Lactose Intolerance

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon. Penguin Press, 304 pages. 2025.

In a 1990 review of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, John Leonard described the book as “unbuttoned, as though the author-god had gone to a ballgame.” Vineland is maybe my personal favorite Pynchon, although choosing one feels like trying to pick the best lava lamp in a chandelier store, so volcanically exceptional is he to American letters, which can’t help but look square and patrician by comparison. I love all the unbuttoned Pynchons—the later, “easier” novels, the stuff that didn’t take decades to research or at least doesn’t make a show of it, the loosies. Vineland, Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, even Against the Day (a long book, but a fun and limber one): these are where Pynchon’s essential pleasures, the makeshift utopias and ludicrous jokes (some perilously low-hanging) that make him so miraculous, get the most room to roam.

Shadow Ticket, Pynchon’s tenth book and the third installment in his recent trio of detective novels, pushes the limits of “unbuttoned.” It’s a novel that’s barely wearing a shirt. By which I mean it’s both stylistically stripped-down—sparse on the stuff that literature usually comes dressed in, like description and interiority—and horny, in a polite, pre-Code sort of way. Even its gags have an airy, low-key quality. Get a load of the repartee when the novel’s protagonist, Milwaukeean private eye (and ladies’ man) Hicks McTaggart, hits the dance floor with a jazz singer at one of the novel’s very many last-days-of-Prohibition-era speakeasies:

“For years that was my dream—to be one of those girls in a nightclub scene, all dolled up, out on a date, across a table from some dreamboat, just a little out of focus, having the best time in the world.”

“Me, a dreamboat, really?”

“Or to put it another way . . .”

However, a few more dances and drinks into the evening—

“Oh my! Is that for me?”

“Thought you’d never notice.”

A pause, which he has the sense to wait through. “Maybe it’s the time of night a girl needs something to hold on to.”

“Go ahead, it won’t mind.”

As Pynchonian dick jokes go, this is a long way from Tyrone Slothrop’s oracular, bomb-predicting boners, rigorously charted in Gravity’s Rainbow down to the fraction of the inch. It bears little resemblance to the straightforward scene of arousal with which Inherent Vice opens (“here came that old well-known hardon Shasta was always good for sooner or later”), or to the conspicuous rising action going on in Sean Penn’s pants in the first sequence of One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s phenomenal quasi-adaptation of Vineland. Instead, as in most of the novel, the writing is coy, oblique, euphemistic, so heavy on innuendo and rat-a-tat patter that it reads like a screenplay—“just a little out of focus”—for an old-timey movie, one where the mise-en-scène is bleary and the sense of history a little futile.

Did Pynchon finally write a proper noir? He’s been dancing around the genre at least since Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, both of which follow the burlesque escapades of private detectives, although part of those novels’ mind-melting appeal is that their PIs have been dropped into anachronistic settings (acid-washed California counterculture, 9/11-era “Yupper West Side”). Vineland, for its part, has a great set piece at a novelty mall called Noir Center, themed around “those old weird-necktie movies in black and white,” featuring establishments like “The Mall Tease Flacon, which sold perfume and cosmetics,” and a mineral water emporium called Bubble Indemnity.

With Shadow Ticket, it’s as though Pynchon has embraced the referent that his other novels have been references to. From the nasty Elmore Leonard snap of the first sentence—“When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line”—the style is all-out hardboiled: women are tomatoes, sex is whoopee, things, if you’re lucky, are jake. The setting is likewise smoky. It’s 1932, era of gangsters and gangster movies, when “private eyes . . . are emerging from an era of labor unrest and entering one of spousal infidelity, encouraged if not enabled by Prohibition.” Noir isn’t yet a sophisticated cinematic genre—Shanghai Express has only just left the station—but Dashiell Hammett has oriented popular crime fiction “in the direction of literature,” as Steven Marcus wrote in the introduction to a mass-market collection of Hammett’s Continental Op stories that I picked up off a dollar cart someplace.

Hicks, our gumshoe, has been caught up in a caper that yanks him, picaresque-esque, through a diorama of Depression-era Milwaukee that’s way more goofy and fun than Hammett’s Poisonville. We’re dropped right into all manner of efficiently sketched minor underworlds: anarchist kitchens, a pirate-radio clubhouse, bowling alleys run by fascists and jazz clubs run by the Outfit, plus speakeasies in the back rooms of seemingly every mild-mannered lunch counter. (Pynchon is great at conjuring Prohibition’s hidden-in-plain-sight lawlessness: at one point another detective opens a window, “reaching outside into the freezing night and retrieving two heavy warped icicles, each with a vivid emerald bottle of Canadian IPA frozen into it.”) Scarface is in lock-up, but Hicks comes up against a different flavor of organized crime when he gets an assignment involving “the Al Capone of cheese,” who heads up a dairy syndicate feared across Wisconsin for its poisonous product and aggressive resistance to price controls.

