Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon
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Shadow Ticket
By Thomas Pynchon
Penguin, 2025
With me, Pynchon is personal. I’ve been reading him for more than five decades. His Gravity’s Rainbow reformatted my brain and became the novel against which I have judged, probably unfairly, all new fiction. So please pardon this unusually personal (and long) review of his new novel Shadow Ticket.
Gravity’s Rainbow is what I call a “monsterpiece”: a very long, profound and masterful work that some readers consider a monstrosity because of its genre mashing, formal idiosyncracies, and stylistic excesses. I used the term when reviewing Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob in these pages and should have used it when I wrote about Gravity’s Rainbow at 50, also here. Of all novels written by Americans since World War II, Gravity’s Rainbow is the grandest monsterpiece, the twentieth century’s Moby-Dick, both the monster whale and Melville’s monstrous novel.
Shadow Ticket is no monsterpiece. Not even close. Once rumored to be long, it is 293 pages. It has no monsters within it, and it’s not a creative monstrosity, some new or even old Pynchonian deformation of conventional narrative. Shadow Ticket coasts merrily along in its detective genre, linear like the gumshoe story Inherent Vice but with historical settings, first Depression America and then Eastern Europe 93 years ago. At 88, Pynchon is himself almost historical, and Shadow Ticket is his ninth novel. Maybe he just wanted to have some fun in what may be his final book. But he wasn’t free for fun. Having published two monsterpieces—Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon — Pynchon had created expectations or desires or wishes in his readers. This one hoped that he would go out with a deep dive into the deep state, even if his book imploded like that submersible descending toward the Titanic this spring.
I should have known better, because in Bleeding Edge Pynchon trolled me for just such a hope of depth. This professor was pleased to be noticed by the master but also disappointed. Here’s a description from my review of the novel:
“At the beginning of Bleeding Edge a documentary filmmaker named Reg Despard abruptly zooms in and out on scenes, causing viewers cognitive dissonance. Pynchon makes fun of an academic who submits Despard’s work to Brechtian analysis and who praises his film for its `leading edge’ post-postmodernism. I praised a similar scene of disorienting zooming in Gravity’s Rainbow as a metaphor for the Brechtian alienation effects of that novel’s `epic theater’ in my book The Art of Excess. Foolish me. Later in Bleeding Edge, Despard says he just shoots what is in front of him and intends `no deeper meaning.’”
Although Bleeding Edge includes a “DeepArcher” website down in the “Deep Web,” Pynchon was mostly shooting what was in front of him, another investigator on the streets with eccentrics and hustlers in New York City in 2001. The fall of the Trade Towers had little effect on the novel. Bleeding Edge lacked the usual Pynchon hard edge as well as depth. In my review, I speculated that one source of Pynchon’s earlier authority and depth as a novelist was his ability to occupy and revision historical periods, as he does in his two monsterpieces and in Against the Day, his longest novel. In Shadow Ticket his mix of historical research and wacky invention (one never knows which is which) makes it more substantial than the contemporary Inherent Vice, but this new detective plot offers no cognitive dissonance, no monstrosity disorientation. As one of many walk-on characters says to the obtuse Private Investigator protagonist, “Leave the deep thinking to others and get on with the action.”
Although the action and the P.I. in Shadow Ticket do move from Milwaukee to several European countries, the innocent (or guilty) abroad is familiar from many Pynchon novels all the way back to his first, V. As usual, his characters have fanciful names. They could be an alienation effect, I suppose, but they don’t push the reader to think about the people and politics—the purpose of Brecht’s alienation effects. The characters often talk about the movies of the time, and many of the characters seem satisfied with playing familiar cinematic roles (the dangerous broad, the sentimental sap). They speak then contemporary slang and have old-movie repartee, which must have been fun for Pynchon to write, a challenge like the 18th-century British English of Mason and Dixon. Because point of view is the usual Pynchonian selective omniscience, he’s free to do whatever he wants, sometimes bandying, sometimes brooding.
