various counterside chores while whatever they’re flipping is in 
> midair rotating end over end”—that’s the author, of course, staging a 
> sly cameo for himself, confident that he can do ten things at once and 
> still catch the omelette on its way down.
>
> Two women talking at a party. <https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a60805>
>
> /“I’m not an extrovert, I’m just an introvert who can’t stand being 
> alone with her thoughts.”/
>
> Cartoon by Emily Flake
>
> And, sometimes, he can. The first page of “Shadow Ticket” is a master 
> class in skills many writers won’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 paragraphs or fewer that you know 
> what you’re doing. Much of the rest of the book is propelled forward, 
> or whichever direction it’s going, by long stretches of fast-paced 
> dialogue, and Pynchon’s ear for the way people actually speak is 
> unerring. (“Whole different tax bracket up there in Shorewood, you 
> people, ain’t it.”) His comedic sense is considerably more 
> fallible—“Shadow Ticket” is not 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 the port city now known 
> as Rijeka as “the Milwaukee of the Adriatic.” The Al Capone of Cheese, 
> meeting the real Al Capone, asks, “And what is it /you’re/ the Al 
> Capone of again?”
>
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>
> As for pace, “Shadow Ticket” reads like one of its subplots, about the 
> Trans-Trianon 2000, a two-thousand-kilometre motorcycle circuit 
> through the disputed territories of Central Europe, all speed and 
> vroom. Uncharacteristically for Pynchon, the book never eddies off to 
> explore some branch of science or mathematics or philosophy, and the 
> moments when it slows down enough to let the reader actually look 
> around are few and far between—a pity, because, when he wants to, 
> Pynchon is wonderful at showing us the world. Here is a Nazi front 
> disguised as a bowling alley, in the outer reaches of 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 balls 
> flickering left to right, pins scattering, reassembling, again and 
> again, silently except for an electrical drone fading up slowly louder 
> the closer you get to it.”
>
> For the duration of that sentence, Pynchon is less Bosch than Edward 
> Hopper, making us feel this scene by making us see it: the night and 
> the neon, the gust of loneliness, the dangerous electric edge. On the 
> whole, though, the author is not in the business of 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 also 
> character-driven, thematically lucid, and profoundly moving.) His 
> customary genre is farce—the rest of his characters are subordinate to 
> the absurd situations they find themselves in—and his customary mode 
> is that of the comic book, full color but two-dimensional. At one 
> point, someone hands Hicks a live bomb on the streets of Milwaukee, 
> which he barely manages to chuck into a fishing hole on iced-over Lake 
> Michigan before it goes kaboom; later, a pair of spies escape a 
> near-assassination in Transylvania by climbing the mooring lines of a 
> departing zeppelin. In both cases, you can practically see the Benday 
> dots and speech balloons. And the emotional register of the book stays 
> mostly within the realm of the comic book, too: the good guys are 
> good-guy-proofed against mortal danger; the bad guys are sinister but 
> not frightening. Even the literal Nazis are never chilling, though 
> they are sometimes chillin’. (Over beer and bratwurst: “We’re National 
> Socialists, ain’t it? So—we’re socializing. Try it, you might have fun.”)
>
> For a while, all this is perfectly 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, as many of Pynchon’s later 
> novels do, from the presence of its predecessors. Consider the cheese 
> underworld, a sphere of criminality so consummately Pynchonesque that 
> it reads like self-parody. In who else’s fiction would you find 
> price-fixing on the Wisconsin Cheese Exchange, bandits invading 
> creameries up and down America’s Cheese Corridor, innumerable 
> nefarious purveyors of counterfeit Emmental and Gruyère?
>
> More important: What is all this doing in /this/ work of fiction? From 
> the beginning, Pynchon has put his readers in the position of his 
> characters, encouraging us to see hidden significance and obscure 
> connections within (and, later, among) his books, and as a result to 
> grow steadily more paranoid with each passing page. Surely, we’re 
> supposed to think, this cheese business must mean something—maybe 
> even, as Pynchon teases, “something more geopolitical, some grand 
> face-off between the cheese-based or colonialist powers, basically 
> northwest Europe, and the vast teeming cheeselessness of Asia.” Or 
> maybe Pynchon, who nearly killed off one of the title characters of 
> “Mason & Dixon” with a giant wheel of Gloucester, is what you might 
> call lactose intolerant. Or maybe he just thought it would be funny to 
> write about the big cheese of Big Cheese.
