words by Inés Paris
photo by Heidi Kewin
Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Shadow Ticket, his first since 2013’s Bleeding Edge, will not win over sceptics, and that is almost certainly the point. Yet the most conflicted reaction has come from longtime readers and fans. Review outlets such as Open Letters Review and Cleveland Review of Books suggest confusion, even disappointment: a sense that something is missing and that this novel does not deliver what is expected of Pynchon as an author and cultural figure. This raises an uncomfortable question for anybody who likes him: Is Pynchon still a misunderstood writer, or has he produced a novel that deliberately refuses to deliver what his readers expect?
I became a Pynchon fan when I first read The Crying of Lot 49 and witnessed a friend at university absolutely despise it, to the point of visible anger. I found this reaction delicious. Pynchon is that kind of writer: a litmus test. Whenever I mention Pynchon, there are three possible responses, the most common being: “Who is that?” The rest are cleanly divided between “I love him” and “I hated that one book I read”. If you fall into the latter category, the combination of outlandish names and impossible dialogue in Shadow Ticket will not change your mind. You should read it anyway, since I would argue it is one of his easiest works and also pretty funny, and also because we live in a moment in which any fiction that makes us confront human-made horrors – and the way we justify them – is a must.
Shadow Ticket is not the first time Pynchon has centred a novel on a noir detective. He previously used this figure in Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013). Yet Hicks, the protagonist of his latest novel, marks a subtle but important departure from these earlier private investigators. Like its predecessors, Shadow Ticket is set against a historically charged moment, 1932, coinciding with the rise of fascism in Europe and the final years of prohibition in the United States, in the wake of the Great Depression. Unlike Doc Sportello or Maxine Tarnow, Hicks appears persistently conflicted about his role in the narrative itself. He moves through the novel as if reluctant to participate, resisting not only the case but also any stable affiliation with the political, criminal, or social groups that surround him, as though the character possessed a will of his own, preferring to remain outside the story altogether.
Hicks’ importance lies not in what he does, but in what he fails to do. He is not a heroic figure, nor even a particularly decisive one, but a man largely carried along by circumstance, whose passivity mirrors the political drift the novel interrogates. His single moment of hesitation – when his gun inexplicably disappears just as he is about to kill a demonstrator – marks the only clear moral interruption in his trajectory. After that, events unfold around him rather than through him. When Hicks becomes entangled in the investigation of a bombing, he is gradually drawn into overlapping criminal and political networks where violence, ideology, and opportunism coexist without clear demarcation. It is in this context that fascism enters the novel as a casual proposition, voiced by an old mentor who treats Nazism less as an ideology than as a social opportunity:
- How about your pal Hitler, you’re handing your life over to this li’l comedian now?
Hey, just a friendly brat-and-beer get-together- we’re National Socialist, ain’t it? So- we’re socializing. Try it, you might have fun.
The Nazz-eyes? Sure, I’ll be in touch with you about that one…
Enjoy it while you can, pal… Don’t wait too long, Leaving th’ station, now’s the time to climb on board, later maybe it won’t be so easy…”
On the surface, Shadow Ticket is unusually restrained for a Pynchon novel. We follow Hicks, a private investigator whose “ticket” – slang for case – draws him into a web where mobsters and authorities are effectively indistinguishable. The narrative is mostly linear and the plot more or less conventional – a classic in noir fiction but something that has shocked Pynchon’s fans, so I wondered why he chose it. Why would a writer, having written chapters in other books in which the narrator was a lightbulb, take such an “easy”, relaxed approach in this one?
This formal restraint appears deliberate. In contrast with the excess and fragmentation often associated with Pynchon’s work, Shadow Ticket privileges clarity and linearity, as if refusing to compete with a world already saturated by chaos. The Shadow of the title is therefore not a mystery to be solved but a condition to be traced. It names power, capitalism, and the quiet merging of criminality and governance that underlies the novel’s seemingly conventional noir surface. Hicks is positioned as a guide through this Shadow, but he fails in that task, just as the reader does. The Shadow cannot be isolated or confronted directly; it permeates everything beneath the narrative surface – the Cheese Mafia, the submarines, the secret services, the overlapping systems that render authority indistinguishable from crime. Throughout the novel gangsters, mobsters, Hicks himself, and even Nazis are presented without the language of monstrosity. Their actions are normalised, often appearing banal. This is precisely the novel's most unsettling claim: that fascism does not emerge as a sudden rupture with democracy or freedom, but rather through accumulation or minor accommodations that gradually transform microfascist gestures into institutional power.
As always with Pynchon, this bleak vision is punctured by playfulness. Shadow Ticket may not be the author’s funniest or cleverest novel, but it is studded with impossible names, absurd songs, and extended digressions, including a memorable meditation on cheese consciousness. Cheese, alive and self-aware, becomes both a joke and a metaphor: a product of capitalism that acquires agency, desire, and even spirituality. The humour does not soften the novel’s politics; it sharpens them:
Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?
Cheese, oh, to be sure, cheese is alive. Self. Aware, actually, maybe not exactly the way we are, but still more than some clever simulation. We’re at a pivot point here in the history of food science, a strange new form of life that was deliberately invented, like Doctor Frankenstein or something-“
“Cheese- wait, cheese…. Has feeling you say? You mean like… emotions?
Long-time spiritual truth in Wisconsin. Thousands of secretly devout cheezatarians…”
Secretly?
Only waiting of our moment. We have to be careful, don’t we… wouldn’t want to go through all that Christian-and Romans business again, would we?”
The novel’s endings (there are three) refuse closure. The most haunting one involves a submarine described as “an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time… forever on the move.” Fascism, here, is not defeated but submerged, drifting toward some future emergence. Early in the novel, there is talk of a submarine trapped in a lake, raising the unsettling possibility that fascism never truly left at all; it merely waited. Considering the current geopolitical climate , this image lingers uncomfortably.
Structurally, the novel mirrors this tension. Divided into two parts, moving from the United States to Eastern Europe, it opens with deceptive calm before giving way to a more frantic, recognisably Pynchonian second half, populated by golems, love triangles, and paranormal escapes. The shift feels less like escalation than revelation. If there is hope in the novel, it resides in this chaos, in the hard-boiled dialogue echoing classic Hollywood detective films and in absurd digressions about cheese or pig rescuing which gestures toward a fragile freedom grounded in movement. “Stay on the move,” Hicks is advised at the end.
Ultimately, Shadow Ticket offers neither answers nor solutions. The multiple endings make that refusal explicit. Pynchon is not interested in telling us what to do, only in forcing us to look. If this is your first Pynchon read, enjoy the ride; there is little else you can do. You cannot read him the way you read other writers, not even contemporaries like Don DeLillo. The term “Pynchonian” exists for a reason. He is unique, occasionally infuriating, and – right now – disturbingly necessary. The grim reality we are living in could be the reason why he has decided not to explain anything, to leave things open.
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Inés Paris Arranz holds an MA in North American Studies (with a mention in Literature and Visual Culture) from the Franklin Institute and an MA in Education, and is currently pursuing an MA in Hispanic Literatures (Basque, Catalan, and Galician). She works as a bookseller and has published poetry in literary magazines and reviews. Her first poetry collection appeared in 2023. Deeply interested in contemporary literature and literary retellings, she is based in Madrid and loves knitting. She is a book reviewer for Zimmer Magazine, an article writer and helps in any way she can with this great project.