Near the end of Gravity’s Rainbow there’s an odd parenthetical passage in which a voice sounds like a novelist talking to his publisher: “I know what your editors want, exactly what they want” — a plot that can be outlined. Shadow Ticket has one, and here it is:
In Depression and Prohibition Milwaukee, Hicks McTaggart, a slab of a man even more dense than that “tanker” Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity’s Rainbow, works busting heads at union strikes. After he believes he has almost killed a man, Hicks decides to become a P.I. and is tutored by Lew Basnight, a detective in Against the Day. Hicks works for, it appears, a nationwide and maybe even worldwide detective firm called U-Ops. Mostly, though, Pynchon has him hanging around speaks, talking with the usual crew of Pynchon oddballs, and keeping an eye out for attractive women. Hicks has a part-time (and two-timing) girlfriend who worries about him because he seems threatened by the Mafia, early-adopting American Nazis, and the federal government. But the first half of Shadow Ticket is low energy hugger mugger until Hicks rescues one Daphne Airmont, the 20-something daughter of the millionaire cheese baron Bruno Airmont who, suspected of financial crimes, has disappeared.
In the second half of the novel, Hicks is dispatched to Europe to bring Daphne, now keeping company with a swing musician, back to America. Although Hicks several times crosses paths with Daphne, he is reluctant to pressure her back to the States. He also meets Bruno, the “Big Cheese” of cheese, but doesn’t try to turn him in. Hicks has gone native in what he feels is a culture more permissive than Milwaukee. If you need an earlier avatar, think Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors.
In the last fifty or so pages, Pynchon thankfully diminishes Hicks’ role, and the novel’s focus scatters among characters of different nationalities with various political loyalties and motives. These figures include, but are not limited to, Bolsheviks, Nazis, British spies, and motorcycle enthusiasts. The scenes in the final pages of Shadow Ticket resemble the chaotic “Zone” in Gravity’s Rainbow, but, unlike this new novel, it had a few well-developed characters to balance the frequently unbalanced folks wandering across the Zone’s downed or disputed borders at the end of World War II.
To really have something substantial in common with Pynchon’s boundary-crossing monsterpieces, Shadow Ticket needed to be much longer. This reviewer, now posing as a renegade “editor,” wants the author to halve the American expository half, triple the length of the European action half, provide some backstories for the many characters, reduce the coincidental meets and miracle rescues by air, keep the talking golem if necessary, start with cheesehead comedy and transition to the kinds of serious political intrigues that led to World War II (and to Gravity’s Rainbow). At the very end of Shadow Ticket, a submarine captain describes “an urge more ancient than anything he knows of to go deeper, to descend, rivets creaking, into depths legendary.” This doesn’t happen in or with the novel.
The changes I’ve “recommended” would have made Shadow Ticket more artistically monstrous, and the novel would also have fruitfully resembled a non-Pynchon monsterpiece about the same space and time, William Vollmann’s National Book Award novel Europe Central. In addition, Pynchon’s title would have gained density. A “ticket” is the word used by P.I.’s to refer to a case or assignment. Hicks’ ticket is initially straightforward, but it changes and leads readers into the unfamiliar shadowland depicted in the novel’s last pages. Unfortunately, the too numerous characters in this novel’s abbreviated Zone are like the shadows on the wall in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.”
Maybe the octogenarian Pynchon wanted what predictable editors and many readers want. Or he didn’t have the time or energy for—or, of course, interest in—transforming his surface-skimming detective story into something “deeper,” to use the operative word here. If you’re a fan of Pynchon, you’ll probably want to read Shadow Ticket. But be warned. You will find that what might be clever or funny inventions to newbies are sometimes shadows of earlier Pynchon materials. Most of the following examples are from Gravity’s Rainbow where Pynchon suggested that objects are alive and have souls. In Shadow Ticket it is cheese and motorcycles. The “They” of Gravity’s Rainbow reappear, as do the Tarot deck and the assertion that information is more valuable than money. Slothrop quests for the killer rocket 00000. Hicks searches for the most tasteless lamp ever invented. “Nothing so loathsome as a Sentimental Surrealist,” says Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow, but the word “sentimental” is all over the text of Shadow Ticket. When Slothrop is confused, he stutters words beginning with “a.” Now Hicks has that tic. There are an outlaw submarine, pet pig, and a bomb thrown into water in both Gravity’s Rainbow and Shadow Ticket. We have songs again, along with cute meets and witty kiss-offs. Vineland and Mason & Dixon have “mopery.” Now it’s “aggravated mopery.”
Pynchon has a long bit in Shadow Ticket about asports and apports, disappearances and reappearances during séances. Perhaps he was aware of familiar materials reappearing in the novel, and they became part of the fun, possibly some winking self-reference for the delectation of his fans. Or maybe he forgot what he had imagined earlier. For me, who believes fiction should defamiliarize, the reappearances and repetitions were not so much fun as sad. The sociologist Max Weber, a probable influence on Gravity’s Rainbow, would have called Pynchon’s refamiliarization “the routinization of charisma.”
