First as Farce, Then as Tragedy

I’m aware that craving another doorstopper from the grandaddy of American maximalism constitutes the worst kind of ingratitude. Hadn’t I searched the Penguin Random House website for ‘Thomas Pynchon’ every month for the last decade? I was glad in April 2025 when Shadow Ticket was announced. Its 293 pages and blurb’s strong suggestion that it belonged to Pynchon’s series of metaphysical detective novels shouldn’t have disappointed me. Length, I reminded myself, isn’t everything. My edition of The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), one of his densest works, is a mere 142 pages long and started my journey through the strange mirror worlds of Pynchon’s fiction. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day (2006), novels of grand scope and ambition, rewrite history with manic energy, encyclopaedic reach, silliness, and a deep (and often overlooked) ethical commitment to the present. Built from scientific theories and inventions both plausibly fictionalised and eerily factual, subplots galore, and globe-trotting characters, these towering works loom large on the literary landscape. They have generated enough commentary in the academy and on internet forums to fill a lifetime of reading. But even though Pynchon has already given us so much, upon finishing Shadow Ticket, I craved more.

Pynchon’s career-long refusal of interviews, public appearances, and the other rituals of contemporary authorship has made him the object of the same paranoid logic found in his fiction. The first whispers of a new book arose when Pynchon sold his archive to The Huntington Library in 2022. Although the archive remained closed to the public, available only to a few hardcore (and so far, discreet) scholars, the Huntington librarians confirmed that the documents contained writing beyond the 2013 publication of Bleeding Edge. Some of that work likely culminated in Shadow Ticket. But just when I had overcome my initial disappointment, the American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum casually remarked that his publisher told him Pynchon had submitted a second book alongside Shadow Ticket. The unverified rumour set the Pynchon underground abuzz with theories. Pynchon is known for long spells of enigmatic silence spent working on multiple books at once. Could it be the fabled American Civil War novel? A tell-all memoir? 

My desire for maximalist fiction originates from something deeper than pure aesthetic preference. This feeling was articulated by Waanyi writer Alexis Wright, whose Praiseworthy (2023) itself represents an important turn in realising the possibilities of literary maximalism. That novel, in my view Wright’s greatest accomplishment within a career of immense accomplishments, uses grand-scale representation to confront the multiple challenges faced by Indigenous Australians amid ongoing colonisation and the Anthropocene. Alexis Wright has described her maximalist mode as necessary for ‘creat[ing] a story on a larger scale – the scope and breadth of which would do justice to the enormity and urgency of what is happening in our world’.

Novels of scale, then, are particularly suited for conveying the urgent and necessary. They carry the promise of moving us closer to comprehending the context in which Shadow Ticket has arrived. Seen this way, my hope for a swansong of grand proportions is inspired by a popular observation in the Pynchonsphere: our world is becoming more and more like a Pynchon novel. In many ways Shadow Ticket seems like a much longer novel collapsed into the shorter word count. It never directly confronts our present day – and indeed my starting presumption that a work ought to be contemporaneous is a prescriptive fallacy. But it does offer a subtle double commentary, on fascism in today’s world and its rise in history. 

Pynchon’s cultural influence is at once widespread and subterranean. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) consecrated his reputation, with its demanding excess, anarchic narrative construction, and depiction of World War II-era Europe as a Boschian hellscape. More recently, Pynchon has attracted popular attention, thanks to filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson taking his novels to Hollywood. Anderson’s faithful adaptation of Inherent Vice (2009) was one for the initiated with its mumbled, cryptic dialogue and wholesale embrace of convoluted plotting. One Battle After Another critiques American immigration control by transplanting Vineland’s (1990) insurrection, revolution, and fondness for explosives into blockbuster thriller format. But even before these film adaptations, Pynchon was, if not widely read, widely known enough to reference: in 2014 at a rally in Iowa, Joe Biden quoted one of Pynchon’s Proverbs for Paranoids from Gravity’s Rainbow: ‘if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.’

