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.
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.
If his powers are not dulled, neither are they pointed; even if you squint, it’s difficult to determine whether Shadow Ticket is a commentary on our current era ... This will disappoint any fans who were hoping for a rousing Pynchon riposte to our depressingly Pynchonesque era, but it’s hardly a problem. Literature has no obligation to be responsive to the times ... But it does raise a question. If our reigning artist of paranoid convictions...hasn’t made use of the present political moment to craft a satire or a survival manual or a swan song or even an 'I told you so,' then what has he come here...to tell us? ... The author is....confident that he can do ten things at once and still catch the omelette on its way down. And sometimes, he can ... For a while, all this is perfectly enjoyable ... But, the further into Shadow Ticket you get, the more it starts to suffer, as many of Pynchon’s later novels do, from the presence of its predecessors ... Patches of unintelligibility are nothing new in Pynchon, but usually a coherent world view gleams upward from the murk.
