Shadow Ticket

by Thomas Pynchon

Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery, Novels, Literary Fiction, Literature, Audiobook

304 pages, Paperback

First published October 7, 2025

About the author

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and nonfiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Rumors of a historical novel about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had circulated as early as the 1980s; the novel, Mason & Dixon, was published in 1997 to critical acclaim. His 2009 novel Inherent Vice was adapted into a feature film by Paul Thomas Anderson in 2014. Pynchon is notoriously reclusive from the media; few photographs of him have been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s. Pynchon's most recent novel, Bleeding Edge, was published on September 17, 2013.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Post-noir mystery taking place in the pre-noir times…
Prohibition is about to be repealed… The Great Depression  continues… Everything begins with an explosion…

The explosion when it comes seems to be from somewhere across the river and nearer the Lake. Forks and glassware pause between tabletop and mouth, as if everybody’s observing a moment of stillness, and nobody seems surprised.

A private eye Hicks… And his girl April… A dancer and singer… And her song reveals the mood and climate of the time…

Midnight in Milwaukee,
Not exactly Paris,
Not exactly swilling champagne, twirling yer
cane, down the Champs-Élysées…
Ev’ry hour’s so blue now,
How much, can it matter,
Might as well be suds in a stein,
Any time, night or day…

Many strange things are under way… A submarine in the lake… Weird cheese culture… Everyone around lives one’s own trashy variation of life… The atmosphere is grotesquely inhumane… Clandestine activities are in prime… Hicks feels he is being hunted by a party unknown… He is sent abroad on a mission to find a very special girl…

“How inconvenient for you, to come all this way for so much less than nothing, and in the middle of a world Depression too,” shaking her head slowly. “You seriously believed everything they told you? For a beat-up old-timer you’re pretty naive.”

Quite soon Hicks’s assignment becomes even more complicated…

Hamburg, once the Swing Kid metropolis, is especially depressing for Daphne to visit. Dockyard neighborhoods solidly Social Democratic and Communist are suddenly all infested with brownshirts, singing Nazi lyrics to the tune of “The Internationale,” “Auf Hitlerleute, schließt, die Reihen” and so forth, known as the “Hitlernazionale.”

“Soldiers of Hitler, close the ranks.”
Inhumanity begets more inhumanity until it ends up in a chain reaction of destruction.

[Marc Kozak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Googling "new Pynchon novel" every month for the last 12 years FINALLY PAID OFF, LET'S GO!!!

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

At 88 years old, Pynchon - much like Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo perpetually ignored by the Nobel Committee - demonstrates how many fucks he has to give about the stuffy literary establishment by crafting the The Great American Cheese Novel. Set in 1932, "Shadow Ticket" is an embrace and a satire of the noir private eye thriller, a sprawling narrative that shows America as one big absurd theater - and while the novel lacks the focus of Inherent Vice, it also thrives on vibes and amps up the bizarre. Our protagonist Hicks McTaggart, a private detective in Milwaukee, is assigned the task to find his former flame Daphne, daughter of the mighty Al Capone of Cheese, and her lover, a clarinetist in a swing band. Hicks himself loves to dance and has a fling with singer April, and all the music and flamboyance are juxtaposed with bombings, a mafia war, and the rise of the Nazis.

Yes, there is too much going on here, and there are too many characters (a decent amount of them superfluous for the plot) and too many ideas - but that's the whole point, this is maximalist storytelling in black and white images. Hicks ends up in Eastern Europe, where people are of course called Dr. Zoltan von Kiss and gangs "The Vladboys". There are agents and U-boats and Nazis and a coup and a golem. People talk like right out of a pulp novel (this could be the last Quentin Tarantino movie, the plot is certainly insane enough!). Pynchon seems to run in every direction simultaneously, there's no restraint whatsoever. The text thrives in witty conversations and the surreal scenes it brings to live, it's a postmodern mosaic that refuses to fit into a seamless picture.

It's pointless to seek one message here: This is about the joy of storytelling that stands against the rise of evil. Because there is one thing that dictators fear: To be ridiculed, to be shown as puppets in an absurd show. Here lies the subversive potential of comedians, and also of writers: Pynchon laughs at agitprop, he gives us wicked art. The Nazis would be appalled, and MAGA would be, too, if they knew who Thomas Pynchon was. Sure, this novel revels in comedic joy more than anything, but if you're writing like Thomas Pynchon plus you have an oeuvre like his to offer that accomodates such a text in its complex tapestry, this can be enough.

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]]

BREAKING NEWS I am squealing with glee, Pynchon hive let’s gooooooo the old man is still out there writing somewhere

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Look, Buddy, it’s simple. If you like his schtick you’ll like his schtick, capiche? What with them Nazis, PT Barnums, criminals and fuck-wits running things these days, a dose of TP does ya good.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not that there ever is, but there will be ZERO objectivity in the following. Why would there be?

I’ve made no bones about the outsized role/influence Pynchon played in my formative years, namely 16ish and within that wheelhouse of formal Self cementing. He was the logical progression after Vonnegut and, seeing as it was 1993, there was no this (waves arms around), no community of likeminded ideological miscreants; he hit right in that slipstream of helping me define not WHO I was/am, but HOW I went about approaching that and the world. That’s to say how to be anything at all. As a kid with a head overstuffed with acid that had begun turning on me, the possibilities of escape and sublimation made available through my high school library’s copy of Gravity’s Rainbow (quickly absconded and never returned; eat shit, Lions!) laid out—however cryptically to a kid not far out from his ‘Beat’ phase—that while both the game and, crucially, I might be totally fucked, hey—that didn’t mean that there weren’t avuncular misadventures ahead.

What’s this got to do with Shadow Ticket? Nothing if you’re not me/everything if you are, ain’t it. Take this as my testimonial to Pynchon, the radical humanist hiding beneath the foxglove of historical fuckery, and all who have sailed her (mixing metaphors): Shadow Ticket is a GIFT. It’s impossible not to read it as a swansong, what with Pynchon busily approaching 90 at the time of this writing. The novel is not sop to fans, rather a further peek behind the carefully draped Oz’s exterior, one which we (I’ll own up to fueling it 25-30 years ago) have diligently and slavishly built as an altar of inscrutable hieroglyphics, abstract mathematics, crytpoid-historico-pan disciplinary mirrors that do not accurately reflect the man, but rather a version of ourselves that we congratulate into ‘getting.’ Great. I don’t care. The idea that there is a (banana) cottage industry of skeleton key writers and online asexuals wasting your money and their lives explaining to you what is on a given Pynchonian page tickles me raw. It’s just the type of absurdity that I have to imagine TP would find hilarious if he could be bothered at all—it’s all RIGHT THERE, on the page.

These here pages contain all of the heretofore ‘Pynchons’ (I have no time for the idea of the Pynchon Lite Brigade) you’ve known. Lyrical, dense, slapsticking, humane, affable, prophetic, learned, learning, and someone that has chosen, perhaps more carefully than any author in history, how much of himself he ever cared to share. It’s a hell of a neat trick, and, for the long-game, no one will ever beat him at it (though one errs toward him preferring just a life AND writing, not the edifice we’ve built in his favor and without his egging).

You’ll find no denser 300-page novel, yet the whole thing, impossibly, carries all of its own weight. It is light given a dense, material form; looks not unlike a tickling feather. It is just a Joy Creation, one that leavens the Whole Beautiful Project that's been ongoing since V.. And if it proves to be the chord he chose to go out on, there is no better, no more idiosyncratically weird, American, fucked-and-jazzed-up 1930s uke-banjo’s suspended Ebmin conjoined with its polychordal C7#9b5th inversion possible (right hand aloft, clutching a lit OP) for fading to black on, its plangent tonal clusters hanging over all our smoke-filled lounges and interior chemical dens of yesterdays, this exact moment, and onward into that PerfectSoundForever copywritten and answering to "Oblivion."





*This unalloyed SPLAT of thought is way too long and boring even to me to reread much less correct; take it, as intended, straight to the head. “Believe it if you need it/if you don’t just pass it on,” friends; it really has been a ribbon and a gas. Or, This Machine Kills "The Charge of the Pynchon Lite Brigade."

[Tom Mooney · Rating 3 out of 5]

A new Pynchon, who'd have thought it. Is it any good? Well that depends if you dig Pynchon already. Large parts of this are at the more accessible end of his catalogue. Most of it is sort-of understandable, if you keep your wits about you and dampen down your ADHD.

What's it about? A PI of sorts called Hicks McTaggart, who winds up in all manner of difficulties involving a wild cast of characters and locations: a cheese heiress, English spies, Milwaukee gangsters, pesky Feds, suspicious cops, bomb-makers, apportists... and literally loads more. Milwaukee, Chicago, New York, the Mediterranean, Hungary and home.