Even the supposed mastermind villain of Shadow Ticket is short on charisma. A pop up character describes Bruno Airmont as a “deep desperado,” but he’s no monster. Arguing with her lover about her father, Daphne says he’s like a fake “monster in the Tunnel of Love,” maybe guilty of “family crimes, bad blood” but no outsized threat. Gaining a monopoly on cheese production doesn’t compare with Hitler’s rocket technology that a character calls “a monster by the tail” in Gravity’s Rainbow. Novels don’t have to use the word “monster” to become monsterpieces. I quote Daphne on Bruno to suggest the low stakes of the action in Shadow Ticket, the limitation of much of the novel’s purview to the personal, “evil” as a bug in an individual not a feature of the cultural systems that Pynchon anatomized in his monsterpieces.
I was admittedly sketchy describing the plot of Shadow Ticket because the story and characters elicited little intellectual engagement, and the novel caused me no fear. “Paranoia” is the psychological term most often associated with Pynchons’s work, but I prefer “fear.” I had no fear that “horrors” (such as a gross movie about food) in Shadow Ticket could impinge on my life and no fear that I would be mystified by Shadow Ticket when finished reading. Because of my tepid response to the book, my attention turned to its author: why write this novel?
Since almost nothing is known about Pynchon the author or man, one is forced to speculate—as one would about the meanings of his novel were it a monsterpiece. Although reportedly tall and self-conscious about his appearance, Pynchon is no monster. Not even an “art monster.” I know someone who had dinner with him. They talked about New York real estate. The genre limitations and frequent repetitions in Shadow Ticket have me thinking of the author as an organ grinder that one still sees in tourist areas of European cities. Organ grinders are usually older men who dress up in period costumes and push through the streets the machines from which they crank out over and over a small repertoire of simple, familiar, and entertaining tunes. The organ grinders I’ve watched appear to revel in the pleasure that their audiences display, even if it’s the pleasure of witnessing an amusing anachronism rather than the pleasure of listening to tortured music. So maybe my initial notion—that Pynchon just wanted to have (and maybe give) fun—is not so far off, and readers should enjoy one last turn of the crank for what it is. I would if I could, but the descent from Gravity’s Rainbow to Shadow Ticket is too steep and deep for me. I wanted Pynchon to remain a crank, a writer willing to take original or crazed ideas to and even beyond their aesthetic limits.
Two other authors of monsterpieces who are often associated with Pynchon—William Gaddis and Don DeLillo—also wrote short final books. Gaddis’s Agape Agape was partly about the player piano and Americans’ lust for entertainment. DeLillo’s The Silence was partly about television and that same lust updated. In old age, the novelists attacked machine-delivered popular “art.” Because Pynchon keeps cranking, Shadow Ticket ultimately suggested to me a motive and explanation deeper and bleaker than having fun. In Russell Banks’s last novel Foregone, the terminally ill filmmaker/narrator keeps going on and on and on for a documentary film crew because, he says, telling his story keeps him alive. With Banks in mind, I wonder if Pynchon keeps writing to keep writing to keep living, doing what he has been doing all those decades he was never seen in public. Keeps writing in Shadow Ticket a similar story with some of the same materials.
Banks’s protagonist dies. In Shadow Ticket no major character dies, and there’s no conclusive end to the story. Yes, the deaths of millions are foreshadowed with the rise of Hitler, but they are in the novel’s future. Like Slothrop, Hicks keeps averting death in the present. In Gravity’s Rainbow millions had already died, and in the first line, “A screaming comes across the sky,” we have the sound of future deaths, our deaths launched from afar. There is no screaming in Shadow Ticket, just the repetitive and simple music of the organ grinder cranking on and on, dodging that final ticket to what he usually calls the “Other Side.” I think it’s not an idle rhyme to say, “No death, no depth.”
Organ grinders in earlier times were sometimes given money to stop playing, to move on. I’m glad you are still here with us, Thomas Pynchon, but you have written two monsterpieces. You have done more masterful work than any of your contemporaries. Now you can stop.
Tom LeClair is the author of two critical books, two volumes of essays, and eight novels. At 81, he keeps on writing reviews.