Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon arrives nearly twelve years after his previous novel, Bleeding Edge. For a man presented by some as a legitimate contender for greatest American novelist of the postwar era, each new book of his is a literary event.
Pynchon won the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1974, and his dense, encyclopedic novels have influenced a generation of writers. At 88, he remains as a reclusive figure who generally refuses interviews and lets his work speak for itself.
The newest book, which is set in 1932, centers on Milwaukee private investigator Hicks McTaggart. He starts his work plumbing the depths and thickets of Midwestern domestic strife, and is then set adrift in Hungary while tracking the heiress to a Wisconsin cheese fortune.
It’s a solid detective story, a genre Pynchon has visited before with Inherent Vice, but set against the backdrop of Depression-era America and the rise of European fascism.
At a little under 300 pages, it’s not the sprawling epic or magnum opus some may have been expected for what may be the senior writer’s final work. In many ways it’s very similar to the longstanding Pynchonian rejection of conventional narrative, but less dense and, in his own way, more readable than some of his past work.
Pynchon has always been a challenging writer, and whilst this hasn’t exactly gone away with Shadow Ticket, he has reined himself in a bit. His baroque prose and labyrinthine plots still demand patience, just less of it. The book’s main problem is that vein it offers little reward for the effort required.
Hicks, a detective whose workload mostly consists of tedious matrimonial cases involving “crazy wives, jealous husbands,” is fed up. He finds his usual assignments distasteful and considers them a headache.
His girlfriend April Randazzo, a nightclub singer, has a thing for married men, but since Hicks is not, they have an odd push-pull flirtation. The detective is also determined not to be like his clients, so both he doesn’t care to investigate her affairs and refuses to get married himself so he can fully satisfy her cuckquean fantasies.
Eventually Hicks is sent to track down Daphne Airmont, the “Cheese Princess,” daughter of Bruno, the “Al Capone of Cheese.” There’s a kid sidekick character who pops in and out. The Wisconsin milk mafia becomes central to the mystery, though the stakes never feel particularly high.
Shadow Ticket, coming in under 300 full pages, is much shorter than Pynchon’s usual sprawl. Yet it still manages to feel aimless and difficult to get through.
Pynchon’s problematic patterns were already visible in Gravity’s Rainbow. That novel’s excesses could be justified by its ambition. Since then, those same habits have only grown more pronounced.
The first half of the novel is low energy morass as Hicks hangs around speakeasies and talks with oddballs. The prose still has flashes of the linguistic playfulness that made earlier works compelling, but these moments are too few and far between. For every page that sparkles, there are five that feel like homework.
The second half sees Hicks dispatched to Europe to bring Daphne back to America, though he proves reluctant to pressure her. Characters speak in elaborate monologues filled with puns.
The dialogue feels more like the performance than actual human speech. Pynchon perhaps wants it to feel like a period detective film in book form, but it just doesn’t work.
In the last fifty or so pages, Pynchon diminishes Hicks’ role, scattering focus among characters of different nationalities with various political loyalties. These figures include Bolsheviks, Nazis, British spies, and motorcycle enthusiasts. It’s clearly meant to evoke the chaos of previous, better novels. However, this one just lacks the developed characters to make any of it land.
The whole book feels like it’s coasting along in its mostly linear gumshoe story like the also uneven Inherent Vice. That linearity might work if the story had momentum. Instead, the plot meanders without much sense of direction. By page 100, it becomes difficult to care about any of it.
Bruno Airmont, the supposed villain, is described by his own daughter as like a fake “monster in the Tunnel of Love,” maybe guilty of “family crimes, bad blood” but no outsized threat. The low stakes undercut any tension the novel attempts to build.
To be clear, Shadow Ticket isn’t awful. Pynchon’s baseline competence as a prose stylist means the book never descends into true worthlessness. In some ways, it may actually be his most accessible work in years, with very few dense passages. What a shame though that some may take this on as their first Pynchon book.
The problem is that Shadow Ticket offers nothing that justifies its existence. It’s not revelatory. It doesn’t break new ground.
Though suggesting that a Pynchon novel be longer or more elaborate would normally be unthinkable, it might have served Pynchon to better develop the European action section and provide deeper backstories for key characters. But even that wouldn’t solve the fundamental issue.
This is a writer on autopilot, recycling his old tricks without the spark that made them work originally. Familiar materials from earlier Pynchon works reappear throughout, from talking objects to submarines to pet pigs.
The novel’s ending feels both rushed and anticlimactic. Plot threads are left dangling. Characters’ arcs go nowhere. It’s as if Pynchon himself lost interest.
All but the most avid literary obsessives can comfortably skip Shadow Ticket. Life is short. There are too many good books to waste time on a mediocre one from a writer capable of much better.
If you’re curious about Pynchon’s work, start with his earlier novels. The Crying of Lot 49 remains accessible and genuinely rewarding. Mason & Dixon shows he could once tell a compelling story, even a period piece, with charm too.
Shadow Ticket feels like a disappointing entry from someone who once pushed the boundaries of what fiction could do, even at his most polarizing. Now he seems content to retrace old ground. One wonders if he still cares, and whether we should as well.
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Shadow Ticket can be found wherever books are sold.
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Quinn Que
Quinn Que is a storyteller & journalist writing regular interviews, reviews, and features. They've been fascinated with the multidisciplinary arts since a child, particularly film, literature, and television. They love microblogging, so feel free to hit them up on Twitter (X), Substack Notes, or Tumblr about any recent articles or just to shoot the pop culture breeze!