I didn't get everything that was happening, but if you understand everything in a Pynchon novel there's something wrong with you. The story is a bit manic and all over the place - again to be expected. The style, however, is fucking ace. His sentences always entertain and the dialogue is evocative and often hilarious.

A must read for Pynchon fans... I just can't decide if I am one. Anyway, a great privilege to get to read this ahead of publication and it has given me the confidence to revisit those books in his back catalogue I found intimidating years ago.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

People are keeping company here who, if history had a shred of decency, would never be allowed within miles of each other. Rogue nuns in civilian gear are two-stepping with bomb-rolling Marxist guerrillas.

There is only The Zone. Despite my cringing at the Grabers and Pinker of the world—you really think so—I find myself dazzled at the possibilities sketched by Pynchon, admittedly moments before OSSification and the subsequent ledgers have been adjusted.

My reading of this was tempered stress, exhaustion and the darkened passages of insomnia. That’s on me and not this dynamic novel which links the oeuvre of an American Master amidst a chronology of despair. Yet amidst the gyroscopes and motorcycle maintenance there’s a Lindy hopping PI set wayward from Wisconsin to the ruins of Hapsburg hubris as the high tide of totalitarianism is but five years in the future. Oh but the newsreels can’t be trusted. We all know who controls that industry.

The novel is a picaresque treatment of emerging technologies. It is light with a seductive backbeat and yet it harkens, it alarms. Unresolved history is paved over by gallant programs of political economy. Of course the focus on apports —the phenomenon of objects disappearing and appearing is well suited for a gumshoe protagonist, the stuff dreams are made of, especially given the author’s truck with Heisenberg.

Alongside the international cheese cartels, the cocaine and the ghosts of vaudeville past, are lingering lessons of our bruised albeit resilient humanity.

[Lannie · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's an episode of the show Scrubs (2001-2010) where someone thought "wouldn't it be neat to align all of the characters of our show with characters from The Wizard of Oz?" And they all agreed to do it. And it was neat.

Yep.

So, Shadow Ticket is like that, except it wonders how cool it would be if we dressed up the 1930s to look like today.

For example, instead of a man marrying his AI chatbot, we have a guy marry an automaton golem, the closest thing to a possible AI chatbot you would have in a fictional 1930s setting. Or how about this: instead of thousands of people watching mukbang videos (videos where people indulge in large quantities of food) on YouTube, they have theater films where a Shirley Temple analogue eats a bunch of delicious food while singing songs, one of which literally has the phrase "it's peanut butter and jelly time."

This is a trick of the Flintstones variety. In The Flinstones, all of the prehistoric garb is fictional aesthetic; the real story, the real humor, is about modern (at the time) America. When Cary Granite does a cameo, it's not informing you about a real celebrity from prehistoric times, it's just Cary Grant.

So when Shadow Ticket introduces the Vladboys, a motorcycle gang siding with upcoming fascism for the violence (as opposed to "legitimate" ideology), we're not meant to think there was actually a Vladboys group in the build-up to WWII. These are the Proud Boys. And this story is about right now.

Our main character, Hicks, lives in the USA, but is swept to Central Europe where Nazi fascism is creeping into the every day. He wants desperately to go home, back to the USA he grew up in with its idyllic peace and none of the fascism of 1930s Central Europe, but he can't. It's impossible. There is no going back, not yet. His journey in the literal is a sepia-tone mirror of the 2020s: Americans woke up in an unfamiliar country, metaphorically, that is growing into the same Nazi-style fascism seen in the 1930s. Some, like Hicks, want to go back to the America it was before, but can't. Other's, like the Vladboys (Proud Boys), revel in the chaos.

There is a lot to unpack here, such as Hicks' metaphorical complicity in all this (Hicks was a union buster, a practice Hitler and Mussolini would approve of in their fight against working class unions), or how the momentum of the plot is driven by the stalking of a submarine from the previous war. But also, it's a cartoonish romp, like most of what Pynchon writes. And that's what ultimately makes it fall flat.

My biggest problem with Pynchon has always been his prose. Sorry Pynchon Enjoyers, it's just not a flavor I enjoy, or understand, or can pay attention to well.

Pynchon novels read like someone transcribing the long-winded, affable mumblings of an older man reciting the plot of a Ralph Bakshi film he saw three months ago. It's written as if spoken, often choppy and witty, but without the necessary emphasis and timing you'd get from audio. I don't think it's a coincidence that Pynchon writes so many song lyrics in his books, but consider this: aren't they kind of hard to read if you don't know the melody? That's how all of Pynchon's stuff is; he assumes you know the melody when he rattles off the lyrics. He writes sentences as if you understand the look on his face, the arm gestures, the tone, the emphasis, but none of those are placed onto the page. You're left to infer the un-infer-able.

I've now read Pynchon at his latest, his earliest, and his in-between-est. I've read his be-hated Vineland and his controversially beloved Gravity's Rainbow. And I think I get it. It's maximal, it's convoluted, and it's also extremely clever and light-hearted. Sometimes it almost reaches beautiful. But it's just... it's just not the writing I find good, ya know?

Look at this sentence:

The magazine selection in the outer waiting area at Godwin Zipf includes Popular Litigation, Modern Psychopathy, and Steamy Detective, deep in whose cover story it’s not till Boynt reaches and shakes him does Hicks realize he’s been immersed for a while.

If I wrote this sentence, there isn't an editor in the world that would let it reach print. This is a testament to how much respect his style is allowed. But also, this sentence is a mangled mess, and it took me three times to fully understand it. Every novel is full of these: sentences that seem to have popped off the top of his dome in a rough draft note-taking session at the pub. This is not a sentence that respects its reader. It eschews clarity, but not in substitute for anything better. It's not funnier in this form, it's not more profound or vibe-o-rific. It's just messy.

Shadow Ticket might be the new "most accessible Pynchon," stealing the crown from The Crying of Lot 49. That's my opinion, at least. If you like a couple of muddled, cartoonish gags here and there, it's fun. Pynchon likes having fun. But at its deepest, the book is just a convoluted way of saying "fascism is coming" in a Sean Bean impression. It toys around with making quirky connections between fictional 1930s and today too much, and not enough time cementing that core idea, or even giving an idea of what to do or think about it. It's an homage to right now, but only in aesthetic.

It's like that Scrubs episode where someone thought "wouldn't it be neat to align all of the characters of our show with characters from The Wizard of Oz?" And they all agreed to do it. And it was neat.

[Trapper]

This is not a drill!

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had to knock this one out this week. Not Pynchon at his “best”, but then again, there is a certain mode of reading with him where you are not following along anything, but giving yourself over to the journey. Branch upon branch upon branch. The trunk is out of sight. You are not sure what is going on. One moment, you are with Hicks McTaggart getting his “ticket” (the case he has been assigned to) and being ready to set out to find the daughter of the “Al Capone of cheese”. The next, you are reading about submarines, Nazis, Bulgaria, cruise ships, and native bonds. And lots of Pynchonian songs. More than one can handle. He loves a song! That being said, this is probably his least difficult novel that I have ever read. And you remain somewhat sane, as Hicks is with you throughout the process, only disappearing for a chapter or two here and there.

[Jaidee (moving into a winter of nonfiction) · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

3.4 "bizzier, buzzier, wonkier and more confusing than a three ring circus" stars !!!

Whew and wow and woah.....

So despite a fairly high rating.... a very mixed review with some superlatives and some sour raspberries.....

You take a very motley crew of characters....detectives, police, jazz singers, gangsters, aviation girlz, motorcycle boyz, eastern european operatives, british spies, cokeheads, flappers, mystical psychics and a cheez heiress and yes a submarine....and then you sort of go kind of crazy cuz I didn't know what the fuck was going on or who was who about half of the time....you go from Milwaukee, to Chicago, to Eastern Europe and Italy and under the ocean even.....

The prose and style are five star superlative......masculine, robust and 1930s sharp
The plot is super fun, silly and incredibly clever
The characters are vivid and colorful but lack psychological depth and often I had a hard time telling them apart
My admiration for the artistry was extremely high

However my enjoyment wavered from fair to good and I can't say I always wanted to dive back in.....

I am finally glad to have read a Pynchon and may return to some earlier works or I may not....who knows ?

[Tom Quinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here it is, the definitive answer to "I'm new to Pynchon, where should I start?"

4 stars. Fast, funny, frequently witty and occasionally wise. Much more linear and much less dense than his other works (except Lot 49 which come to think is actually where you should start, probably)

A Statue of Liberty made of Jell-O. Where do you start eating it? The head? The torch? (75)

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Bleeding Edge came out back in 2013, many people treated it as a kind of valedictory, the last word from a master of his craft. It’s hard to believe that we’re here, more than ten years later, with Pynchon now aged 88, unexpectedly getting another book from him. An air of astonished gratitude, mounting to something like the miraculous, hovers over Shadow Ticket, and at first I was reading it thinking, yes, this is a great encapsulation of his qualities, almost a best-of, until that started to seem patronising. The truth is this is simply a vintage Pynchon novel by any standard, in my opinion the best thing he’s written since Against the Day.

