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. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them.
Starts with a bang ... His most urgent novel yet ... It is filled with his famously overstuffed paragraphs, often one thrumming sentence each. But his words go down a bit more smoothly than usual without sacrificing any of his crackle. The result is a Pynchonian reduction simmered to delectation.
It’s 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 ... Pynchon may not have lost a step in Shadow Ticket, but sometimes he seems to be conserving his energy. His signature long, comma-rich sentences reach their periods a little sooner now ... For most of the way, though, Shadow Ticket may remind you of an exceptionally tight tribute band, playing the oldies so lovingly that you might as well be listening to your old, long-since-unloaded vinyl.
Rollicking, genially silly and ultimately sweet ... If all of that (and there’s so much more) sounds a little goofy, it mostly is, in a winningly loopy way. It helps that the 88-year-old Pynchon’s prose is still as balletically dazzling as the trick shot Lew teaches Hicks, often in ways that can be hard to quote with any sort of brevity ... Pynchon may have the most distinct voice — a clipped tough guy patois delivered with the rhythms of borscht belt comedy, amplified by an endless appetite for linguistic play — that has proved largely inimitable.
