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Synopsis:

Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.

Review:

The latest novel by Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket, is one of those late career novels that people will not read very much. When fans of Pynchon recommend his work, they will suggest the accessibility of The Crying of Lot 49 or the magnitude of Gravity’s Rainbow, or even Vineland or Inherent Vice due to their movie adaptations. Shadow Ticket is really a novel that only the fans can love and will not be one to recruit anyone to become a fan of Thomas Pynchon.

The story centers around Hicks McTaggart, a private investigator with a checkered past working in Milwaukee. He is hired to find a missing heiress to a cheese empire because he has met her before. The story follows Hicks as he looks around Milwaukee until he is eventually drugged and thrown on a steamship to Europe, where he looks around some more. It seems like Hicks is a character that does not really understand much of what’s going on around him. He was a hired as a strikebreaker to beat up people without any questions before he became a investigator, and he did not think much about how dangerous that could be. He is still this way with being an private investigator. He spends the entire book almost clueless to the peril he is in from several different side. He is more lucky than skilled when it comes to getting out of trouble, mostly because he is ignorant to how much trouble he is in. The novel slugs along, and it feels like once it makes the transition from the United States to Europe, the story slows down even more because at least Hicks knew what he was doing next when he was in the United States, who he can see for information, and how the case might be solved with what little skill he possesses. When he gets to Europe, he does not have any resources besides his blind, dumb luck. 

This novel is definitely style over substance. Some of the sentences could be an entire novel in their own right, and there are a few moments of really weird things happening that feel much more interesting than the main story about a guy who is just mucking around, trying to say something funny in every conversation, and looking to stumble into the solution. A few sentences and paragraphs are really rough, like they needed a bit of editing and cleaning up because the words are too intertwined within themselves to be unknotted easily. This makes Shadow Ticket difficult to read sometimes, and it took much longer to get through this 300 page book than most other books simply because I had to reread so much to figure out exactly what is trying to be explained. For most of his career, Pynchon has been worth this effort, but by the final pages of Shadow Ticket, the only thing I wanted the book to do was end so I could read anything else.