Pynchon has always been the American writer with the most interest in the world outside the US, and here we find him again turning to the strange contingencies of Europe during its tumultuous twentieth-century upheavals. This one is set in Central Europe (and Milwaukee) in the early 1930s, and thus slots neatly between Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s slimmer (and more fun) than those two, but much deeper than it first appears.

All of Pynchon’s gifts and idiosyncrasies are on extravagant display, and his prose is still unmistakable. This one is built from a lot of Prohibition-era slang, the text studded with roscoes, tomatoes, dips, O-Os and loophounds. He stopped using verbs like ‘said’ or ‘replied’ sometime back in the 90s, leaving his adverbs to stand alone, so that a line of dialogue from him now looks like this:

“Just about to ask,” Hicks politely.

Do not try this at home. The effect seems oddly familiar, until eventually you realise that it has the same format as the stage directions from a film script:

          HICKS
        (politely)
      Just about to ask.

…which in this case, given the time period, inevitably lends Pynchon’s long passages of uninterrupted dialogue the feel of a screwball script from someone like Howard Hawks, often with shades too of film noir. Pynchon’s world is not entirely historical, but rather set in a past as conjured through movies, myths, hearsay, and his cast of wisecracking dames and laconic mobsters is played not for verisimilitude but for sheer joy. And every now and then, the madcap stichomythia gives way to a slab of Pynchon’s trademark melancholy vagueness:

Skeet came to learn about outdoor city light and how much and how little to expect from it in the way of comfort—plate glass window reflections, penumbras of lampposts at the ends of trolley lines to the edges of suburbs still officially to be named—haunting given stretches of sidewalk just as the shops close down and the girls come out dazy and chattering, cigarette smoke and perfume in the slowly more intensifying light of the evening street, immersed too deep in lives that Skeet could never quite see any plausible way to step into…

There is something positively Proustian about how he can keep layering phrases on top of one another until you’ve forgotten what the finite verb was, or even whether the sentence ever had one in the first place, just lost in the endless waves of feeling.

As always, there are bad jokes galore (krav maga is described as ‘Jew-jitsu’) and everyone in here is called something ridiculous like Dippy Chazz, or Glow Tripforth del Vasto. The women are all libidinous and fiercely independent, while the men are well-meaning dolts interspersed with the occasional monster (Pynchon’s basic view of the world), and all his characters move implausibly in and out of each other’s orbits according only to the dictates of plot and incident. He makes plotting look so easy – or should I say, so unnecessary, perhaps something else too bourgeois to be taken seriously.

But, like the greatest writers, his playfulness is in the service of real ideas, which as always are better explored through wit than through the ponderous earnestness of lesser talents. Here, as so often in Pynchon, we see our heroes facing up to enemies who turn out, in some way never entirely explained, to represent a whole shadowy coalition of global capitalist interests, out on a moral crusade to crush their opponents (‘namely everything to the left of Herbert Hoover’).

Europe has been fractured by 1914–18 into a constellation of smaller states and ethno-nationalistic grouplets, with the burgeoning Nazi party giving a good sign of what’s to come in this strange transition period – a time characterised by one of Pynchon’s walk-ons as

“one of those queer little passage-ways behind the scenery, where popes make arrangements with Fascists and the needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact…many have been quick to blame it on the War, on the insupportable weight of so many dead, so many wrongs still unresolved.”

Typically with Pynchon, intimations of the supernatural are seen as the best way of explaining the mood, and here we have, among other things, a Czech golem, a vampire motorcycle gang, and a longrunning subplot about the felonious uses of teleportation. The characters here are, like their author, ‘tellers of and believers in geopolitical ghost stories’.

That we got another book from this guy makes me so happy, but that it’s as good as this is nothing short of incredible. It feels like something he could have brought out at any time in the last fifty years – the characters have not aged, the concerns have not altered, the confidence of the prose has not wavered, so that it feels only like a beautiful coincidence when a couple of passages make you pause and reflect on the author himself, as you linger over the page, perhaps blinking away a few specks of emotion from the eye there.

Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark. Until finally we turn to look back the way we came, and there’s that last light bulb, once so bright, now feebly flickering, about to burn out, and it’s well past time to be saying, Florsheims, let’s ambulate.

[Alexander Carmele · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lapidar-lakonisches Irren und Wirren durch die Welt der 1930er. Despektierlich erzählt.

Ausführlicher, vielleicht begründeter auf kommunikativeslesen.com

Inhalt: 1/5 Sterne (Abgehalfterter Prügler irrt herum.)
Form: 4/5 Sterne (bunter Sprachreigen)
Erzählstimme: 1/5 Sterne (lässig-desinteressiert-urteilend)
Komposition: 1/5 Sterne (keine)
Leseerlebnis: 1/5 Sterne (schlimm)
--> 8/5 = 1,6 -> knapp 2 Sterne.

Schattennummer von Thomas Pynchon erweist sich als Rhapsodie auf die Prohibitionszeit, als eine Art Tribut an den hardboiled Roman, die Detektiv-Coolness, eine Film-Noir-Szenerie, die leider niemals zum Showdown, zu einer Art Höhepunkt führt. Pynchon lässt in Schattennummer keinen Zweifel daran, dass der Erzähler über den Dingen steht und im Grunde auch gar keine richtige Lust mehr darauf hat, etwas auszuerzählen. Andeutungen müssen reichen.

«Hicks, du brauchst mehr Kultur, eine europäische Einstellung zur Liebe und zum Leben. Du solltest wenigstens rausfinden, womit Bela sein Haar pflegt.» Und so weiter.
«Bomben kommen, Bomben gehen, die Handelskammer von Santa Flavia ist nicht mehr so wichtig, schreib mir einen kurzen Bericht, aber das sind bloß Kinkerlitzchen, ich hab uns was Fabelhaftes an Land gezogen, und ich sage dir, damit sind wir alle gemachte Männer …» Und so weiter.
Bevor er jemand findet, mit dem er reden kann, gibt es einen lauten Knall, und sofort rennen die Leute in alle Richtungen und schreien: «Da sind sie wieder», «Rette sich, wer kann» und so weiter.

40x taucht diese Wendungen auf. Pynchon beweist mit Schattennummer eindrücklich, wie ein Erzähler alles dafür unternimmt, seinem Publikum zu missfallen. Die Abwehrgeste durchflirrt resolut den Text. Weder die Figuren noch die Handlung noch die Zusammenhänge können und sollen überzeugen. Das Flickwerk existiert als Molestum, Ärgernis, als Provokation. Wer will schon eine Story, eine Figur, wer will im Zeitalter des Todes der großen Erzählungen Erzählungen? Schattennummer begräbt sich selbst samt seinem Titel, denn der Roman von Pynchon stellt tatsächlich eine Schattennummer dar: nichts zu sehen, vor lauter Finsternis, malt es euch doch selbst aus.

«Unser erster Auftrag –» «Unser, das heißt … meiner und Ihrer.» «– besteht darin, eine ziemlich geschmacklose Tischlampe zu lokalisieren und ihrem Besitzer zurückzuerstatten, eine Lampe, die unter Lampensammlern als das Kronjuwel geschmackloser Lampen gilt, ja als eine so verblüffend geschmacklose Lampe, dass sie die Kategorie der geschmacklosen Lampe selbst ad absurdum führt. So entsetzlich geschmacklos, dass sie niemals fotografiert worden ist.

Selbstredend nimmt Pynchon sein Publikum hops, selbstredend nimmt er nichts von dem ernst, was er da hinpinselt und selbstredend steckt da eine ganz hintergründige, subversive, poststrukturalistische Ironie dahinter. Nur zu welchem Ende? Der Roman, der sich weder rahmt, noch traut, noch verknüpft, sondern eine Varieté-Nummer ohne Spektakel bleibt? Dazu noch viele Details aus früheren Romanen wie V., die die Lektüre zu einem staccato-haften Déja-vu-Erlebnis geraten lassen. In Schattennummer bleibt so ziemlich alles im Dunklen. Wer darin gerne herumtappen will, nur zu – irgendetwas lässt sich ja immer finden. Ist ein bisschen wie Nasenbohren …

