Thomas Pynchon’s ninth novel starts out as a case for Hicks McTaggart, a private dick hired to find the daughter of “the Al Capone of Cheese”. (“A byword of terror in milk sheds throughout the land”.) Hicks is “a big ape with a light touch” whose style of investigation is peculiarly passive. As he is spirited from Milwaukee onto a transatlantic ocean liner and then to Europe, where fascism is sprouting, he becomes a hatstand for the author’s playful use of pulp detective tropes.
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.
There is talk of ancient plutocrats being de-aged, a diverting new technology called Face-Tube, robot girls, and lurid headlines in the Lowlife Gazette. There are “arguments on both sides”. And Hitler? “You can’t trust the newsreels”. There are other kinds of Hitler movies, presenting “a warmer, gayer Hitler, impulsive, unorthodox, says whatever comes into his head”. So it’s 1932, but relatably so.
The language is brightly-painted with, as Pynchon concedes “full cognisance of, and frequent reference to, The Gumshoe Manual”. There are torpedoes and tomatoes, elves and vampires. There is an unsurrendered Austro-Hungarian submarine, picking up tobacco, hooch, dope, guns, live passengers with dubious papers. There is a secret Indian reservation. There is magic. Things come and go, or apport, in a dream-like way. There are hats. The reader, most likely, will identify with “the sombrero of uneasiness”.
As the title suggests, Shadow Ticket exists in a glorious state of flux – the shadow of what, a ticket to where? Uncertainty, mostly, is the destination: the tale flits through a dreamy wonderland that invokes unreliable memories of every Hammett, every Chandler, every film noir ever made.
It’s not un-confusing. Weirdly, it isn’t depressing. Though Pynchon muses about an erotic desire for “the shuddering instant of clarity, a violent collapse of civil order”, he approaches this from a position of dark mockery, in prose that flows like jazz. Of the detective business, he writes “what we do, it’s only investigation, it’s like going to the movies.”
Sometimes, you got to laugh. Happily, worryingly, Shadow Ticket is a hoot.