Good Night and Good Luck

Justin St. Clair reviews Thomas Pynchon’s new novel “Shadow Ticket.”

By Justin St. ClairOctober 7, 2025

• Fiction

• Noir

FANS OF THOMAS PYNCHON would be forgiven for thinking they’d heard the last of the elusive novelist. The man’s nearing 90, after all, and it has been more than a decade since the publication of Bleeding Edge (2013). In 2022, the Huntington Library acquired his literary archive in a deal apparently orchestrated by his son Jackson. Pyn-heads took this news as a sign that their favorite writer had finally entered the Zone of Silence, shuffled off in search of Ambrose Bierce or whatever secrets the desert holds. There were rumors, to be sure. Maybe a novel in the can that his wife, literary agent Melanie Jackson, would be willing, sometime down the line, to let loose. Or perhaps an authorized biography that had already been composed, ready and waiting for when the inevitable finally arrives. As it turns out, however, Pynchon had an encore planned. He’s always had a way with endings.

While its publication may have come as a surprise, Shadow Ticket (2025) will be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with the author’s work. His new novel has all the usual features to delight the faithful and frustrate those who mistake the tenets of realism for something more—for rules to read by, perhaps, or useful rubrics for evaluating fiction. We’ve got implausibly named characters (Glow Tripforth del Vasto) and sartorial malfeasance (“a summer-weight fresco in a citric shade”), gloriously unappetizing dishes (a casserole comprising “sport peppers, canned pineapple, [and] almost-familiar pork parts”) and drinks you wouldn’t dare consume (Old Overholt, Peach Nehi, and absinthe, over ice). The novel is replete with retrofuturist technologies, from autogiros to radiofacsimile machines; farcical side quests, including a convoluted search for La Lampo Plej Malbongusto, “the crown jewel of tasteless lamps”; self-reflexive voice-overs (“They both know,” the narrator intones, “that runaway fiancées and their duty-bound pursuers are expected to fall in love—stage, screen, and radio are full of it”); and a host of characters even more cartoonish than those who people the primary tale—from a costumed pig comfortably installed in a sidecar to a Bugatti-driving golem on the run from the amorous advances of his robot sweetheart, Dushka. “If you stay late enough,” the narrator confides, “everybody shows up here.” It is, in a word, splendid.

For the past 60 years, Pynchon has been crafting what might best be described as a national epic: a sweeping, multivolume account of American experience that counterbalances the subjunctive possibility of what might have been against the indicative record of history. Mason & Dixon (1997) covers the nation’s 18th-century founding and Against the Day (2006) the early decades of the 20th century, while Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is set in the 1940s, V. (1963) the ’50s, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) the ’60s, Inherent Vice (2009) the ’70s, Vineland (1990) the ’80s, and Bleeding Edge the end of the American Century. Shadow Ticket, then, fills a precise historical gap in Pynchon’s chronology: the 1930s. As ample clues make apparent, we’ve landed in 1932, the year “when it all begins to come apart.” Cognizant of its place between Pynchon’s two greatest novels, Shadow Ticket not only traces the historical forces at play in the interbellum period but also carefully embeds its storyworld within Pynchon’s larger fictive universe. Those familiar with Against the Day, for example, will note the reappearance of private eye Lew Basnight, doggedly resisting retirement and gently dispensing advice to subsequent generations of knights-errant.

Shadow Ticket opens with a bombing in Milwaukee, and before we know it, we’re knee-deep in another conspiratorial caper. As with much of Pynchon’s fiction, the reader has something of a diegetic stand-in—think Oedipa Maas in Lot 49 or Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice, protagonists who stumble through the evidence with the same bewilderment as their real-world counterparts. In this case, our fictional avatar is Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker who has graduated to company gumshoe, drifting leftward as he tries to do right but failing, typically, to avoid being typecast as a heavy-handed goon. As soon as Hicks begins investigating the bombing, things get complicated. There’s a mysterious U-boat in Lake Michigan; bowling alley Nazis and Italian bombaroli, a chorus girl, a gangster’s moll, and the Al Capone of cheese; bootleggers and union men; dance halls and dance bands; a viaduct hiding a ham radio den; crooked cops, scheming feds, and a couple of elves who’d like to see Hicks­—or someone—dead. Suffice to say, the investigation makes little headway, and it becomes increasingly apparent, even to Hicks, that he has been swept incidentally into larger machinations. Responsible parties, as we might reasonably guess, will never be fully revealed. “Get to reading too much crime fiction in the magazines,” Lew warns, and you “start thinking it’s all about who done it. What really happened. Hidden history.”

When the feds make Hicks a job offer that he clearly will not be permitted to refuse, he skips town, but not exactly on his own terms. Under coercion, he finally agrees to take the case that he’s been studiously avoiding—to locate and retrieve Daphne Airmont, cheese heiress, who has apparently run off with clarinet-toting Hop Wingdale and the Klezmopolitans. Daphne, with whom Hicks has a history, is the daughter of cheese baron Bruno Airmont, who accidentally leveraged a much-maligned commercial failure (think radioactive Velveeta) into a vast criminal empire. When the smoke cleared, “Bruno, bewildered as anybody, emerged as the last man, if not standing, at least able to stumblebum around, somehow finding himself in supreme command of a darker project he may never have learned the true depth of.”

After the failure of Radio-Cheez, Bruno goes quickly underground, leaving behind a “mountain of dummy corporation records, lawsuit summaries, dishonored checks, rap sheets and police reports.” In the novel’s second half, he plays the role of incompetent villain: not a ruthless industrialist from the Gilded Age, like Scarsdale Vibe in Against the Day, but rather a pointedly Trumpian excrescence, an upwardly failing idiot-toddler unable to suppress whispers from his past, ones that suggest a long history of pedophilia and incestuous desire. “To waste my talent not on an evil genius but on an evil moron,” one of his pursuers laments, “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.” Even at its most absurd, Pynchon’s art inevitably imitates life.

The second half of the novel is set in Europe, where Hicks, unsure whether he’s been dispatched or deported, is swept into a mysterious world of spies and double agents, bouncing around the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as the continent’s axis tips toward fascism. If rolling out a Cheese Lord as the tale’s antagonist weren’t enough to make it obvious, Shadow Ticket’s focus on the rise of global fascism lets even the inattentive know that, whatever the ostensible setting, this is a novel of the moment. Pynchon, after all, has always championed temporal conflation, folding history onto itself to expose the structures of power. “The more you dwell in the past and in the future,” he offers in Gravity’s Rainbow, “the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.”

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 downballot 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.

The shadow tragedy at the heart of this novel is progressive failure, in all its punning iterations. We’re stuck in 1932—or 2025, it doesn’t matter­—and we know what’s coming. Wandering Europe ahead of the inevitable, “sometimes all Hicks wants is to be back in Milwaukee, restored to normal life, to a country not yet gone Fascist, a place of clarity and safety,” the narrator tells us. But we’re marooned, always already in exile, knowing the subjunctive promise of the future will never arrive. Late-period Pynchon, or so the story goes, provides a modicum of hope: sailing toward celestial grace in Against the Day, finding community on a fogbound freeway in Inherent Vice, or discovering the domestic promise of family in Bleeding Edge. This isn’t that. It’s hard to spoil the ending—we all know, eventually, where plots lead. But this one’s heartbreaking: no conveyances to save us, no magic stories or metaphysical aeronauts, just the creeping dread of the living and the dead, doubly refracted through time’s passage. If Shadow Ticket turns out to be Pynchon’s final voyage, it’s hard to imagine one more poignant.