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Details – ab hier Spoilergefahr (zur Erinnerung für mich):
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Inhalt:
●Hauptfigur(en): Hicks McTaggart (HM), Privatdetektiv, Milwaukee, Anfang der 1930er, während der Prohibition.
●Zusammenfassung/Inhaltsangabe: HM hat (vor Handlungsbeginn) die Käseprinzessin Daphne Airmont (DA) vor der Klapsmühle gerettet, und zwar mit einem Schnellboot von seinem Onkel Lefty (Detlef). Im Zuge des Verschwindens ihres Vaters, Al Capone des Käses, möchte sein Chef, Boynt Crosstown von der Filiale der Unamalgamated Op, dass HM DA aufspürt, denn diese soll mit einem Klarinettisten einer Swingband durchgebrannt sein (Hop Wingdale). Als eine Explosion in Milwaukee hochgeht und ein Schmuggler, Stuffy Keegan, lahmgelegt wird, gerät HM ins Kreuzfeuer des FBIs, die ihm den Bombenanschlag unterzujubeln versucht, und zudem verübt einer der Mafiabosse, Don Peppino, eifersüchtig auf seine Affäre mit April Randazzo ist, einen Mordanschlag auf ihn, so dass er sich nun doch überreden lässt, den Auftrag anzunehmen, Milwaukee zu verlassen und nach Daphne zu suchen. Er reist mit dem Zug nach New York, verbringt dort ein paar Tage, wird mit k.o.-Tropfen betäubt und findet sich alsbald auf der Stupendica wider, einem Hochseedampfer. Über Tanger fährt er nach Wien lernt doch seinen hiesigen Auftraggeber Egon Praediger kennen, der ihn nach Budapest schickt und ihn auf Ace Lomax, Bruno Airmonts, Daphnes Vaters Kontaktmann, ansetzt. HM lehnt dankend ab, reist aber nach Budapest, lernt über Terike, eine Motorrad-Botin und -Fanatikerin Slide Gearheart kennen, einen freischaffenden Auslandskorrespondenten, der ihm verrät, wo DA auftritt. HM findet sie und erfährt, dass ihr Klarinettist HW ausgebüchst ist. Sie verbringen eine Nacht miteinander und er nimmt ihren Auftrag an, HW für sie zu suchen, um, statt eine Scheidung zu finalisieren, mal auch ein Paar wieder zusammenzubringen. Über Slide erfährt er, dass sich HW auf einer Motorradrundfahrt befindet. Slide organisiert einen fahrbaren Untersatz. Zusammen mit einem jüdischen Golem namens Zdenek brausen sie Richtung Adria. In einem transsylvanischen Dorf, das sich um ein Ersatzteillager herum gebildet hat, erfahren sie, dass HW in einem kroatischen Guerilla-Camp der Ustascha auftritt, in das auch Lomax verschleppt wird. Zdenek befreit beide. Alle treffen sich in Fiume wieder, wo Daphnes Vater in einer Villa Partys schmeißt. Bruno flieht. DA hat ihm eine Überfahrt organisiert. Er wird zurück in die USA geschleust. HM erhält die Nachricht, dass AR nun fest mit dem Mafiaboss liiert ist. Es gibt nichts mehr, was ihn zurück in die USA zieht. In Sizilien telefoniert er mit seiner Mutter. Er trifft Terike. Sie küssen sich; am Ende erhält er einen Brief von Skeet, der sich auf dem Weg nach Kalifornien befindet.
… Hauptthema: Hicks, in prekären Umständen aufgewachsen, Faust des Kapitals, entsagt der Gewalt. Immer wieder soll er Gewalt anwenden, aber er wehrt sich. Er will nicht Teil dieses Spiels werden. Hicks die Komponente, die sich von den verschiedenen Seiten nicht fangen lässt, weder vom Kommunismus noch vom Kapitalismus, weder von Faschisten noch von den Bolschewisten, weder vom FBI noch MI6, und schon gar nicht vom organisierten Verbrechen. Eine Welt aus dem Ruder – der Holocaust im Anzug. Die Geldmacherei.
… Nebenthema: die Sehnsucht, Nostalgie, das Paar-Sein mit April, das nicht zustandekommt, weil sie die Partnerin eines Gangsterbosses wird (aber kaum ausgeführt).
… Motive aus anderen Büchern (V.): Maschinen besessene Frauen (Motorrad/Auto), Schönheitsoperation; unterirdische Labyrinthe in Städten;
... unklar, wie Hicks nach Fiume kommt.
… unklar, welche Intrigen Bruno zur Flucht zwingen
… unklar, was es mit der InKäs
… welche Rolle spielt Al Capone, wozu? Prohibition? Wozu? Erster Weltkrieg?
… unklar, wozu Pip und Alf, die Apport-Magie? Welche Rolle hat das Teleportieren?
… die Handlungslinie: Glow/Porfirio und Skeet und Stuffy Keegan, völlig überflüssig, die U-13 Geschichte. Tragschrauber? Moto Guzzi? Die Suche nach der geschmacklosen Lampe?! Ace Lomax, keine Story?
… was soll die Inzestphantasie-Andeutung von Daphne?
… unklar, inwiefern Hop Spion war oder nicht. Wer hat die Bombe gelegt, die Stuffys Wagen zerstört hat?
●Charaktere: (rund/flach) – flach und uninteressant, nur Skizzen
●Besondere Ereignisse/Szenen: Nostalgie-Szenen, April und Hicks auf dem Dampfer, atmosphärisch, auch beim Abschied auf dem Bahnhof.
… große Ähnlichkeiten, am Ende, zu Die Projektoren von Clemens Meyer, Atmosphäre der Gewalt auf dem Balkan, vermischt mit Musik, Kino, mit Faschismus/Kommunismus/Extremismus und hinzukommen ein Paar
●Diskurs: Politischer Extremismus, aber eher oberflächlich.
… es gab im Grunde genommen keinen Plot – die Handlungslinie: Daphne einst gerettet, Daphne entflohen, Hicks im Schlamassel, sucht Daphne, verbringt Nacht mit Daphne, die sich absetzt, und dann tröstet er sich mit einer Motorrad-Botin … äh … gähnend langweilig.
--> 1 Stern

Form:
●Wortschatz: großer interessanter, dynamischer Wortschatz, variabel, aus vielen Feldern, nicht fehlverwendet, treffsicher in Abstraktionsabstufungen
●Type-Token-Ratio: 0,1775 (Musil >0,25 - Genre < 0,1)
●Satzlängen-Verteilung-Median: 17,2 STAB 17, Median 11 … komplexer Satzbau, interessante Varianten, Retardierungen des Sinnes, der Auflösung, sinfonische, kompositorische Schreibweise, leider oft gewollt, oft gekünstelt. (bei Musil: 28 Wörter mit Standardabweichung (STAB) 19 Wörter)
●Anteil der 1000 häufigsten Wörter: 71,3 (Musil/Mann <70% - Genre >80%) … Wortreichtum, platzt förmlich aus allen Nähten, mehr ein Wörterbuch als ein Roman, beinahe Arno Schmidt-mäßig, verspielt.
●80% Abdeckung mit wie vielen Wörtern: 2423 Wörter … sehr hoch, in den Bereich von hochkomplexer Literatur
●Auffälligkeiten: ja, gewollt lange Sätze, viele Dialoge, wenig lange, reflektorische Abschnitte, eigentliche keine Reflexion, im Grunde völlig Immersion, Distanzlosigkeit, Atemlosigkeit, Kessel Buntes, Zirkus, Karneval.
●Innovation: dennoch vom Material hoch.
--> 4 Sterne

Erzählstimme:
●Eindruck: Kommentierend, lapidar, überheblich. Kürzt ab, urteilt scharf, interessiert sich nicht wirklich für seine eigene Welt, daher destruktiv, lakonisch und auf Coolness setzend, eher defensiv und habituell – poserhaft; possenreißerisch.
●Erzählinstanz (reflektiert, situiert, perspektiviert?): weder noch
●Erzählverhalten, -stil, -weise: siehe oben, destruktiv gegen die eigene Erzählwelt, abbreviativ, desinteressiert, kalt … desillusioniert.
●Einschätzung: es gibt keine Regie, nicht mal das, eine Montagetechnik, die etwas zusammenwebt, was nicht unbedingt miteinander harmoniert. Ein Stück- und Flickwerk. Slapstick-Noir, eine Erzählstimme, die sich selbst unterläuft, keinen Rahmen besitzt
--> 1 Stern

Komposition:
●Eindruck (szenisch/deskriptiv/Tempiwechsel): interessant durch rapide Wechsel, die auf Dauer ermüden, da es keine Perspektive, keinen Rahmen, keine Handlung gibt.
●Extradiegetische Abschnitte: nicht wirklich.
●Lose Versatzstücke: viele Fäden finden nicht zusammen – die Magie (Apport/Asport), die seltsamen Intrigen, die nicht aufgeklärt werden.
●Reliefbildung: am Ende kaum, da alles nur angedeutet wird.
●Einschätzung: keine rahmende Figur, keine rahmende Handlung, keine strukturelle Bindung. Totalausfall.
--> 1 Stern

Leseerlebnis:
●Gelangweilt: ja, sehr.
●Geärgert: nö, zu belanglos.
●Amüsiert: an manchen Stellen, durch Wortwitz, Karnevalismus.
●Gefesselt: nein, nur ein wenig, als die Affäre mit April auseinandergeht, Bahnhof- und Dampferszene.
●Zweites Mal Lesen?: auf keinen Fall.
--> 1 Stern

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[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

CRITIQUE:

"Action, Well, I Try to Avoid That Too, When I Can"
(Thomas Pynchon - p138)

As entertaining as Pynchon's most recent (and potentially last) novel is, it intentionally lacks significant narrative action.

