Set in 1932, during the worst year of the Great Depression, it tells the story of Hicks McTaggart, a private detective from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who has the misfortune of landing an assignment that places him in one precarious situation after another.
Along the way, McTaggart tangles with both organised crime and political radicals on both the right and left, struggling to maintain the serene “Oriental attitude” he has spent years learning. The assignment forces McTaggert to leave the familiarity of Milwaukee to travel through a world on the brink of collapse, eventually ending up in Hungary.
What we learn of McTaggart’s backstory corresponds closely with the life of the American author Dashiell Hammett, who developed “hard-boiled” detective fiction along with other contributors to Black Mask magazine during the 1920s. Both worked as strikebreakers, hired by corporations to control labour unrest, before having a change of heart.
But whereas Hammett became a writer, creating the nameless first-person narrator known as the Continental Op, McTaggart becomes a detective himself. Just as Hammett’s political views shifted leftward, so do McTaggart’s. And, even though Pynchon does not write anything like Hammett, the intricate structure of his tale and the sense of constant menace pervading it recall the latter’s novel Red Harvest.
Shadow Ticket will be more captivating if readers don’t know all its twists and turns in advance. Without giving too much of the plot away, however, I can state that the novel is set in 1932 because that year, when many countries had reached their economic nadir, represented a crucial turning point in the struggle to contain far-right extremism.
Although this sounds like a foreboding tale, it is leavened by the surreal scenarios and silly jokes that have characterised Pynchon’s work since his 1963 debut novel V.. Rather than detract from the seriousness of the story’s subject matter, however, this black comedy throws it into sharp relief. At least, that’s what Pynchon fans will be inclined to think.
More than most novelists who have been taken seriously by both critics and scholars, Pynchon is very much a love-him-or-hate-him figure. Even people who acknowledge his facility for creating memorable turns of phrase and intriguing characters find him a taste they are unable to acquire, turned off by his penchant for needlessly complicated sentences, abrupt changes in tone, and stupid puns.
I loved Thomas Pynchon from the first moment I read him, when I picked up his short 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 to occupy myself after a party at which I had been persuaded to consume a mystery concoction that made sleep impossible. During those strange hours in the early morning, I found it impossible to read sequentially, yet delighted myself paging back and forth between different sections of the book, perceiving improbable connections that were not dependent on following its plot.
Given that it has been over a decade since Pynchon’s last book, it’s safe to assume that he has been working on Shadow Ticket for a while. Probably a lot longer than that, if the stories about him working on multiple projects at once are true. It’s almost impossible to know for sure, since his life has been a mystery for over half a century.
Had Donald Trump not returned to the White House in 2025, the novel’s depiction of political extremism during the Great Depression would have seemed less urgent. Unfortunately, it very much does.
This isn’t the first time Pynchon’s work has proven prescient. Over and over again, he has created speculative fiction, not by peering into the future, but by turning his back on it, preferring to show how we arrived at the present conjuncture than to fantasise about what will follow in its wake.
Pynchon devotees are so accustomed to his absence from the public sphere that they forget how remarkable it is that he has managed to stay hidden despite being sought after for decades. But that seclusion magnifies the importance of everything he publishes.
That’s why the announcement of Shadow Ticket earlier this year was such a big deal, even though the likelihood of an 88-year-old author producing something worthy of his reputation was not high. And why so many acquaintances of mine—most of them, it must be said, highly educated white men over 40—rushed to see whether their fear of being disappointed had been justified.
It also didn’t hurt that Pynchon was in the news because of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new picture One Battle After Another. A loose adaptation of Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, the film has been widely praised for its portrayal of left-wing radicals battling deranged white supremacists in American law enforcement.
As I wrote in my piece on the film for The Battleground, while the film has many strengths, Anderson’s decision to update Pynchon’s basic story disappeared the legacy of the 1960s that lies at the heart of Vineland. Where the novel is concrete, the film is diffuse.
One Battle After Another doesn’t simply detach its depiction of radicalism from the specific historical incidents that inspired it. The film also conjures a California that bears a tenuous relationship to the actually existing state, with characters managing to drive from the redwood forest on its far northern coast to the barren desert near the Mexican border in a matter of hours. By contrast, even when Pynchon invents a place in Vineland, he makes sure you know where it would fall, more or less, on a real-life map.