Worrying times indeed when the U.S. Vice President (and later, President) invokes the paranoid imagination. Although, analysing Gravity’s Rainbow in 1989, Leo Bersani observed that ‘all the paranoid thinking in the novel is probably justified, and therefore – at least in the traditional sense of the word – not really paranoid at all’. Seen this way, paranoia is closer to enlightenment than delusion. The foundational irony of Gravity’s Rainbow is the uncertainty about whether paranoia is a deranged mental state in the individual or a deranged world-system. By quoting Pynchon’s proverb, Biden suggested the latter.

To be sure, a swift glance over recent history reveals phenomena that demonstrate paranoia’s dual potential – as either delusion or enlightenment. QAnon, the Epstein files, the flagrant public activism of far-right extremists, or LLMs playing the Turing test every day in universities and workplaces alike – all of them denote eerie parallels to the outlandish conspiracies that weave through Pynchon’s fictions. The fact that Pynchon’s paranoia helps us comprehend the present shouldn’t be understated. Look around: polyphonic worldviews; strange and dangerous people in high places; a decentralised information network built on surveillance that governs human activity and increasingly seeks ways to influence and profit from those behaviours. Who better to guide us through these overwhelming times than the old man himself? But in addition to the prophetic value of Pynchon’s work, his writing offers a counterhistory of the twentieth century, and thus, new ways of understanding the past.

Shadow Ticket is a breezy detective pastiche à la Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, in which investigators of dubious aptitude become entangled in conspiracies too elaborate to figure out. It begins in 1932 Milwaukee, where The Great Depression and Prohibition provide fertile grounds for radical ideology to bloom. Guiding us through the heyday of riots, mass unemployment, and organised crime syndicates is Hicks McTaggart, an ex-strikebreaker working as a private eye for the Unamalgamated Ops agency and Pynchon’s dimmest detective to date.

In the first chapter, Hicks is given the ‘simple assignment’ (or ‘ticket’ in P.I. slang) of locating runaway Daphne Airmont, daughter of Bruno Airmont, a.k.a. the ‘Al Capone of Cheese’. The alleged ‘simplicity’ of the job is an ironic wink. On the very same page, a ‘sudden commotion’ brings another plot to the fore: the hooch van of one Stuffy Keegan, outlaw liquor merchant, has been bombed, and Hicks is given another ticket to investigate.

Many other tickets will be thrust upon Hicks, none accepted willingly. Diversion, rather than development, is the logic that governs a Pynchon novel. A line from the nightmare scene that opens Gravity’s Rainbow provides us with a helpful lens: ‘this is not disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into’. Thus, Pynchon eschews the familiar shapes of narrative (the pyramid, the circle, the line) and plots his novels out like circuit boards – networks of irregular nodes, thin-wired pathways, no clear beginnings or ends.

The second half of Shadow Ticket sends Hicks out of Depression-era America to Hungary and Eastern Europe, where Daphne Airmont has allegedly fled with her clarinet-playing lover. Meanwhile, Stuffy Keegan, pursued by unknown operatives, leaves Milwaukee in an Austro-Hungarian U-boat lurking in Lake Michigan, an improbability at least partially based on fact. When Hicks arrives in Hungary, the plot loosens even further as we tour pre-WWII Eastern Europe, usually on motorbikes, with diminishing regard for scene-setting or verisimilitude. Hicks struggles to sort out his multiplying tickets: an Interpol officer enlists him, hoping that Daphne will lure Bruno, also at large, out of hiding; renegade groups of Nazis terrorise the countryside, seemingly without retribution; desperate exit plans are formed by local Jewish people; and objects start to disappear and reappear in instances of theosophical phenomena known as asporting and apporting, respectively.