Instead, it relies on atmosphere, character, description and dialogue, not to mention Pynchon's signature nomenclature (e.g., Hicks McTaggart, Boynt Crosstown, Thessalie Wayward, Skeet Wheeler, Stuffy Keegan, Hop Wingdale, Angie Voltaggio, Ooly Schaufel, T.P. O'Grizbee and Zoltan von Kiss).

"A Milwaukee Bildungsroman"

Although the novel is set in 1932, it's populated by German and Italian immigrants, Nazis, Fascists, Mafia family members, Jews, Klezmer players, millionaires, cheese makers, members of the International Cheese Syndicate, Ustashe operatives, gang members and private detectives.

The chief protagonist, Hicks McTaggart, is a private detective who is hired to find and return Daphne Airmont, the daughter of Bruno Airmont, "the Al Capone of Cheese".

Hicks is rumoured to have had an affair (Pynchon calls it "a history") with Daphne in the distant past, although she's now hanging around with Hop Wingdale, the clarinet player in a Jewish swing jazz band called the Klezmopolitans, who have recently embarked on a European tour.

The novel starts in Milwaukee (the cheese capital of Wisconsin) and Chicago (the mob controlled and heavily syndicated capital of Illinois) and finds its way by boat, train and submarine to pre-World War II Vienna, Budapest and Fiume (where the Italian Fascists assemble submarines out of parts manufactured further inland). All things lead to (a villa in) Fiume (and back):

"The villa dates from just after the War, when...Fiume had a reputation as a party town, fun-seekers converging from all over, whoopee of many persuasions, wide-open to nudists, vegetarians, coke-snorters, tricksters, pirates and runners of contraband, orgy-goers, fighters of after dark grenade duels, astounders of the bourgeoisie...

"For Daphne the villa is a place she would gladly have come 'home' to , even to live in."

(Fiume)

On Tour with the Klezmopolitans and Other "Astounders of the Bourgeoisie"

As often occurs in Pynchon's fiction, the characters travel from America to Europe (or the Middle East), and back to America (or vice versa).

Mid-western America is as ethnically and politically diverse as Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. The U.S.A. is the product (or a by-product) of Europe.

Pynchon's novel is equally a product of this intercontinental relationship that is both humorous and stimulating.

The United States of Paranoia

On a more serious note, the novel also suggests that the apparently home-grown fascism and paranoia of the contemporary United States originally crossed the Atlantic Ocean with the European immigrants.


SOUNDTRACK:

The Klezmopolitans - "Stompin' at the Savoy"

https://klezmopolitans.com/music/stom...

I don't know if there is any link between the real life and the fictional bands.

The Klezmopolitans - "Fon der Khupe"

https://klezmopolitans.com/music/khup...

The Beatles - "Ticket To Ride" (2024 Stereo Remix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB0Qx...

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5, rounded up.

I don't count myself amongst the Pynchon super-fans. I read his first 3 novels 50 years back when they first came out and, frankly, was much too young to get much from them - but liked his weird and unique worldview and his loop-de-loop sentences. I TRIED to read his two behemoths several times and never made much headway in either. A decade ago I read Inherent Vice to try to make sense out of Paul Thomas Anderson's film adaptation - and that pretty much brings me to now.

Since this is his first book in 12 years AND suspected to be his last (he'd be 100 if it took him as long to finish another) - I wanted to see what all the hoopla is about. Much of this seemed familiar - the strange names for all the characters, the long, convoluted sentences and difficult to follow plotline(s), the faux pastiche of Spillane/Cain/Chandler gumshoes and international shady syndicates.

I must confess that a lot of this I found rather jejune rather than intriguing, especially the character names, which I felt him straining too hard to make as bizarre as possible. I wish I had either read it on Kindle, where I could have relied on the search feature, or kept a detailed reckoning of the more than 50 characters, since I found it increasingly difficult to remember who everyone was, as it progressed.

Forget making any 'real' sense of the plot - I gave up and just enjoyed the elliptical and often amusing sentences - and some of the set pieces - which PTA should have a field day with, if he ever decides to make a third Pynchon film (as his current film, One Battle After Another, is loosely based on Vineland).

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Welcome back Mr Pynchon!

Another thoroughly entertaining read from one of my absolute favourite authors.

Who'd have thought an octogenarian would have had it in them. I suppose it's probably too much to ask to expect another novel from the man at some future date?

[Greg Zimmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Out Oct. 7.

Don't want to say too much about this yet pending my review for Chicago Review of Books, but suffice it to say, it's definitely, unmistakably a Pynchon

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very typical Pynchon. History sweeps up the main character, and he is like a leaf in the storm.

[Stetson · Rating 2 out of 5]

In this review, I may be unfair to Pynchon as I’ve read little of his oeuvre, and much of my admiration comes secondhand, filtered through writers he's influenced like David Foster Wallace. Even so, Shadow Ticket reads as an attempted resuscitation, a feeble one at that, of his own mid-century ethos, a zombie Pynchonism, if you will. It is the return of the same anarchist posture, the same postmodern gambits that turn thermodynamics into incoherent social theory, the same historical pastiche of fringe American cultural arcana (jazz, gangsters, and 1930s fascism). All this wouldn’t be a problem if the book treated these inheritances as live questions for which stakes actually exist; instead, Pynchon appears to be donning a costume in a playact of no consequence.

Shadow Ticket gestures constantly—at plot, at politics, at sympathy—without ever committing to the brass tacks that would make those gestures mean something. Detective beats exist as atmosphere, not engines of motive; any romance is staging, not attachment; satire is scattershot rather than targeted. Shadow Ticket feels nostalgic for Pynchon's own fading cleverness, and the nostalgia here functions as an anesthetic for an inchoate pain. Does Pynchon even matter to Pynchon anymore?

What's the point of all of this anyway? Was this a vanity project spurred on by McCarthy's The Passenger and Stella Maris? And if Pynchon wants readers to care about the surface-level action of the novel, then why does he plot pre-textually? Has he not yet learned just how involuted his countercultural worldview has become? Create convincing characters and places them in legible but compelling circumstances and make them function along some line of internal logic. Don't just move chess pieces along a pre-determined path and have that path lead nowhere particularly interesting.

Anyway, I doubt Pynchon sees things the way I do. Given how One Battle After Another, an adaptation of Vineland, has been received by remaining cultural tastemakers, I'm sure he can comfort himself about the relevance of his ideas. But really, these things are corpses held up as art that's supposedly brimming with energy. In the end, they're curiosities that will be consigned to a museum that will just gather dust while its biggest patrons pretend to visit.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Light” Pynchon is still better than almost anything else in the world. Still the greatest living writer.

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Statue of Liberty made of Jell-O. Where do you start eating it? The head? The torch?

It’s a new Thomas Pynchon adventure so, no matter where you start, you are guaranteed to become discombobulated , just like private detective Hicks McTaggart of Unamalgamated Ops detective agency in Milwaukee, the year 1932.
I’ve been around the block a couple of times already in a vehicle driven by Mr. Pynchon, so I knew that, once I have secured my seat belt, I was in for a wild ride of conspiracy theories, with a large cast of colourful and untrustworthy characters and a maximalist, truly immersive approach to world building. The world in this case being the next door neighbour to Al Capone’s Chicago, at least for the first part of the novel:

... there’s your wholesome Cream City, kid, mental hygiene paradise but underneath running off of a heartbeat crazy as hell, that’s if it had a heart which it don’t ...

Hicksie tries to keep a low profile and to stay out of trouble, but this is a difficult proposition when you’re built like an armoire and rolling bombs are launched at truck drivers like Stuffy Keegan, a local underworld figure. His boss at the agency has a proposition for McTaggart, a former strikebreaking gorilla better known for his fists than for his brains. According to the Gumshoe Manual, such a job is called a ticket:

“And the job would be ...”
“To locate Miss Airmont wherever she’s off to, smooth-talk her out of her involvement with this clarinet player, bring her back. Simple pickup and delivery.”

Daphne Airmont, the Milwaukee Cheese Heiress, has run away from home to follow clarinetist Hop Wingdale, a member of The Klezmopolitans, a popular swing band reformatted by electric xylorimba virtuoso Curly Capstock. Daphne left her fiancee G. Rodney Flaunch of the Glencoe Flaunches in tears over the million and a half dollars dowry that slipped through his fingers.
“Around Baraboo, even the sweetest of girls, the most carefully brought up you can imagine, could still, one day, all at once, just ... well, run away with the circus.”
Hicksie, who had a previous encounter slash one-night-stand with the missing hot tomato, seems like the right man for the job, despite his reluctance to handle affairs of the heart or to venture anywhere outside of his home town.

