Difference between revisions of "Shadow Ticket Reviews"

Latest revision as of 19:22, 7 October 2025

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The New York Times: Reviewing Thomas Pynchon...

Reviews

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10/07/25 Den of Geek Cartoon Zaniness of Inherent Vice In Shadow Ticket - Richard Chachowski: "For some, it might be a chaotic, plotless story filled with gangsters, cheese heiresses, and enough spies and counterspies to fill the entirety of the James Bond canon. But for most others, Shadow Ticket is the ultimate ode to Pynchon’s larger body of work – a nostalgic tip of the hat for all those readers who have stuck by the author’s side since V.’s publication in 1963. And in many ways, that’s achievement enough for a novelist of Pynchon’s undeniably immense caliber." Full review »

10/07/25 Literary Hub Thomas Pynchon Has Been Warning Us About American Fascism the Whole Time - Devon Thomas O'Shea: "Despite working in an archetypal mode, Pynchon’s United States is never black and white; it exists in a continuous tug-of-war that’s undetectable unless you’re using the right lens. It’s in the struggle against the cops, it’s in the fight between boss and the workers, it’s encoded relations between the soldier and the occupied; the agent and the undocumented." Full article »

10/07/25 Los Angeles Review of Books Good Night and Good Luck - Justin St. Clair: "Even the very title of this new novel is an effort to dwell, simultaneously, in the past and the future. The phrase 'shadow ticket' appears to have been lifted from the mammoth four-volume History of U.S. Political Parties that Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. edited in the early 1970s. In one of its essays, 'The Progressive Party, 1912 and 1924,' historian George E. Mowry explains the demise of Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, popularly known as the 'Bull Moose Party.' It collapsed, he argues, as a direct result of the party’s failure to build a national network of down-ballot candidates. While restrictive election laws were partially to blame, progressives’ own willingness to compromise, particularly in the Midwest, prevented them from fielding a full slate, and this ultimately spelled the movement’s doom. 'Because of the bargains made with many midwestern progressive Republicans,' Mowry writes, 'the Progressive ticket in these areas was largely a "shadow ticket."' By 1916, the party had dissolved." Full review »

10/07/25 Unherd - Thomas Pynchon’s world of shadows - William T. Vollmann: "The bottom line is that Hicks McTaggart’s Milwaukee is hopelessly far away. Fortunately, when hailed by Stuffy Keegan’s submarine he was informed, maybe even guaranteed, that thanks to some “swell beer joints”, the home base of Fiume (AKA Rijeka) is “the Milwaukee of the Adriatic”. Anything can happen in one Milwaukee or another, maybe even something good, for even “as Hicks begins to understand that he’s not going back to the States right away”, Pynchon gives him one lulu of a ticket, because his ever closer friend Terike starts teaching him Hungarian, which necessarily involves kissing lessons. Full Review »

10/07/25 The Independent - Inside the cult of the elusive Thomas Pynchon - Martin Chilton: "The novel displays some of Pynchon’s finer traits – including his debunking attitude towards institutions – although I feel out of step with the glowing critical praise it has received. The novel is extremely dialogue heavy and those who love the book love the dialogue. The boiler plate conversations and quips lack the verve and authenticity of Raymond Chandler’s detective fiction of that era. To me, it sometimes felt as though Pynchon had continuously raided a dictionary of 1930s slang for wordplay. Perhaps I missed the humour; perhaps lines such as 'you packing any heat?' or 'what other kind of dame is there?' are simply homage to the detective story genre." Full article »

10/06/25 Newcity – A Golden Ratio: Taking the Measure of Thomas Pynchon's Shadow Ticket - Annette Lepique: "I don’t want to spoil any more of the book, so please trust me when I say this book is a gift from one of America’s last remaining men of letters. Also, for us Chicago and Milwaukee readers, “Shadow” is not only a madcap and moving inter-war caper of the supernatural variety, but an unexpected shoutout to a corner of our region’s history. Though only around a third of the book takes place around the Great Lakes, it is just plain fun to recognize some of the places within “Shadow”’s pages. Pynchon has the uncanny gift of transforming the places that you may know into a grand adventure: like the seedy after-hours goings-on at the Green Mill, or Daphne’s teenage flight to freedom from a defunct Winnetka sanatorium, or even still the ritzy beginnings of the still-ritzy Plaza del Lago, a first-of-its-kind outdoor shopping center. Full Review »