>
> Your appetite might differ, but for me, nine novels in, all this 
> code-cracking and jigsaw-puzzling is no longer thrilling. The same 
> goes for the other bells and whistles of Pynchon’s style; even a 
> seventy-million-trick pony is still a trick pony, and much 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’s worth 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 from the past because they come across like 
> pure Pynchon invention—among them Clara Rockmore, a famous theremin 
> player (Pynchon presumably appreciates her name), and a shoe-store 
> X-ray machine for superior fittings, which not only really existed but 
> really was produced by a Milwaukee company. You will find the 
> aforementioned weird forms of transportation: that appropriated 
> U-boat, an autogiro, an enormous motorcycle built to accommodate three 
> German sleight-of-hand artists—Schnucki, Dieter, and Heinz, who 
> collectively sound like a Minnesota personal-injury firm. And you will 
> find, inevitably, characters with stranger names: Dr. Swampscott Vobe, 
> Assistant Special Agent in Charge T. P. O’Grizbee, the noted 
> illusionist or possibly genuine article Zoltán von Kiss. (As for our 
> nomenclaturally modest hero, Hicks McTaggart, he is presumably named 
> for J. M. E. McTaggart, an influential British philosopher who 
> espoused the quasi-Pynchonesque beliefs that time is an illusion and 
> that the human soul, connected to others of its kind by love, is the 
> fundamental unit of reality.)
>
> This one-man-band blare never quiets, but the music darkens 
> considerably toward the end of “Shadow Ticket.” 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 which F.D.R. is 
> toppled and General Douglas MacArthur seizes power. Stuck in exile, 
> Hicks takes up with a motorcycle-riding Hungarian hottie but longs for 
> Milwaukee, where the air smells like grilled bratwurst and sounds like 
> accordion lessons and life “seldom gets more serious than somebody 
> stole somebody’s fish.”
>
> By then, I longed for Milwaukee, too—for the antic early pages of 
> “Shadow Ticket,” when something coherent seemed to be forming beneath 
> the fun. Instead, we get a darkness that is not just moral but 
> epistemological. A suicide in a Budapest bathroom, a secret community 
> of people sexually attracted to tasteless lamps, a movie plot entirely 
> about violence and overeating: this stuff isn’t Bosch; it’s 
> bosh—absurdity for absurdity’s sake, with no discernible aesthetic or 
> intellectual purpose.
>
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>
> Patches of unintelligibility are nothing new in Pynchon, but usually a 
> coherent world view gleams upward from the murk. Modern life, in his 
> grim estimation, is entirely controlled by capitalism and technology, 
> forces relentlessly destructive to the human soul. Those who perceive 
> this total control are prone to paranoia, leaving them mistrustful and 
> lonely, while those who seek to profit from it are dragged into 
> depravity. You can’t beat this system and you shouldn’t join it, so 
> the only option is to somehow duck out of its range. That’s why 
> Pynchon is drawn to drifters and dropouts, to borderlands and hidden 
> worlds, like the Zone in “Gravity’s Rainbow,” and the interior of the 
> hollow earth in “Mason & Dixon” and “Against the Day.”
>
> You can see the outlines of this world view in “Shadow Ticket,” where 
> capitalism Got Milk, the cheese is radioactive (really), and fugitives 
> retreat to strange pockets of freedom, including a secret Indian 
> reservation (“mentioned only once in a rider in a phantom treaty”) and 
> that rogue U-boat (“an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist 
> space-time”). But the grab bag of parts—cheese barons, Nazis—never 
> comes together, and the old obsessions never acquire new force. In 
> Pynchon’s best works, his bleakness is brightened, in both 
> senses—illuminated and made lighter—by the sweep of his vision and his 
> affection for his fallible, foolhardy, well-meaning, wildly outmatched 
> main characters. One finishes those books unclear on the particulars 
> but certain that this whole wild world was built to teach us 
> something, which is pretty much the human condition.
>
> No such experience attends the completion of “Shadow Ticket.” The book 
> ends with a letter from Skeet 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 rails westward with his 
> sweetheart, as Hicks had once longed to leave town with April. 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 riding off into the sunset ironic, a comment, as with 
> “Mason & Dixon,” on the evils committed in America by the allure of 
> westward expansion? Or is it what Hicks should have done many plot 
> twists ago—escape the forces scheming to control him by running away 
> with the woman he loves? Or is it just Pynchon turning around in the 
> saddle to wave farewell? Who knows. The ticket, the shadow ticket, 
> “Shadow Ticket”: all these remain unresolved, leaving us with the 
> enduring hope of the Pynchon universe, that everything in it means 
> something. At some point, though, meaning that is sufficiently cryptic 
> becomes indistinguishable from no meaning at all. ♦
>
> Published in the print edition of the September 29, 2025 
> <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/29>, 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