Private eyes of the 1930’s are emerging from an era of labor unrest and entering one of spousal infidelity, encouraged if not enabled by Prohibition

Clear so far? Don’t worry, things are about to get a lot more interesting in various explosive and/or subversive ways. You see, Miss Airmont is the daughter of the infamous Bruno Airmont, also known as the Al Capone of Cheese, which is pretty big in the milk saturated state of Wisconsin. Bruno is also missing, having absconded with a very large sum of money embezzled from the Cheese Syndicate. He is presumed to be hiding on a tropical island, surrounded by hula girls and sipping daiquiris. A lot of unpleasant personages are looking for Bruno – one more reason for Hicks to refuse the ticket.

This is about as far as I can get with trying to make sense of what happens next.
I made a list of the recurring characters, hoping it would help me navigate the detours our gumshoe is forced to take on his way to find the missing heiress. I ended up laughing out loud as I scratched my head at the inventiveness of the author while suspecting some of these names are based on real underworld characters from the period.
Zbig Dubinsky: a junior hire at the U-Ops agency, Skeet: a small though energetic urchin with a pocketful of rubber balloons and a supply of pins, Don Peppino Infernacci, Vito Guardalabene, Hoagie Hivnak, Giancarlo Foditto aka Dippy Chazz, Francesco “Finger of Death” Sfuzzino: locally year after year coming in at the top of everybody’s most-frightened-of list, Miss Fancy Vivid, Greasy Thumb Guzik, Ooly Schaufl, Vito Cubanelli, Dr. Swampscott Vobe, Pancho Caramba: percussionist, early influencer Glow Tripworth del Vasco and her alleged husband/ jealous boyfriend Porfirio del Vasto: high society thief and aircraft dealer, Royal Navy Commander Alf Quarrender, retired and his wife Philippa who are probably secret agents from MI7b or some service like that, Dr. Zoltan von Kiss: apportist, Zdenek, who claims to be an authentic Czechoslovakian golem, child movie star Squeezita Thickly, a spinthomaniac (don’t ask) named Phoebe, Egon Praediger: a cocaine addicted European commissar, Ace Lomax: bike dare-devil, Vassily Midoff: Russian contrabandist. There are literally hundreds more names to keep track of.

The novel comes with its own cabaret and vaudeville soundtrack, courtesy of the several femmes fatale that cross paths with Hicks, starting with his main squeeze and dance partner April Randazzo, a chanteuse who is also wooed by one of the ’Ndragheta capi, the seductive Glow, a fiery Hungarian biker named Terike, eventually Daphne if/when she comes out from the shadows. McTaggart may be a little slow in the brain department, but he is a real smooth operator on the dance floor, one could even say a professional at the Lindy-hop, the Mazize, the North Shore Zombie two-step(?) and other syncopated as sin rhythms of the original hipster era.
The ladies interest in Hicks comes with the complementary dirty looks from their husbands, parents or mobster sponsors. When a couple of elves bearing gifts accost our gumshoe on the street it is probably time for him to do his own vanishing act. Hicks would rather not go farther than a stone throw from his home town, but his boss, the newly arrived G-men in town and a spiked drink will make sure he wakes aboard the ocean liner Stupendica , bound for Europe and as clueless as the reader about what the heck is going on.

>>><<<>>><<<

So, Mr. Pynchon, where do you get your ideas from?
Apparently, he watches a lot of old Looney Tunes cartoons, because this is the main vibe I got from this novel:

A familiar mental prowl car now begins to drive back and forth across Hick’s brain, gonging high-low-high-low, signalling trouble for somebody, which Hicks would prefer to be anybody but him.

I can understand why it takes more than ten years for the author to publish something new: underneath the wacky actions and the burlesque actors lies a very solid foundation of research. The atmosphere feels authentic because one never knows for sure what is invented and what is actual trivia from 1932, what is relevant to the plot and what is just a detour. Most of all, the story is immersive for the intensive use of slang and of cultural references, in particular when we arrive in the Central Europe / Balkans part of the novel, at least for me as a native of the region.

Many are the rabbit holes waiting to trip the serious reader who wants to fact-check the author, and many are the rewards for those who can put aside the book in order to learn more about such things as the Maxfield Parrish nude pictures, an actress named Toby Wing, the Sombrero of Uneasiness, IMOPIO (Infernal Machines of Presumed Italian Origin), a hi-jacked Hungarian submarine from WWI currently hiding in Lake Michigan, Ojibwe spirit quests, pre-owned autogyros in tip-top condition barely flown, Sticky Toffee Pudding, Jack Rose cocktails the size of birdbaths, belinographs, 500 cmc Moto Guzzi racing motorcycles, contraband Ankhesenamun cigarettes, flying watermelons, theremin vacuum tubes, pareidolia, dedicated cruciverbalists, a lamp so stupefyingly tasteless it makes nonsense of the tasteless-lamp category itself, slivovitz effects on clarinet reeds, Blavatskian narkomats or the role of teuthologists in Valdivia Expedition of 1898-99.

Some of these are red herrings, some are actual clues to closing the Airmont ticket . So we’ll put on a zoot suit in midnight aubergine and electric kumquat , grab a big bowl of giant exploded kernels of corn fiery with eros paprika, drenched in goose grease, and try to solve the McTaggart ticket ourselves, as we move from Midnight in Milwaukee, with or without ukulele accompaniment, to mornings at the Crossword Suicide Cafe in Budapest, from Vlad the Impaler comedy skits around a Transylvanian campfire to a masked ball in Fiume/Rijeka (the Milwaukee of the Adriatic). It will go probably like this, and I’m quoting the novel for the next lines:

“Wait, now you’re talking about – vampires?”

“Talk to Lew Basnight. Get him to teach you the Curly Bill Spin. Something every gunslinger should know.”

“Egon. Wait. C’mon ... counterfeit cheese?”

“I say – Republicans and gangsters? How can such things be?”

“And while he was down there he bit my ankle. Rather like human existence, wouldn’t you say.”
“Y – well, no. Sure. Um – “
“Leave the deep thinking to others and get on with the action, that about cover it?”
“Action, well, I try to avoid that too, when I can.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Don’t worry, it doesn’t always avoid me.”

“Oh and this is Erzsebet, we’re eating her for Christmas.”

“Meanwhile, if I knew you were this cold I’d’ve asked you to keep a bottle of beer for me close to your heart.”

>>><<<>>><<<

Jumping catfish , give me a break, I will eventually get to the point, probably faster than Mr. Pynchon, with fewer detours and with less radioactive cheese (which is apparently the main source of the Bruno Airmont wealth and the reason InChSyn, the mad dog of Cheese Enforcement, are hunting him).

“Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?”

As if the story wasn’t already convoluted enough, beyond the scope of the most bright cruciverbalist, some supernatural elements put in an appearance: sapient cheese, Zdenek the golem, various apportists, vampires, card sharps and mentalists like Thessaly, the U-Ops agency secretary(she knows all about men). Here’s another rabbit hole I need to escape from ... but not before two examples of the inclusion of real historical references in this crazy carnival ride, like :

... the recently famous Mrs. Myrtle Bennett of Kansas City, who in the course of an otherwise friendly bridge game shot her husband dead for coming up two tricks short on a contract.
(According to wikipedia, the famous Ely Culbertson wrote about the killing and trial in his new magazine, The Bridge World. In lectures, Culbertson suggested that if only the Bennetts had been playing the Culbertson System of bidding, then 36-year-old John Bennett might still have been alive.)

or, One of the many interesting facts about Milwaukee is that along with the Harley-Davidson motorcycle and the QWERTY typewriter keyboard layout, it’s also the birthplace of the shoe-store X-ray machine.

>>><<<>>><<<

I have so many more ideas I want to include in this review, like the importance of the Oriental Attitude TM in sleuthing, or the various tips to be gleaned from the Gumshoe Manual TM, some lessons in Romanian insults and folk tales, lyrics in cabaret singing or sketches about night owls, freeloaders, accidental walk-ins, practitioners of esoteric arts, fearers of the dark, compulsive socializers, secret police, jewel thieves, firefly girls, drug dealers, cigarette-factory workers, tobacco smugglers and all the other walk-in actors here.
You probably already deduced that I am a fan of this exuberant and twisted style of story construction, of the journey being often more interesting than the destination. But I also know there is always a backbone, a solid core to the whimsical and the subversive Pynchon narrative. It takes a lot of digging to get at the gold, but that is probably one of the keys to his enduring popularity.
Prohibition Era Milwaukee was not chosen at random: the ethnic mix of the population, the criminality, the political conspiracies, all that laughter, dancing, music, drugs and chaotic loving are projected against the background of the coming storm:

We’re in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree. If anybody’s around to remember. Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark. Until finally we turn to look back the way we came, and there’s that last light bulb, once so bright, now feebly flickering, about to burn out, and it’s well past time to be saying, Florsheims, let’s ambulate.