One instance that has stuck with me from when I first read the novel as an undergraduate comes when the protagonist and his daughter flee Southern California in a colourful VW bus with a bunch of hippies,
all headed for the Sacramento Delta country, where flourished a commune, deep in, beyond the shallowest of boat drafts, sanctuary for folks on the run from court orders, process servers and skip tracers, not to mention higher and more dangerous levels of enforcement. This refuge from government happened to be lodged in the heart of a regionwide network of military installations that included nuclear-weapons depots and waste dumps, mothball fleets, submarine bases, ordnance factories, and airfields for all branches of the service, from SAC down to the Marines, whose flying stock, none of it equipped with noise suppressors, roared overhead without letup day and night
As someone who spent nearly a decade living close to the strange Delta country described here, one rarely captured in the Hollywood films through which most people come to perceive California, I could picture each and every item in this list and was deeply impressed that Pynchon had taken the time to get the details right.
While biographical information about the author was astonishingly scant—and remains so, despite the internet—it is generally agreed that he had lived in a beach town south of Los Angeles in the late 1960s, then moved to a remote location near California’s north coast, where much of Vineland is set, where he remained into the early 1980s.
In other words, the geographic accuracy of the passage above and its many counterparts elsewhere in that novel and in his other two books that take place in postwar California, The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice—which Anderson adapted into a 2014 film I wrote about for Souciant—is clearly the product of firsthand knowledge and careful observation.
Shadow Ticket, by contrast, takes place five years before Pynchon was born and in a city where he was not previously believed to have a meaningful connection. This made me apprehensive, since it’s much harder to write convincing descriptions of locations one hasn’t visited personally.
As a consequence, once I began to read the novel, I found myself stopping every few pages to fact-check geographic and historical details. Not only did this excursive behaviour significantly delay my progress, it ended up having a similar impact on my experience of the book as paging through The Crying of Lot 49 under the influence had back in May 1989.
Perhaps Thomas Pynchon would disapprove of this perverse manner of reading. But I doubt it. Long before the internet made vast quantities of information available in seconds, he was writing novels perfectly suited to the logic of hypertext, every proper noun an invitation to conduct a search, wondering whether it was the product of imagination or—often improbably—something that existed outside the text.
Although I would not be surprised if someone who knows the history and geography of Milwaukee very well could find fault with Pynchon’s treatment of the city, his attention to detail remains sufficiently acute to satisfy a reader like me, someone who desperately wants authors to get things right, but can’t stop trying to prove them wrong.
Maybe the most gratifying aspect of Shadow Ticket for Pynchon’s longtime fans is that every page sounds like him and pretty much only him. Even if his ambition has diminished with age, his style has remained remarkably consistent.
That’s the first thing likely to strike someone who reads Shadow Ticket without prejudice, and, in all likelihood, the last. The novel might only be attempting a tiny fraction of what Gravity’s Rainbow does, less than Vineland, less even than his previous book Bleeding Edge. But this modesty is a matter of content more than form.
Even in Pynchon’s shorter books, the exuberance of his style, the sense that he truly believes that more is more, annoys readers who prefer leaner prose.
Sentences go on too long, beyond the point where the case-starved English language can keep things organised, beginning in the middle of a thought or dead-ending abruptly, with the realisation that the thread your mind has been unspooling behind you is your only means of escaping the labyrinth. Consider this one, chosen at random:
Maybe not as solid a voice as Dick Powell, not bad as a hoofer—yet as if in his sleep, he had somehow aged from a bright-eyed juvenile song-and-dance artist into a street-hardened, less often shaved and brilliantined specimen, one that the most level-headed of starlets these days might have trouble keeping still for even a couple bars of being crooned to by.
That terminal “by” is Pynchon’s prose style pared down to an essence, directing you backwards before you dare move farther down the page. Over and over again, despite my familiarity with his previous books and deep affection for them, I found it necessary to retrace my steps, almost as if I were diagramming sentences the way I was required to during my school days.
Since I was fresh from seeing One Battle After Another twice, I realised that this was not a bug but a feature. Too many authors today act as though their readers were moviegoers, so intent on making progress in a narrative that they will refuse to slow down, much less reverse direction. But what makes literature a distinct medium is precisely the bidirectionality that Pynchon’s style keeps bringing to our attention.
At a time when there is immense pressure on people to consume as much content as possible, regardless of whether they can properly digest it, and when artificial intelligence is being constantly exalted as a way to save time by pre-digesting material, the virtue of reading a novel like Shadow Ticket is that it forcefully resists the fast-food approach to culture.
What will almost certainly be the final book Thomas Pynchon publishes during his lifetime is full of content that is both sobering and inspirational, reminding us how difficult the struggle against fascism and its private-sector corollary in organised crime can be.
But the greatest virtue of Shadow Ticket may be its insistence on the primacy of form. In a world that seems intent on speeding us up, the first step in mounting resistance is to remember how important it is to take our time.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