10/05/25 The Quietus - Nocturnal Admissions: Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket Reviewed - Aug Stone: "Which brings us to a central theme of the novel, the world of ‘apports’ and ‘asports’, occult terms for things showing up or disappearing out of nowhere. A particularly Pynchonian idea. Perhaps most famously, it’s the fate of main character Tyrone Slothrop’s Hohner harmonica in Gravity’s Rainbow. Not so much its loss – falling down the Roseland Ballroom toilet in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in either 1938 or ’39 or ’40 depending on who you ask – but its reappearance five to seven years and almost 600 pages later in the German countryside, where he proceeds to soak it in a mountain stream overnight. Shortly after this, Slothrop himself will begin to disappear from GR’s narrative. But the comings and goings in Shadow Ticket are more immediate. And in true Pynchon fashion, they will centre on a truly tasteless lamp, highly sought after by collectors, whose materialisation connects a number of different plotlines." Full review »

10/05/25 Reason - Lindy-Hopping Nazis and Golems With Guns: The Return of Thomas Pynchon - Jesse Walker: "But now a door has materialized between the author and the mainstream. Paul Thomas Anderson's impressive film One Battle After Another, based very loosely on Pynchon's 1990 book Vineland, hit No. 1 at the U.S. box office in late September, giving the writer an opportunity to pick up new readers. Almost immediately afterward, a fresh product appeared for those newcomers to buy: Pynchon's ninth novel, an acid noir titled Shadow Ticket. This one offers the writer in a relatively accessible mode. There are no dense passages that stretch on for pages, no detours into literal rocket science, no homoerotic encounters with Malcolm X. It's short, it's funny, and its core plot—private eye chases runaway dame—is familiar enough to give a cautious reader something to cling to as the book gets stranger." Full review »

10/03/25 4Columns - Absurdities, conspiracies, homegrown fascists: in Thomas Pynchon’s novel set in 1932, the more things change, the more they stay the same. - Brian Dillon: "Many of Shadow Ticket’s pleasures come from immersion in its period, to a point way beyond parody or pastiche and into some wildly imagined but sedulously recalled (or researched) level of precision. The action is soundtracked by popular song both real and imagined: 'Midnight in Milwaukee, / Not exactly Paris. . . .' Genuine jazz musicians ply the clubs: 'Jabbo Smith and Zilner Randolph going after high F’s and G’s not without some jugular risk.' There is a craze for radioactive foods and medicines, and (mimicking spiritualist vibes of the day) apparently paranormal weirdness afoot when objects start vanishing into thin air. But most impressive is the language, a mix of authentic slang and Pynchon’s own coinages that makes every page a joy and just demands to be noted and recited: 'ya ten-minute egg, you . . . a jazz drummer on temporary booby-hatch leave . . . Hicks bringing out a fin as several hands reach simultaneously . . . Have you been to the company brain-croakers about this yet? . . . Hicks can hear sounds of noodle-flexing sociability'—and so on. Then there are the trademark ludicrous names: Thessalie Wayward, Hoagie Hivnak, G. Rodney Flaunch 'of the Glencoe Flaunches'." https://4columns.org/dillon-brian/shadow-ticket Full review »]

10/02/25 Uncut - Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket reviewed: darkly comic detective caper set during Prohibition-era - Alasdair McKay: "The book completes Pynchon’s fictional jigsaw of the 20th century. The story’s relationship with time and place is fluid. The main feature of Milwaukee in 1932 is that it isn’t quite Chicago. Pynchon refers to 'pre-fascist space time.' Also 'a strange time .. one of those queer little passageways behind the scenery.' Readers in search of contemporary echoes won’t be disappointed. In a tale of goons, conspiracists, electoral jiggery-pokery and popcorn cooked in goose fat, the most feared of organised crime groupings is New York Real Estate.'" Full review »

10/02/25 New Republic - Thomas Pynchon’s Strangely Stripped-Back Noir - John Semley: "Because Pynchon’s books are such rarities, the Halley’s Comet–like arrival of a new one at the current 'strange time' cannot help but feel a little auspicious. It is tempting to read Shadow Ticket’s dread about the rising tides of fascism, antisemitism, and general lunacy against the derangements of our current moment — and of the United States specifically. (One may be reminded of Pynchon’s winking warning in his description of Against the Day: 'No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.') When a cop in Shadow Ticket decries the mega-wealthy cheese tycoon Bruno Airmont as not “an evil genius but … 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 stubbornness of a child…,” the description naturally calls to mind any number of present-day personalities. Ditto the warnings of an energized authoritarian creep. 'I know that going back to the U.S.A. will only be buying time,' the heiress Airmont warns, 'that sooner or later no place will be safe.'" Full review »