You might say I am reading contemporary things into the cheese magnate that are not there, but what else can I do when I come across such comments:

how insulting to me personally, to, to be mentioned in the same breath with this feeble impersonation of a crime boss? To waste my talent not on an evil genius but on an evil moron, dangerous not for his intellect, what there may be of it, but for the power that his ill-deserved wealth allows him to exert, which his admirers pretend is will, though it never amounts to more than the stuborness of a child ...”

The title mentions shadows and tickets. One interpretation is that all these people are dancing their way to apocalypse.

“Some of us, if conscience had toenails, would be hanging on by just that margin. Yet conscience must find ways to go on operating inside history.”

We are still operating today inside history, and the times they are a-changing!
As our Hicks McTaggart might exclaim in the final hour of his ticket:

Abyssinia, hepcats and hot tomatos! I’m truckin’ off to Timbuktu!

[Faisal]

SAVE MY LIFEEEE

[Jason Furman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is only my third Pynchon. I absolutely loved every sentence and frequently wanted to call everyone I knew to tell them about all the dozen or so zany things Thomas Pynchon dreams up on just about every page from the Al Capone of cheese to German submarines in the Great Lakes to a grand set of conspiracies linking gangsters, fascists, the law and more unravelling in Budapest.

I liked the picaresque, the 1930s vibes, the humorous pastiche of hard boiled detective novels, the linking of the Midwest and middle Europe.

But I somehow found myself yearning for some of what realistic novels have to offer. The characters were, well, real characters--at least the men and one dame. But they still don't feel like real people with real psychology telling you about anything (unless you think it is a commentary on the links between monopolies and criminality and fascism).

So ultimately it felt like a lot of fun. And really A LOT. I would read it again but first there are another five novels to read.

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

An epilogue to Against the Day and a prologue to Gravity’s Rainbow, this text presents the confrontation of the old era of romantic intrigue as against the new era of mere survival within anomic space. We might paraphrase Gramsci by stating that the old text is dying and the new text struggles to be born--now is a text of monsters.

The latter has been growing for some time. The "kid underworld," for instance, full of lumpenized types such as "drifters, truants, and guttersnipes," is organized along a fuhrerprinzip: "'It's like Mussolini [...] the little ones report to bigger kids, who report to me, then I report to you, then on up the pyramid" (7). The state is functionally anomic, insofar as “The federals who had you in are likely just a front, OK? It’s the outfit that’s behind them, a nationwide syndicate of financial tycoons, all organized in constant touch against the forces of evil, namely everything to the left of Herbert Hoover. Worried about the next election, worried this latest Roosevelt if he gets in might decide to step out on his own, and even if he does revert to type after all, it might not be in time to stop the Red apocalypse that’s got them spooked out of what they think of as their wits” (76). Fear of bolshevism authorizes unprincipled barbarism.

There an excellent proof of this postulate, coming in several sections across the novel. First, the predicate:

'Spend your whole day around ice cream, you can begin to grow philosophical. You figure a state with two million dairy cows, a certain percent of that milk will be going into ice cream, nickel a cone, been that way forever. But it turns out there’s milk and then there’s milk. The kind you drink from a bottle is more expensive than the kind they use to make butter and cheese and ice cream out of. A two-price system is what they call it. Now we got syndicates of Bolshevik farmers looking to make it all one price, meaning the cost per scoop of ice cream goes up 70, 80 percent, next thing we’re looking at a dime cone, the banana split you thought you wanted goes up to 30, 40, 50 cents, no end in sight [...] It’s civil war. (15)

Then, the confrontation quickens: “Even with prices brought down to where they are, that’s still a hell of a lot of milk—if those goldurn Bolshevik collectives would let us sell it, of course. Right now they’d rather block all the shipments and dump them trackside” (222). Later, the fear materializes into open Hitler-Trump style violence:

Seems revolution has broken out in the U.S., beginning in Wisconsin as a strike over the price per hundredweight that dairy farmers were demanding for milk, spreading across the region and soon the nation. Milk shipments hijacked and dumped at trackside, trees felled across roadways and set aflame to stop motor delivery, all-night sentinels, crossroads pickets, roundups, ambushes, bayonet charges, gunfire, casualties military and civilian […] The Red Hour has struck at last. Bankers, capitalists, club-fellows, Fascists locally and abroad ignore Bruno’s pleas, offer no aid or comfort, fail to return ship-to-shore phone calls, often too busy thrashing desperately themselves against the relentless vortex of a sinking world order, others relying on their faith in the realities of blood and soil, which never go away, to save them. […] There was a coup. Gang of millionaires including a couple of Roosevelt’s own Brain Trusters, like that Hugh Johnson. General MacArthur is in command now. (283)

Of course the dairy capitalist lamenting the farmers’ activism got rich selling radioactive products: “Radio-Cheez was designed to stay fresh forever, in or out of the icebox, thanks to a secret, indeed obsessionally proprietary, radioactive ingredient” (83). By the time of the novel’s story, “Radio-Cheez dwindled to a strange afterlife among those who still claimed health benefits from the mysterious rays it continued to emit” (85), essentially the province of MAGA cultists who inject bleach instead of vaccines, their critical capacity afflicted by capitalist propaganda, making them unable to fend off either conspiracism or fascism.

One old spy from the era of intrigue thinks that “The whole idea, then as now, being to keep the bolshies behind the fence. [He] expects a ‘Great Simplification’ quite soon, Matters will then all be ever so much easier. Not like the last show. This time around, thanks to improvements in radio, internal combustion, aeronautics, no time zone will be spared, no more of those strangely named distant purgatories” (136).

In some ways this text is a preamble to Gravity's Rainbow, therefore, cogitating on the Zone avant la lettre. The protagonist thinks himself in Europe on a "'Routine ticket, only over here for as long as it takes, till everything’s back to normal,'" to which the response from an old spy is "'do you really not know? "Normal"? Things will never go back to the way they were, it’ll all just keep getting more, what the Chinese call, "interesting"'" (143). The time is accordingly out of joint: "'It’s a strange time we’re in just now [...] one of those queer little passageways behind the scenery, where popes make arrangements with Fascists and the needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact…many have been quick to blame it on the War, on the insupportable weight of so many dead, so many wrongs still unresolved'" (144).

Rather, "'everything since 1919 has gone pivoting, this year [1932-33] is when it all begins to come apart. Europe trembles, not only with fear but with desire. Desire for what has almost arrived, deepening over us, a long erotic buildup before the shuddering instant of clarity, a violent collapse of civil order which will spread from a radiant point in or near Vienna, rapidly and without limit in every direction, and so across the continents, trackless forests and unvisited lakes, plaintext suburbs and cryptic native quarters, battlefields historic and potential'" (157-58). We see “the current disarray of Central Europe, a terrain nearly 100 percent unreadable” (186).

We can expect further expansion: "it’s too dangerous over here anymore, I know that going back to the U.S.A. will only be buying time, that sooner or later no place will be safe" (193)--despite the protagonist's desire to "be back in Milwaukee, restored to normal life, to a country not yet gone Fascist" (210). Another character: "After the War he found he couldn’t return to the U.S., something there had gone screwy, it was badlands now, to be avoided. “But…there’s no money over here, all the money’s back in the States" (230-31). Not to put too fine a point on it, but "it’s increasingly likely that Jews, maybe even in unprecedented numbers, will soon be needing to change their address” (208).

Within this proto-zone setting, “the strange ring of historical debris that had once belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary" (228-29), the novel presents an eidos zoe for the pinkerton-style detective, based in discrete rules.

The protagonist's supervisor elucidates the fundamentals, setting up the story's primary dialectic: “To the great life lesson Money Talks [...] is now added Lesson Two—Romantic Partners Stray. For reasons that continue to escape me you keep questioning both these principles, which happen to form the bedrock of our profession, choosing again and again not to cash in whenever a sure thing is handed to you on a plate, and continuing to believe against all evidence in true and faithful love, although to look at you nobody’d ever know it. Another romantic chump” (23). He does understand it, however: “Basic rule of the business [...] one person’s big romance is another’s time and a half for overtime" (191).