Just like Hicks, we are caught in a web with no spider. This free-floating, associative, ragged plot logic bestows upon Pynchon enormous license to explore a wide range of subjects. These include the rise of fascism and antisemitism in Europe and the U.S., the links between dairy-industry monopolies and organised crime, the history of private investigators, labour disputes, the geopolitical and economic instability of Hungary following the Treaty of Trianon, and the various technological and mechanical innovations of the day. As William Logan quipped in a review of Against the Day, Pynchon ‘does everything possible to prevent the reader from taking his novels seriously’. And so these weighty subjects are nestled among characters breaking out into song, bizarro names like Glow Tripforth del Vasto and Zoltán von Kiss, coincidental reunions, carnivalesque set pieces, and gutter jokes.

Pynchon’s earlier novels fused surface-level goofiness with Rabelaisian obscenity to render atrocity as ridiculous. And as with Rabelais, each jest was dead serious. For example, in trying to explain what Gravity’s Rainbow is about, I could say that a V-2 missile strikes the precise location where Tyrone Slothrop has just had sex, and that the book is a wild goose chase – secret operatives hunting down Slothrop, while Slothrop is unable to keep it in his pants. But doing so would overlook the ironic underside of Pynchon’s absurd premise. ‘Oh sure,’ you can hear the author coolly suggest, ‘and the other reasons for bombing people make sense?’ The humour in Shadow Ticket is, assuredly, lighter, but it does contain Pynchon’s funniest scene, which occurs when, one drunken night, Bruno Airmont, the ‘Al Capone of Cheese’, runs into the real Al Capone:

Pynchon is up to his old tricks, locating his fiction in a counterhistorical space, neither quite invention nor fact. The dark satirical distortions that resulted in Gravity’s Rainbow being refused the 1974 Pulitzer for obscenity are rarely employed in Shadow Ticket. As a result, the jokes are PG, stripped of any Juvenalian bite. But although Pynchon’s sensibilities may have softened – Shadow Ticket never represents depravity outright – he continues to write as an ironist, perhaps an historical ironist, whose interest in doubleness and duplicity is the most vital obsession of his writing career.

When the blurb for Against the Day first appeared on Amazon, signed and presumably written by Pynchon, it included the following: ‘with a worldwide disaster looming just ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.’ The latter portion (my italics) was cut from the book jacket copy and all subsequent editions. Had Pynchon given away too much of the game?

Ideas of doubleness prevail throughout Pynchon’s fiction. Against the Day keeps the counterfactual and historical in constant tension. Among the richly detailed and researched set pieces of the era, characters bilocate (exist in two places at once), a trespasser from the future (implied to be our present day) warns of the coming war, and characters begin to suspect that, somewhere along the path, they have left one plane of existence and entered a parallel one. The plane of existence left behind is the one that matches our real history. Pynchon thus offers, via metafictional allegories, the possibility of a second chance.

In Shadow Ticket, the coming storm occurs just off the page; it is Hitler’s ascension to the Chancellorship of Germany in January 1933. From there, Nazism became the ideology of hate that defined the mid-twentieth century, continuing to haunt our present with renewed vigour. For a novel so occupied with documenting the rise of fascism in America and Europe, it may seem curious that the book snaps shut right before this prepacked climacteric. But Pynchon has long preferred to underemphasise or displace his ostensible grand historic subjects. For example, Tyrone Slothrop’s misadventures through WWII only ever obliquely refer to the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, or the actual fighting of the war. Similarly, the events of 9/11 occur midway through NYC-based Bleeding Edge, but arrive second-hand, mediated by television and internet conspiracy, never directly witnessed. He places his trust in paralipsis, theorised by Gérard Genette in his Narrative Discourse as the ‘omission of one of the constituent elements of a situation in a period that the narrative does generally cover’. In other words, notable absence is a form of dramatic emphasis. Decentring monumental events frees the narrative from the domineering presence of famed crises.

Pynchon’s approach to 1930s fascism in Shadow Ticket is similar to Hannah Arendt’s in The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she seeks to ‘discover the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved into a conglomeration where everything seems to have lost specific value, and has become unrecognisable for human comprehension, unusable for human purpose’. What Arendt describes here is a genealogical approach to history, one that examines multiplicity and origins in favour of reductive causal narrativisation. So if there is a shadow novel found in Shadow Ticket, it is a genealogy of the hidden mechanics that gave rise to fascism in the 1930s, along with the parabolic suggestion that circumstances today are disturbingly reminiscent. But this is a Pynchon novel after all, with dark subjects and zany plots. Inverting Marx’s aphorism, Pynchon renders history first as farce, then as tragedy.

