Shadow Ticket
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Bestseller • A New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by The Los Angeles Times, Vulture, TIME, The Guardian, The New Republic, and LitHub
The new novel from Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice.
“A masterpiece.” —The Telegraph
“Bonkers and brilliant fun.” —The Washington Post
“Late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.” —The Los Angeles Times
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 onetime 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In 1932 Milwaukee, private detective Hicks McTaggart gets handed what should be a simple assignment: Find a local heiress who’s run off with a jazz musician. He ends up crossing paths with British spies, Hungarian wizards who can make objects appear and disappear, a fascist vampire cult, and the shadowy International Cheese Syndicate, who just might be pulling all the strings. So yeah, this is a Thomas Pynchon novel. But it’s Pynchon at his most direct, accessible, and humane. The opening chapters feel like a screwball-comedy spin on classic hardboiled detective novels, but once McTaggart lands in pre-WWII Europe and witnesses fascism’s rise, the story becomes deeper and more poignant even as his quest gets increasingly strange. If you’ve ever been daunted by Pynchon’s reputation for “difficult,” impenetrable work, Shadow Ticket might be your way into his singular world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With his casually playful and chillingly resonant ninth novel, Pynchon (Bleeding Edge) delivers a warning against global fascism, a slapstick symphony whose antic comedy can't begin to conceal its hopelessly broken American heart. It begins as a 1930s gangster story, focusing on Hicks McTaggart, an honest but hungry detective on the hunt for Wisconsin cheese heiress Daphne Airmont, who may well have disappeared into "pasturelands so far away the cows go oom." Known around Milwaukee for his rumpled honor and general romantic haplessness, Hicks trails Daphne to Hungary, where a foreign correspondent named Slide ominously warns that "the smart money is on war." A surreal motorcycle race around Central Europe ensues, including a daring pig rescue that ends with the freed porker in a sidecar, "done up in helmet and goggles, beaming, posing like a princess in a limousine." Ultimately, the homesick Hicks wonders whether there's no going back. Belying his reputation as an intimidating genius of weighty ideas and unresolved plots, Pynchon is simply telling it like it is: life is crushing, and nothing's ever over. The novel's heart-freezing finish is as plaintively moving as anything he's ever done. Irresistible and deeply satisfying, this makes clear Pynchon's powers remain undiminished.