Without getting too deep in the cheese weeds: the dairy kingpin’s flapper daughter, Daphne Airmont, is missing, having run after her klezmer-clarinetist lover to destination unknown. Now several influential parties—the Airmont family, the local fuzz, the feds, the mobster who happens to be Hicks’s girlfriend’s boyfriend—muscle Hicks into tracking down the elopees. A “simple pickup and delivery,” Ross Macdonald–style—but as early as the page-sixty-three pit stop at the Nazi-run “New Nuremberg Lanes,” we can sense the rumblings of trouble more violent and high-stakes than simple white-cheddar crime.

A perennial question for the private detective is where they stand on the spectrum of law and disorder—a spectrum hemmed in by cops and Nazis on one side, scary mobsters on the other. You can intuitively grasp why Pynchon, who has so frequently returned to the primordial clash of fascism and anarchy, might’ve found his groove in the detective genre. But among recent Pynchon protagonists, Hicks is uniquely clueless about his position on all that stuff. Where Inherent Vice’s constantly stoned Doc Sportello at least had firm allegiances in the battle between the straight world and the counterculture, Hicks basically has no idea what’s up (“Don’t take this the wrong way but . . .Would either of you have any idea . . . how I got here?”). His moral compass is on the fritz, his sense of history foggier than Doc’s beachside pad after a sesh with the gravity bong. All he knows for sure is that a job at the Unamalgamated Ops detective agency, where the work exists in “kind of a transition zone between working for the owners and saddling up to go steal a payroll from them,” feels more legitimate than his old gig, as a freelance heavy busting up “Bolshevik” labor strikes at the height of Milwaukee’s era of sewer socialism.

In the novels he’s written since the labor-wrecking 1970s, Pynchon harbors a beautiful and special hatred for union-busters, infiltrators, and anti-labor goons. Hired bullies show up across the bibliography, lumbering through plots across centuries to fuck up working people’s livelihoods, the man personified. Against the Day has its unsavory fin de siècle strikebreakers, but I think I prefer the description of counterrevolutionaries in Inherent Vice, the incantatory paranoid portrait of “operatives” who “went out to collect cash debts, they broke rib cages, they got people fired, they kept an unforgiving eye on anything that might become a threat.” (Briefly, psychedelically, Pynchon offers an entire theory of history with these hippie-hating ratfuckers at its center: “If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who’d make it happen.”)

Hicks isn’t Pynchon’s first character to arrive at private eyedom via these “ancient forces of greed and fear”: that would be Against the Day’s Lew Basnight, who briefly makes an appearance in Shadow Ticket, worn out from his previous adventures and now “decorating the mahogany” at another Milwaukee hooch joint. But unlike Basnight and the real-life Hammett—a Pinkerton turned private eye turned Marxist—Hicks has so far failed to develop mature political allegiances, leftward or rightward. The feds identify him as “anti-Red but not a Nazi either.” When he remembers stuff he’s seen in the papers, he does so “dimly.” “Hicks, you need more culture,” his girlfriend tells him after they catch a screening of Dracula. “A more Continental approach to life and love. At least find out what Bela’s putting in his hair.”

Eventually, of course, our op does get Continental. The Airmont case finds him knocked out, stuffed onto a transatlantic ocean liner and carted off to interwar Europe, where now he’s really in over his “oversize American” head. In Hungary, Hicks finds himself adrift in the middle of a recently disbanded empire where the White Terror of the 1920s has given way to a chaotic jumble of right-wing factions, all competing for control of the new rump state and aided on the ground by roaming paramilitary gangs—“flexibly all-purpose Fascist,” and more terrifying than any mobster or G-man back in Milwaukee.

Does Hicks understand that he’s in a civilization that’s speeding toward the Holocaust? Pynchon narrates the darkening central-European mood in an elusive, down-tempo way—“the population of Jews available for persecution seems to be getting smaller lately,” he writes offhandedly—and we get the sense that Hicks is reluctant to really assimilate the fascism question. Within the year, he’s told on his first day in Budapest, Europe will undergo “a violent collapse of civil order which will spread from a radiant point in or near Vienna, rapidly and without limit in every direction, and so across the continents, trackless forests and unvisited lakes, plaintext suburbs and cryptic native quarters, battlefields historic and potential”—to which Hicks’s uncomprehending response is to “stare politely and wait for it to all go away, wondering how he’s supposed to deal with this.”

