Shadow Ticket Reviews
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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.
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 »