The protagonist is also aware that his profession has a code, and he considers it often: "'not the recommended course of action,' as it says in the Gumshoe’s Manual” (48); "as the Gumshoe’s Manual points out, 'the alert operative can often gain valuable insight into the character of a Thompson user, though here, time being understandably of the essence, speed is recommended'" (49); "as the Gumshoe’s Manual advises time and again, to try and appear professional, already knowing it’s no use, he’s in the soup once again and his job will be to get in the way of and absorb any violence that might arise, as if there’s some Private Dick Oath like the one doctors take, with a no-harm clause, which there isn’t” (91); "as the Gumshoe’s Manual points out, quite useful if you want eyewitnesses to be focused more on the suit than the mug happens to be in it" (133); "the Gumshoe’s Manual advises, 'it’s funny—but then, when it does happen to you, you wonder why you ever thought it was funny.' The unspoken kiss-off, which the Manual doesn’t include but experience in the field confirms, being that after a while, if you should live so long, it gets funny again" (138-39); "As the Gumshoe’s Manual advises, always be watching for the next ticket to be sprung on you with no advance word, no front money, plus that all but certain promise of uncompensated overtime" (199); "Despite frequent warnings in the Gumshoe’s Manual not to consider hairdos as more than secondary factors" (242); “the gumshoe’s code, no daydreaming on the job" (268).

That this eidos zoe would have its own collective bargaining unit, despite its origin as strikebreaking proto-fascists, the "International Brotherhood of Tough Guys” (93), should be an unsurprising irony, an example of Rawls' veil of ignorance or Kant's antecedent position of choice. ("'Study your history, gabadost, you started off, mosta yiz, breakin up strikes, didn’t ya, same as Mussolini’s boys'" (112).)

That his code also has godelian silences should also be unsurprising: "'What we’re after is an Overlooked Negative, an all but forbidden topic anymore, a whole chapter about which, in fact, like certain books of the Bible, was deliberately left out when the Gumshoe’s Manual was put together'" (114). In fact, at times the code seems to lapse: "The Gumshoe’s Manual here is not as helpful as it could be. Hicks has even written them letters about it, never answered, sometimes even sent back unopened, despite such real and widespread concern in the business" (180). Despite all of this, we are misadvised "Don’t expect a philosophical cop" (213).

Ultimately, the independent operator, even a rules-based former quasi-fascist, for what it’s worth, can’t fit into the new era: “Best thing for you’d be change your name and get into some other racket, like international intrigue” (288). (My pet theory is that his smuggler acquaintance at novel’s end gets him back to the US, where he retires to the Berkshires to set up Hick’s Garage, about which Slothrop fantasizes.)

He is also advised against a Chandlerian interest in solving supererogatory mysteries: “Just so long as you ain’t another one of these metaphysical detectives, out looking for Revelation. Get to reading too much crime fiction in the magazines, start thinking it’s all about who done it. What really happened. Hidden history. Oh, yeah. Seeing all the cards at the end of a hand. For some, that kinda thing gets religious mighty quick” (45).

In the novel, there’s ghosts and golems, vampires and teleporting sorcerers, animistic objects and secrets fountains of youth—but it’s all Old World and all peripheral. In the US portion of the novel, it’s mobsters, fascists, corrupt bureaucrats, small-time crooks--all components of the modern US system, which of course will be imposed on the Old World soon enough. There aren’t monsters in the US—just administrators, capital, ideology.

Recommended for readers in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree.

[Bonnie G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am still not sure what I just read, but my time in the world of the "overlords of cheese" was delightful, and funny, and slyly relevant. "Some of us, if consciences had toenails, would be hanging on by just that margin." Feel current to anyone?

This is Pynchon at his lightest, zaniest, funniest, and most frenetic. There are big bands in underground nightclubs, end runs around prohibition, and the rise of a populist leader who is destroying all the color and light and creating bogeymen (in this case, the Jews) to rally the faithful and let everyone know that no life is sacred unless Adolf thinks so. Regardless of the concerns of the Al Capone of Cheese, his daughter, and Hicks McTaggart, the private dick who has stumbled into being her savior, this book is about fiddling while Rome burns and finding yourself in the ruins. So yeah, it's relevant.

The book takes place in Milwaukee (which sounds like a place name Pynchon would have made up if it did not exist) until the action moves to the European theater via a slowboat Hicks finds himself aboard through no intention of his own. There are conmen, second-rate spies, klezmer musicians and more. I also learned that Budapest was the "Lourdes not of hope but of despair" where people flocked for a more "authentic" suicide. It is a rollicking adventure tale for sure, but so much more than that. I enjoyed the heck out of this. Did it have the heft of Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon? No. Was it smart, well-researched, hilarious, and oddly moving? Absofuckinglultely. An unambiguous 5-star for me.

I listened to this read marvelously by Edoardo Ballerini and read the Kindle for portions, and the audio is the way to go here. Ballerini is sublime.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

After a twelve-year silence since Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon returns with Shadow Ticket, a compact but dense noir that feels like a "greatest hits" remix of his bibliography. Set in 1932, the novel begins as a Midwest detective caper reminiscent of Inherent Vice, starring Hicks McTaggart, a lindy-hopping PI hired to find a runaway cheese heiress. However, once the plot migrates from Milwaukee to the crumbling ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the book sheds its gumshoe skin and goes "full Gravity’s Rainbow," plunging into a paranoid fever dream of rising fascism, sentient dairy products, and pre-war entropy.

While the first act burns slowly—focused on the "Al Capone of Cheese"—the second half accelerates into that familiar, chaotic Pynchonian "Zone" of spies and anarchists. The brevity (under 300 pages) is bittersweet; it lacks the immersive sprawl of Against the Day, yet every sentence is packed with his trademark manic erudition. It is hilarious, terrifying, and distinctly Pynchon.

"Cheese, oh to be sure, cheese is alive. Self-aware, actually, maybe not exactly the way we are, but still more than some clever simulation."

"Sometimes all Hicks wants is to be back in Milwaukee... to a country not yet gone Fascist, a place of clarity and safety."

Will he ever write another doorstopper? At 88 years old, it is highly unlikely we will see another 1,000-page leviathan like Mason & Dixon. Shadow Ticket feels like a final, playful bow—a concentrated dose of his genius rather than a sprawling feast.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately there was very little in this book for me. There were a few funny, clever moments, but overall the detective story had almost no stakes and some nonsensical turns that weren’t quite weird enough to be interesting. The historical touches (bouncing from Nazi and Bolshevik sympathizers in 1930s Wisconsin and Europe) also felt like set dressing rather than saying anything meaningful about then or now.

[Markus]

Das war er also, der neue Pynchon. Anfangs bin ich auf der Leitung gesessen und dachte schon, das ist Käse. Bis ich es geschnallt habe. Privatschnüffler Hicks McTaggart aus Milwaukee stolpert aus einem einfachen Vermisstenfall in eine Welt, in der lokale Mafiosi, das ominöse "Internationale Käse Syndikat", Nazi-Sympathisanten in Bowling-Clubs, britische Spione, Motorradfreaks, Spiritisten und Jazz aufeinandertreffen. Wie üblich ist nie das drin, was draufsteht, und keiner ist der, für den man ihn hält. Der klassische Detektivroman entpuppt sich als Farce, als Satire und Groteske.

1930er Jahre, Wirtschaftskrise, Prohibition, Kleinkriminalität und globaler Faschismus, dunkle Mächte ziehen die Strippen und dazwischen Schlager mit infantilen Texten, Versatzstücke aus Popkultur, Wortspiele, flache Witze und Slapstick als Mittel, das Absurde und Abgründige sichtbar zu machen. Es gibts zwar sowas wie eine Handlung, allerdings ist sie ziemlich sinnlos. Es ist mehr eine Abfolge von Bildern und Szenen, die aus einschlägigen Filmen geschnitten sein könnten - typische Klischees, irgendein Held steckt endgültig in Schwiergkeiten, und wenn du glaubst, es geht nichts mehr, kommt irgendwo ein Zeppelin her und lässt dir ein Seil herunter …

Die narrative Entropie entspricht der Geschichte der 1930er Jahre — und noch mehr der Gegenwart: Eine immer mehr um sich greifende Auflösung aller bisher für verlässlich gehaltenen Strukturen führt von der schlichten Paranoia des Einzelnen zu einem kollektiven Gefühl der Realitätserosion. Was 1932 noch obskure Untergrundaktivität war, wird heute vom Internet durch die schiere Masse an Desinformation an die Oberfläche gespült. Bald hebt KI die Grenze zwischen Realität und Fake ganz auf und lässt alles in beliebigem Slop verschwimmen.

Gefallen hat er mir schon, der neue Pynchon, der Witz, die Seitenhiebe und vor allem die unzähligen enzyklopädischen Bezüge und Skurrilitäten. Unterhaltsamer anspruchsvoller Klamauk, aber nicht mehr. Die große Begeisterung ist diesmal leider ausgeblieben. Kann sein, dass die verrückte Welt des Thomas Pynchon seit 9/11 und Covid von der Wirklichkeit eingeholt wurde. (Dronald Tump könnte ja aus einem seiner Romane entlaufen sein.)

BTW: apropos Entropie. Goodreads scheint sich auch aufzulösen. Zuerst kann ich die review gar nicht speichern, später bessere ich einen Fehler aus, trotz Speichern ist der Fehler immer noch da usw. usf. ...