The disorienting vibe is amplified by the fact that, in the cafes and hashish bars of Budapest, Hicks keeps encountering foreign characters who aren’t quite who they seem. The second act of the novel reads like a series of Mission: Impossible–style mask-off reveals: British tourists who chat plummily about Hitler and sticky toffee pudding (“SticToPud”) turn out to be MI6. An Interpol officer seems to be running cover for the Croatian ultranationalist organization Ustaša. A barbershop song-and-dance trio are, rumor has it, an anti-Soviet assassination squad. And that klezmer clarinetist, Hop Wingdale, with whom Daphne Airmont ran off? He, when he finally shows up, turns out to be involved in an underground resistance network, mobilizing against the rapidly mounting threats of Nazism. It’s via Hop, not Hicks, that we finally get a sense of Shadow Ticket’s full aperture. “We’re in for some dark ages, kid. Dim at least,” he’s told by a fellow resistance member. “This could turn out to be”—here the reader winces—“thousands, maybe tens of thousands of lives, and we’ll have to be the ones with better logistics, infrastructures of resistance and escape in place and at hand . . . every day, fact-compliant, inescapably committed to the given world . . .”

One of Pynchon’s tricks is to set novels at moments of especially rapid historical transformation, pit a residual technology or way of life against an emergent one, and survey whatever collateral damage results from the collision. All his novels take stock of a systems-level vibe shift—the replacement of folk knowledge with science and machinery, the violent overthrow of old-world economies by speculative finance, the co-optation of revolutionary vibrations into entertainment and kitsch—and boil its Marxian drama down to the human scale.  

Shadow Ticket’s early 1930s offer plenty of opportunity for this appealing flavor of fiction-as-conjunctural analysis. It’s not just the Holocaust that looms: jazz is just getting good, but the entertainment industry is also becoming more monocultural and censorious. The Roaring Twenties have slammed to a miserable end, but Prohibition is running on fumes. Communism is Stalinizing and American capitalism is about to briefly reform itself. (Not to mention smaller, not strictly real transformations: “The year 1930 happened to be the 1776 of the cheese business.”)

A mild quibble is how few of these transformations get room to fully stretch out. The novel’s economical, shot-from-the-hip style—so different from, say, Against the Day’s Whitmanic spaciousness, in which America’s cities and plains are described from a literal birds’-eye view—means that many of its most historically interesting settings are only glancingly described, summoned in snippets or namechecked in novelty songs (“Drinkin my way up, th’ Dan-ube”), rather than in those hypnotically unfurling paragraphs we all know and love. The novel contains scarcely more than a sentence or two, for example, about Budapest’s streetscape. Milwaukee gets some lovely descriptions, particularly once it’s in Hicks’s homesick rearview—he longs for its “dairy-colored surfaces through the leisurely days imperceptibly continuing to darken behind a bituminous haze safe to breathe, never as bad as Chicago”—but, like Hicks, we might wish we’d gotten to spend more time there.

Maybe the settings feel lean because we’re seeing them at historically unprecedented miles per hour. Motoring through the novel is a parade of period-conjuring technologies, usually ones intended for the rapid transportation of commodities, information, and people across the decade’s unstable borders. If Against the Day is, as people like to say, a novel about light, Shadow Ticket might be a novel about speed—about “the streamlined velocities of the 1930s,” as one character admiringly puts it. The usual technologies of momentum make appearances—ocean liners, railroads, hooch wagons, motorcycles, cocaine—as well as more arcane autogyros, “road Pullmans,” and U-boats of several nationalities. Some of these, naturally, will become part of those thrilling “infrastructures of resistance and escape,” hurtling leftists and Jews in safer, freer directions. But Pynchon doesn’t let us forget that new technologies bring new constraints on freedom, too. “There used to be more time to make a getaway,” Hicks considers, after being IDed via globe-spanning wirephoto service (invented in 1929). “Now they’re flashing everybody’s mug shot all around the world in the blink of an eye, pretty soon there’s no place to run to anymore.”

