Shadow Ticket
The latest novel by Thomas Pynchon centers on a union-buster-turned-private eye, Hicks McTaggart, assigned to find a runaway Wisconsin Cheese heiress, daughter of the Al Capone of Cheese—both somewhere overseas—as an ostensible reason for a gumshoe plot. Grounded in a specific place and time, 1932 Milwaukee, the opening of Shadow Ticket is reminiscent of a black-and-white Depression-era Hollywood film, chock full of Midwestern shtick, American fascists and Nazis, Chicago-style mobsters, hepcat musicians, girl singers, swing dancers, a U-boat, wisecracking wildly named characters, and a narrator who loves wordplay, paragraph-long sentences sometimes written in lists (like this one). Facile, fast, and funny, the first half is mindboggling storytelling, a narrator’s voice that slips slyly in and out and in between dialogue and descriptive passages that blend seamlessly into a durée of lingo, all of which challenges readers to keep the beat “on 2 and 4” and an eye on the dance moves in this occasional tribute to swing bands.
If an offbeat and uncanny Prohibition novel is your “ticket” (also known as a detective case), Shadow Ticket may be your preferred cocktail, but be prepared for the second half of this caper, in which Hicks is shanghaied onto a ship, by way of an FBI-delivered Mickey Finn and two British agents, bound for Budapest where a bizarro world of international intrigue and a metaphysical stratosphere of apports and illusions are the norm. This conspiracy and paranoia-fueled novel by the 88-year-old, reclusive Pynchon may just be a commentary on today’s absurdist world, from the actual wrecking ball to the emblematic destruction of free will and democracy, and a bleak reality of stranded characters who seem unable to correct the course of their lives. Or it may be a joke on the reader, whose laughter ricochets inside the absurdity.
