Review: The return of Thomas Pynchon

Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon’s latest (and, for an octogenarian author, possibly last) novel, opens with a bang.

It is 1932, and Hicks McTaggart, a private eye in the employ of Unamalgamated Ops and former strikebreaking thug-for-hire (a “torpedo,” in the novel’s noir patois), is “ankling his way” around Milwaukee’s Third Ward. He is keeping an eye on some suspicious types and hungrily sniffing Italian food that he can’t afford this late in the pay period, when a bomb goes off. Hicks soon gets caught up in intrigues that have him all over Milwaukee and Chicago, on a transatlantic cruise, and in Belgrade, Budapest and Fiume, the port city in Croatia. 

His adventures and misadventures involve European motorcycle gangs, a cocaine-crazed Interpol officer, a Czech golem driving a Bugatti, German-American Hitler sympathizers, bizarre foods (“Wisconsin lasagnas with dead raccoon somewhere in the recipe”), an international cheese syndicate, a submarine gliding beneath the ice on Lake Michigan, a search for “a lamp so stupefyingly tasteless it makes nonsense of the tasteless-lamp category itself,” airborne gyroscopes and—the list goes on quite a while.

Shadow Ticket is the ninth novel from the famously media-shy author. (The most frequently used adjective is reclusive, though this seems to imply something amiss with a man who avoids the global celebrity apparatus rather than the other way around. He has, however, twice been a guest on “The Simpsons.”) Pynchon—now, with Don DeLillo, one of the last living members of the generation of writers that also included Philip Roth, John Updike and Cormac McCarthy—first made a splash in 1963 with the densely allusive novel V, long considered a classic of the American postmodernism of that period. His third novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, won the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction, and his mixing of genres, convoluted narratives, jokey dialogue and display of wide learning, in that novel and others, have been a significant influence on many writers (perhaps most clearly David Foster Wallace, and Infinite Jest in particular).

Like Pynchon’s previous works, Shadow Ticket is about atmosphere, style and slangy dialogue, not the plot. But to an even greater degree than in Pynchon’s other novels, the plot here does not quite cohere. Whether this is a flaw or irrelevant comes down to a matter of taste for the postmodernist style that the literary critic James Wood, two and a half decades ago, termed hysterical realism. 

That maximalist profusion of detail and incident characterizes Shadow Ticket, though this new novel, like its two predecessors Bleeding Edge (2013) and Inherent Vice (2009), might also be categorized as zany neo-noir—or slapstick noir—for developing the noir tropes of the 1930s and 1940s (private detective, crooked cops, hazardous dames, barbed repartee, colorful criminal characters—all of it in a convoluted tangle) in a less hardboiled, wackier direction. This comes through largely in Pynchon’s lingo, a mix of the familiar and odd coinages that seem to be Pynchon’s own: dame, pins (for legs), kisser, heater (for gun) and speak (for speakeasy), of course; but a dame is just as often a tomato, a cigarette a gasper, a coffin a wooden kimono and a diamond ring a sparkler (including one so large “you’d expect to find one or more Black Hawks skating around on it”).

Shadow Ticket, like much of Pynchon’s oeuvre, transpires in a transitional era with gathering gloom in the periphery. In Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the groovy, trippy late 1960s are starting to overtake the staid early 1960s. In Inherent Vice, the heady (so to speak) atmosphere of the psychedelic, bohemian 1960s begins darkening after the Manson murders and as Nixonian surveillance and policing get more aggressive. In Vineland, the last lingering fumes of the 1960s dissipate as the Reagan regime gathers strength. In Bleeding Edge, the carefree 1990s come to an abrupt and fiery end with Sept. 11.

The year 1932 functions similarly in Shadow Ticket, though here the sense of impending darkness is greater. The post-war (World War I, that is) good times have come to an end with the Great Depression, and over in Europe, Nazi influence spreads. In Hamburg, one of the later destinations in the book’s dizzying peregrinations, neighborhoods once “solidly Social Democratic and Communist are suddenly all infested with brownshirts” singing the “Hitlernazionale,” labor’s beloved “Internationale” but with fascist lyrics, and in the jazz clubs, “[blues] licks have largely given way to major triads.” 

There is thus a tension, a form of dramatic irony, in the reader (if he or she knows even a smidgen about World War II) knowing the fate that will soon befall the world, even though the characters are only beginning to glimpse “the relentless vortex of a sinking world order.” 

A few passages in the final pages of the novel suggest that Shadow Ticket is, at least obliquely, a counterfactual history, that the things that have transpired in America have made it entirely different and more frightening. 

But Pynchon being Pynchon, it’s not all gloomy and portentous. It’s also zany, even cartoonish. Characters with both prolonged and fleeting presence in the book have names like Vivacia Airmont, Stuffy Keegan, Glow Tripforth del Vasto, Boynt Crosstown, Angie “Vumvum” Voltaggio, Don Peppino Infernacci, Giancarlo Foditto (“or Dippy Chazz, as he’s known in the lounges of the underworld”) and Squeezita Thickly; and they hang out in places with equally colorful names—Club Hypotenuse, Velocity Lunch, the Crossword Suicide Café, an ocean liner called the Stupendica.

There are the lengthy names of organizations and principles, with acronyms that, depending on the reader’s receptivity to this kind of humor, can be funny or quickly wear thin, such as the Bureau Administering Golems Employed Locally (BAGEL), the Law of Unintended Effects (LOUIE) and the most memorable (and maybe most juvenile), the Semi-Military Entity Greater Milwaukee Area (SMEGMA). And there are the zany images, whether metaphorical, such as the “sombrero of uneasiness,” a gumshoe’s premonition of bad things on the way, or literal, such as a scene in which the nightclub chanteuse April, after watching a movie with Hicks McTaggart, had “eaten six cubic feet of popcorn and was using his tie to wipe the butter off her fingers with.” This latter quotation is also an example of the sort of breeziness and deliberately incorrect grammar that is one of the hallmarks of Pynchon’s style.

By the end of Shadow Ticket, readers have accompanied McTaggart on all manner of hijinks, with an enormous cast of characters. Taken individually, the scenes are often amusing for their high-velocity oddness and Pynchon’s great capacity for verbal inventiveness—the names and acronyms, but also descriptions of “precarious sunlight,” dives where “the smell of beer is generations deep” or “lunch dramas passing like storm fronts.”

On the other hand, it’s hard to know what it all adds up to. 

Even more than in some of Pynchon’s previous works, Shadow Ticket’s many subplots and intrigues lead one to another without necessarily resolving or seeming to progress toward a resolution; the wacky antics are the point as well as a subversion of most conventions of narrative. To return to the “hysterical realism” designation, though, it now seems, in 2025, that whether through the uncanny prescience of a great artist or a chance confluence of stylistic tics and preferences, Pynchon’s fictions are responding to a world that continues to get weirder all the time—realism for surreal times, if you will. 

The frenetic pace, the paranoia, the global conspiracies that may or may not exist, secret organizations both laughable and terrifying, the absurdity, the pervasive ironizing of everything, the layers of illusion and confusion with no solid reality behind it all—from a certain perspective, the world of Shadow Ticket, and much of Pynchon’s corpus, looks, in our world as it is now, more realistic, more plausible, than what has traditionally been called realism. 

However much or little one enjoys Shadow Ticket, it is true as much for our world as it is for that fictional one that, to quote Pynchon, things “will never go back to the way they were, it’ll all just keep getting more, what the Chinese call, ‘interesting.’”

This article appears in January 2026.

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