Shadow Ticket is Pynchon’s most direct and sustained engagement with the swing towards fascism, even though he explored similar sociohistorical conditions in his debut, V. (1963). Myriad walk-on walk-off characters briefly steal the spotlight to wax lyrical about the coming storm. When Hicks arrives in Europe, he meets a cocaine-sniffing Interpol officer who supplies the following:

Pynchon has long used characters as mouthpieces – as avatars through which he, the notoriously media-averse writer, speaks. So even though Hicks, perennially tuned out, can’t quite catch the seriousness of what he’s being told, he is right about one thing: Egon has entered a trance. He’s been temporarily possessed by his author.

Hicks, however, is no political crusader. On the contrary, he barely fathoms the unfolding revolution. At a dinner in Milwaukee, Hicks’ Uncle Lefty, a Nazi sympathiser, proclaims ‘der Fuhrer’ is ‘der future’. Hicks responds by shrugging it off and asking Uncle Lefty to pass the casserole. Likewise, the so-called Vladboys, a band of Nazis persecuting (seemingly without retribution) the Jewish population of the Hungarian countryside, are glimpsed only briefly on our speedy motorbike tour. Nevertheless their Storm Leader Dubendorff gets his moment in the spotlight: ‘history rolls on […] toward our Fascist future, immense and stately, we here being only the squalls and tornadoes breaking out at her edges’. The agents of fascism can see what’s coming down the line, but Hicks can’t. This is classic dramatic irony, since reader hindsight produces a tension. Why is Hicks so complacent in the face of such hatred? Pynchon reminds us of how the magnitude of the atrocities to come would have been inconceivable at the time, and that historical actors seldom recognise the threshold they’re crossing.

But it isn’t entirely inconceivable that Hicks, if he had continued his mercenary strikebreaking, would have wound up down a darker path. In a memorable flashback, Pynchon describes the supernatural occurrence that marked the end of Hicks’ strikebreaking days. Already an agent of oppression, Hicks has earned a ‘certain notoriety as a corporate thug, fighting his way through one picket line after another so he could go on beating people up all shift long’. During a particularly violent strike, Hicks is taunted by a left-wing striker and later realises

What’s happened here? This is the first mention of asporting – the sudden and miraculous disappearance of an object. In this case, the asporting of Hicks’ sap is a saving grace from his author.

What Hicks realises – and why he then moves to private investigation, freelance, turning away from his corporate thug past – is crystallised in a later scene. The first is that working for a cause he didn’t really care about (a labour dispute where he was muscle-for-hire) got him so worked up he was ready to kill someone. The other realisation comes later when he visits New Nuremberg Lanes, a Nazi hangout masquerading as a bowling alley. There, Hicks runs into a mentor from his strikebreaking days, Ooly, who has embraced Nazism. ‘Don’t wait too long to pick a side,’ Ooly advises, ‘leavin th’ station, now’s the time to climb on board, later maybe it won’t be so easy.’ We see how, if fate had twisted in the other direction, Hicks could have been throwing bowling balls and dreaming of dark revolution alongside Ooly.

Pynchon uses Hicks’ experiences to chart fascism’s complex genealogy back along varying responses to socioeconomic conditions – to the crippled and divided zeitgeist of Eastern Europe and the Depression-era class struggle in America. The labour disputes, therefore, are a clear representation of these divisions, with their literal polarity. Ooly’s urging that Hicks picks a side evokes both the ideological and the literal topography of picket lines.