Shadow Ticket’s flashy metaphor for its era’s accelerating motion is a paranormal, physics-bending set of processes called asportation and apportation (shortened to “ass/app,” a term that made me laugh dumbly every time it appeared), in which objects move around of their own unexplainable volition. The Hungarians are crazy about ass/app, and things around Hicks are constantly vanishing, disappearing, going into hiding. All this mysterious motion, we’re given to half-understand, may or may not play a role in the coming world war—the Soviets have “taken a deep interest in the paranormal, especially its potential in modern warfare”—but to my ear Pynchon’s richest use of his latest paranormal flourish is to have it occasion a raft of scammy secondary industries. Budapest is littered with apport insurance advertisements, apport-based variety acts peddling “retro-White mischief” onstage, apport repossession agencies (“apporepo”), and apport counterfeiting outfits, in which small-time crooks sell items “passing for merchandise just in from the other side of whatever this is that’s going on.”

A mystical force, in which flickering tricks of light scratch ancient pleasures, turned to profit and cheapo entertainment by reactionary capitalists? As Daphne Airmont might say, I’ve heard that one before. . . .  Among the many seismic cultural transformations of the 1930s that briefly surface in the novel, the only one to get a seriously extended descriptive treatment is the movies. Starting with its screenplay-style prose, the novel reinscribes early-’30s Hollywood like a book of autographs. Characterization generally occurs parallel to the silver screen: Daphne is always doing “that Norma Shearer turn”; Hicks, feeling like a tough guy, makes “furtive Ronald Colman faces at himself in the mirror.” The PI biz itself, his boss tells him, is “like going to the movies. Sit quietly, eat popcorn, get educated.” As clumsy and squabbling “phalanx[es] of Fascists” on motorcycles start popping up all over the former Empire (including Transylvania, which appears “not in movie black-and-white but autumn colors and countryside aromas”) to cash in on the “open season on Jews,” I began to feel like I was reading a novelization of Duck Soup, with fascism as a comic tableau of stupid people bumbling around, hampered or possibly helped by ridiculous spooks.

Duck Soup is among the better Hollywood flicks that Hicks might have caught at the local movie house (or Hungarian mozi, where, we learn, the popcorn has a “mighty unusual taste, besides the paprika, I mean”). The really good ’30s stuff—much of it, of course, to be made by Jewish Europeans fleeing the Nazis—was still a few years out: the Hawks and Wilder screwballs, the noirs, the genius antifascist antics of Lubitsch. But Pynchon, again, likes to catch epochs on the cusp. Like TV in Vineland, or the internet in Bleeding Edge, cinema functions in Shadow Ticket as a newish mass-cultural reality whose rhythms everyone is just beginning to get the hang of. Whole plotlines are pulled along by characters imitating behaviors they’ve seen at the movies: Hicks and Daphne “both know that runaway fiancées and their duty-bound pursuers are expected to fall in love—stage, screen, and radio are full of it.”

And yet Vineland’s tube and Bleeding Edge’s cyberspace mostly serve malevolent functions, reminders of capitalism’s advanced ability to surveil the public it has turned into vegetables. Aside from a couple of humane nods toward the damage done by Hollywood to the culture of vaudeville, Pynchon isn’t quite so interested in condemning Shadow Ticket’s era’s dominant entertainment. He loves movies too much. By far the most richly detailed sequence in the novel is an extended ekphrastic encounter with a fictional Hollywood hit, starring a Shirley Temple–style child actress with the insane-even-by-Pynchon-standards name Squeezita Thickly, on which Pynchon lingers for a full four or five happy pages. We’re treated to not one but two original tunes from Bigger Than Yer Stummick (1931), plus a kind of confusing plot synopsis, reading almost like Shadow Ticket in miniature, in which little Squeezita gets embroiled in a continent-spanning caper, landing “someplace vaguely outer European” upon which rain “anarchist-style bombs,” and eventually finds herself a participant in a Soviet-style people’s revolution alongside her double-agent dad (Wallace Beery).

