Shadow Ticket Reviews
Review aggregators
Reviews
Please add any relevant reviews as they come in. Blog reviews are fine as long as they're substantial and more than a few paragraphs.
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 »
10/06/25 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 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 »
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 »
09/22/25 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 »
