| Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon’s ninth novel, which comes out next week, details the misadventures of Hicks McTaggart, a gumshoe in 1930s Milwaukee hot on the trail of the heiress to a cheese fortune. McTaggart’s investigation, writes Andrew Katzenstein in our October 23 issue, drags him into the crosshairs of some “formidable forces”: “the Chicago mafia, the Bureau of Investigation (the precursor to the modern FBI), British intelligence, Hungarian nationalism, Nazism, and international capitalist conspiracies.” But poor McTaggart, writes Katzenstein, would rather hang out with the jazz musicians who pass through Bronzeville, Milwaukee’s Black ward, and go dancing…. Pynchon, who turned eighty-eight this year, likewise seems to be in it for a good time. Shadow Ticket raises big questions about authoritarianism and freedom, but it doesn’t seem too concerned about answering them. This is unusual for Pynchon. Contrary to his reputation as an obscurantist, he tends to overexplain, especially when it comes to politics. It’s as if recent history has made it unnecessary for him to spell out his usual themes, since the supposedly hidden forces that his previous work exposed have rarely been more visible than they are now. Who at this point would deny that Trump is the latest expression of a long American tradition?
Below, alongside Katzenstein’s essay, are our reviews of Pynchon’s eight earlier novels, including his debut, V., which was featured in the second issue of The New York Review of Books. Shadow Ticket is brisker than Thomas Pynchon’s other work, but it’s full of his usual vaudevillian sensibility, and it addresses his favorite theme: how to live freely under powerful systems of control. “A good postmodernist, like a 9/11 truther, can afford the luxury of disdain for innocence; a parent is bound to protect it. Bleeding Edge is best understood not as the account of a master of ironized paranoia coming to grips with the cultural paradigm he helped to define but as something much braver and riskier: an attempt to acknowledge, even at the risk of a melodramatic organ chord, that paradigm’s most painful limitation.” —November 7, 2013 “Gags and allusions are fleeting instances of cultural thought at work, failures of seriousness that are prodigies of connection, and in this sense the surfing and doping world of late-Sixties California offers Pynchon something similar to the forms of popular poetry and song that support the later work of García Márquez, the ballads and boleros full of broken hearts and eternal love. No thought is banal if it is up to something.” —September 24, 2009 “All of these characteristics, which have figured in Pynchon’s work since the beginning, are in Against the Day taken to unprecedented lengths. The overall impression is of a vast piece of architecture, something with wings and turrets and redoubts and flying buttresses, that has been entirely constructed by hand and without blueprints. It may appear titanic and overwhelming from a distance, but close up it is oddly homespun, friendly, accommodating, and free of such oppressions as symmetry and hierarchy.” —January 11, 2007 “Mason and Dixon are cleverly drawn as temperamental opposites—Mason a mopey deist who is obsessed with the ghost of his dead wife and his own professional disappointments, Dixon a cheery Quaker whose sorties in search of erotic adventure are frequently spoiled by the effects of his colleague’s damp personality. They can stand each other’s company, but just barely, and their continual bickering becomes one of the leitmotifs of the book, and forms, in the end, the basis for a rather touching friendship of a very inarticulate, very ‘guy’ sort. This is, in Hollywood terms, a buddy story.” —June 12, 1997 “Pynchon displays throughout Vineland what might be called an internal loyalty: he keeps the faith with the generally feckless and almost invariably inarticulate misfits he assembles, tracking their looping thoughts and indecisive actions with a patience that seems grounded in affection. He is true to his creation until the finish; the book’s closing pages strike a moving note of sweet inconclusion, of curiosity grading not into enlightenment but into wonder.” —March 15, 1990 “Gravity’s Rainbow, like many other modern novels, like all novels in one sense, is set in the writer’s mind, but Pynchon’s mind, by virtue of his imaginative anxiety or historical care, is full not only of personal obsessions (lavatories, sewers, shit, sadism, Germans) and personal B-movie fantasies (the windswept wastes of Kirghistan, the Argentine hero, Martin Fierro, as played by Jorge Luis Borges) but also of more major recent historical deposits than it seems a single mind could take.” —March 22, 1973 “In spite of the obvious protective clothing of comic names (Stanley Koteks, Dr. Hilarius, “her shrink”) and a subtly aped slickness of style, Pynchon is again whispering something in our ear about the meaning of coincidence, the possibility of recurrence in history, and the circularity of time.... The Crying of Lot 49 is one of those mystery novels that can’t be solved.” —June 23, 1966 “Nothing more intricately conceived than Thomas Pynchon’s first novel has appeared in American fiction since the work in the thirties by Faulkner, Nathanael West and Djuna Barnes, the last two being among the writers who have given him the courage of his artifices and of the assumptions that go with them.” —June 1, 1963 Starting October 6, 2025 at 7 PM EDT Join Edwin Frank, editor of the NYRB Classics series, for a four-session webinar on the political novels of Joseph Conrad. Special Offer
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