Pynchon is sometimes critiqued for prioritizing cartoonish spectacle and political didacticism over roundly developed human emotion. Nearly two decades after James Wood complained that Pynchon’s novels, with their “habit of making his flat characters dance for a moment on stage and then whisking them away. . . . do everything but move us,” the New Yorker’s Shadow Ticket review asserted that “the author is not in the business of making anyone feel things.” Setting aside the ways in which Pynchon’s more world-historical subject matter might produce strong feelings indeed (try to read Vineland and Inherent Vice without feeling like the near-miss of the New Left’s promised utopia—the closure of the 1960s’ “little parenthesis of light” that briefly promised freedom and rock ‘n’ roll for all—is the single most wrenching thing that’s ever happened, or I guess not happened), the critique strikes me as out of tune. In his later and mellower novels, mostly written after he had a kid, Pynchon is an intermittently beautiful writer of small-scale emotional life. All his later novels are in some ways family novels; certain surnames (Bodine, Cherrycoke) sprawl across his works, linking them in a multigenerational web. And when he settles in for family time, a kind of Spielbergian sentimentality takes hold. Runaway mothers—an odd Pynchonian trope—find their way home. Ditto deadbeat dads. Parents impart lessons (“‘Labor produces all wealth. Wealth belongs to the producer thereof.’ Straight talk.”); children avenge parents (via dynamite or krav maga); and mom and dad, sometimes, get back together.

These scenes—homecomings, reunions, lost-then-found semi-resolutions—are reliably the emotional highlights of Pynchon’s literature, cozy counterweights against the ancient bummer-inducing forces of violence, capital, and squareness that rage outside the bedroom or commune (or, as in One Battle After Another, the immigrant safehouse). Besides the episode with adorable Squeezita Thickly, who really is a cartoon, what Shadow Ticket doesn’t have are the kinds of ecstatically warm scenes with which Vineland is suffused, elaborated at real length, where mini-utopias are jerry-rigged and the word is love. Fascism has proven highly sophisticated at ripping families apart, and its encroaching presence in the novel forecloses anything of the kind. Instead characters speed off in their various intermodal ways, some with the mission of “escorting Jews to safety, one at a time or in truckloads.”

Hicks, for his part, is left in the lurch by his own fash-curious country: at the end of the novel, he gets deported. He’s a U.S. citizen, but—as with the hundreds of thousands of Americans of Mexican descent who were “repatriated” during the early 1930s, or illegally nabbed and tossed out of the country this year by ICE—it doesn’t make a difference. He ends Shadow Ticket with no home, no family, and vanishingly few comrades, dreaming about his own runaway mother. I finally started to feel for the hapless guy when we learn how drastically his old ties have been severed: in a kind of reversal of the plot of Ball of Fire (a story Billy Wilder conceived while still living in Europe, around the time Hicks is settling in) he’s powerless to save his American girlfriend from getting forcibly married to a mobster. Eventually Hicks gets word that she’s pregnant: a sentimental family plot, finally, but one that excludes him.

The closest Shadow Ticket comes to any sort of mini-utopia, familial or otherwise, is in its conjuring of the former Free State of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia), part of an interwar patchwork of “mixed populations, disputed territories, histories of plebiscites and provisional government, currencies printed on inexpensive stock in fugitive inks.” In Fiume, Hicks finds a “tattered ghost city” that is part theme park for rollicking outlaws from the liberal order and part oubliette for the proto-Fascist bourgeoisie, each nursing a residual memory of their salad days (vegetarians are also welcome). The city’s recent history as a countercultural autonomous zone—not long ago a haven for “pirates and runners of contraband” and “whoopee of many persuasions”—still lingers, a melancholy totem of life before state terror. “You might consider us an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time,” explains a member of the underground Nazi-fighting resistance, “forever on the move, a patch of Fiume as it once was.” Transient, speedy, on the run by dark necessity: If the novel has a vision of freedom, it’s this.

In one scene set in Fiume, Daphne, now on the run herself, meets a factory worker who teaches her to sing an old tune. “Daleko m’ê moj Split” is a real song, not a Pynchon original courtesy of the Paranoids or Billy Barf and the Vomitones. Its lyrics aren’t printed in the novel, but you can find them online with the help of a quick Croatian-to-English translation. There are a few versions on YouTube. (One highlight of the Shadow Ticket reading experience was allowing it to guide me in the direction of a lot of great music, such as Eddie Cantor’s sexy 1928 showtune “Makin’ Whoopee.”) The song Daphne hears—its title translates to “My Homeland, Split, Is Far Away”—is narrated by a speaker who’s been displaced. She’s reflecting on the condition that Hicks, in his own untimely iteration of exile, will come to think of as his “post-American life”:

When you’re somewhere alone far away in the world

Why must you think of your native land?

Is there any pain more severe, is there any sorrow more severe?

A little like Shadow Ticket, the best part of the song might be the beginning. Before “Daleko m’ê moj Split” gets really sad, it’s got a kind of cryptic, wised-up energy. And tell me there’s not something a little punk, a little electrically Pynchonian, about those exclamation marks:

You yearn for something

I know that well!

I know that well!