10/02/25 New York Times - Thomas Pynchon’s New Novel Isn’t His Best. It’s Still Good Fun. - Dwight Garner: "I haven’t come close to covering the amount of pseudo-serious life this novel contains. There are droll and erudite disquisitions (and throwaway lines) on bomb-making and tacky lamps and how to bake bowling balls. Strange casseroles are served, Vernors ginger ale is celebrated and Harley Davidson flatheads are driven to vivid effect. Hooch wagons are exploded, mickeys are slipped, a trans-Atlantic voyage is undertaken. Sheepshead, the regional card game, is played in marathon sessions." Full review »

10/02/25 Alta Journal - Conspiracy Theory: In Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon comes full circle — and then some. - David L. Ulin: "I want to be careful not to reduce Shadow Ticket to a political parable; it takes a long time to write a novel, after all. I can’t say when Pynchon began to work on it, and I don’t want to assume the presence of an agenda, since that is not how literature works. Instead, I’d like to suggest, what’s at work is a matter of the author’s sensibility, an exploration of his signature concerns. Fiction not only as an act of the imagination, in other words, but also, perhaps, as one of restitution, restoration, in which, as Pynchon hinted in his 1990 novel, Vineland, 'secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed.'" Full review »

09/30/25 The Guardian - Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon review – his first novel in 12 years tunes into rising fascism in the US - Xan Brooks: "As for hadow Ticket itself, the book is an antic mixed bag, a diverting tour of old haunts. Pynchon’s yarn sets out with a song in its heart and mischievous spring in its step, but it edges into darkness and its final forecast is bleak. The writer knows what’s to come and where this roll of foul history will eventually lead: towards a clownish world order epitomised by men such as Elon Musk, who recently boarded a Wisconsin stage with a cheesehead hat on his head and the American flag at his back. Cheese fraud is a front and period details provide cover. But the fascist past isn’t dead, it’s stinking up the joint right this minute." Full review »

09/30/25 L.A. Times - Thomas Pynchon's Shadow Ticket is a 1930s detective tale with a sucker punch ending - David Kipen: "For most of the way, though, Shadow Ticket may remind you of an exceptionally tight tribute band, playing the oldies so lovingly that you might as well be listening to your old, long-since-unloaded vinyl. The catch is, for an encore — just when you could swear the band might actually be improving on the original — the musicians turn around and blow you away with a lost song that nobody’s ever heard before."Full review »

09/29/25 The Washington Post - Thomas Pynchon’s new detective novel is bonkers and brilliant fun - Jacob Brogan: "Fortunately, real life never really comes into it in this rollicking, genially silly and ultimately sweet novel, set in the early 1930s. 'When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line,' Pynchon writes in the book’s opening sentence. The town in question is Milwaukee, a minor metropolis increasingly occupied by the mob (or the 'Outfit,' as Pynchon calls it), but the real trouble comes in the form of a bomb that explodes under booze smuggler Stuffy Keegan’s 'hooch wagon.' Though Hicks is curious, Boynt soon has him on another case, attempting to track down the missing heiress Daphne Airmont, who seems to have ditched her fiancé and headed off to parts unknown with a clarinet player. Through it all, Hicks is haunted by an incident from his strikebreaking days, when his leather sap disappeared just before he could bean a union agitator with it. Before long, he’s getting advice from a psychic who sends him to Lew Basnight, an old-school type visiting this novel from Pynchon’s lumbering masterpiece Against the Day (2006), for gunfighting tips." Full review »

09/22/25 The New Yorker - Reading the New Pynchon Novel in a Pynchonesque America - Kathryn Schulz: "Is this act of riding off into the sunset ironic, a comment, as with “Mason & Dixon,” on the evils committed in America by the allure of westward expansion? Or is it what Hicks should have done many plot twists ago—escape the forces scheming to control him by running away with the woman he loves? Or is it just Pynchon turning around in the saddle to wave farewell? Who knows. The ticket, the shadow ticket, “Shadow Ticket”: all these remain unresolved, leaving us with the enduring hope of the Pynchon universe, that everything in it means something. At some point, though, meaning that is sufficiently cryptic becomes indistinguishable from no meaning at all." Full article »

09/22/25 The Times - Thomas Pynchon — our verdict on his first novel in over a decade - Mark Sanderson: "Pynchon’s fans will be delighted to make the acquaintance of such zany-monickered characters as Special Agent TP O’Grizbee, the female hack Glow Tripforth del Vasto and the “noted apportist” Dr Zoltan von Kiss. Others may not get beyond the first dozen pages. If he wants to, Pynchon, wired with research rapture, can take you far beyond boredom. Here, the tedium is the message. On the other hand, no one else fuses quantum physics and literary allusion (Shakespeare, Joyce, Borges, Conrad, Burroughs, Dickinson and Rilke) like he does. In his world, as on the web that did not exist in 1973, everything and nothing is connected." Full article »