Pynchon speaks to our present moment by indicating that fascism is a perverse reaction to socioeconomic conditions. The reaction takes two key forms. The first, according to Hannah Arendt, is complex resentment. Arendt writes that ‘neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.’ In today’s world, we are witnessing an unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands (and pockets) of the few. Pynchon’s magnates run colossal cheese empires, but today’s empires of wealth are far more intangible and inflated. The second form of response is sociopolitical complacency in the face of unbridled far-right extremism. Far-right ideologies have established footholds in European and Latin American political systems. Donald Trump has equivocated when it comes to condemning far-right ideologues in America. And in Australia, neo-Nazi groups make headlines for their emboldened public activism, despite public sentiment being firmly against them. Shadow Ticket asks us to consider how such resentment, extremism, and passivity shape the conditions in which fascism can flourish.

Although I’ve conceptualised Shadow Ticket as a genealogical history of the early 1930s, it has one more intentional omission: the antisemitism of the period. Given its centrality to the rise of fascism, I was initially surprised by how little narrative space is devoted to it. I’ve come to see this paralipsis as a form of ethical commitment. The atrocities are a given in the text – they loom large in our historical consciousness. They are not further illuminated by being transformed into farce. Thus we encounter the dangerous gambit that underlies Pynchon’s form of Menippean satire: in embracing the ridiculous, the whimsical, and the comic, his works always risk undercutting the seriousness of their subjects. For all its high ambitions of documenting fascism’s rise, Shadow Ticket at times feels too playful, too breezy, to truly capture the darkness of its era.

Shadow Ticket uses more than historical exposition to document the sociopolitical conditions that engendered fascism in the 1930s. Pynchon has long treated genre as an archive, neither pastiche for its own sake nor merely a redeployment of familiar tropes. Rather, genre becomes a vital mechanism in Pynchon’s historiographical narratives because it reflects back the narrative systems through which an era understood itself.

When I teach Thomas Pynchon to undergraduate students, usually under the topic of postmodern literature, I refer to Pynchon’s 2004 cameo appearance in The Simpsons. In the episode ‘The Diatribe of a Mad Housewife’, Marge Simpson becomes a bestselling author and seeks professional endorsements. Pynchon is shown with a paper bag over his head, speaking into a phone a line of praise for Marge’s novel. Behind him, a light-bulb sign reads Thomas Pynchon’s house, come on in. Simultaneously enacting and mocking his aversion to publicity, Pynchon’s self-parody turned his aesthetic of ironic citation on himself, both reinforcing and subverting his reputation as a recluse. This self-reflexivity is how Pynchon deploys doubleness and duplicity – a signature aesthetic which can be read as double coding – in his writing.

Originally found in architectural theory and the works of Charles Jencks, double coding is the layering of a new style upon an older one. By doing so, a double-coded aesthetic speaks on two levels, incorporating elements from a bygone era on one hand, and elements of the present on the other. A classic example is 550 Madison Avenue in New York, which appears both as a modern skyscraper and grandfather clock – the modern and the nostalgic operating at once. The literary equivalent of Jencks’ architectural double coding is genre pastiche, and Pynchon’s novels, particularly since Against the Day, are energised by their nostalgia for past generic modes. The important thing here is to recognise Pynchon’s pastiches not as what Fredric Jameson described as ‘blank parody… a neutral practice of such mimicry’ but rather an integral technique in his rewriting of history.

Pynchon’s selection of genres is never arbitrary or neutral. In situating Shadow Ticket’s relationship to genre and history, it is helpful to refer to Brian McHale’s theory that Pynchon’s double-coded narratives are not an anything-goes play with form but rather a specific historiographical method. In an essay on ‘Pynchon’s genre-poaching’, McHale describes Pynchon’s fusing of genre and history as mediated historiography, that is, ‘the writing of an era’s history through the medium of its popular genres’. Seen this way, Mason & Dixon’s mock-register of eighteenth-century English seeks to historicise not only language but the mechanisms of representation within that era. Similarly, Bleeding Edge borrows liberally from cyberpunk fiction (itself a hybrid of two genres: the hardboiled detective novel and speculative fiction) to tell the story of the internet’s conversion into capitalism’s new frontier. The cyberpunk kitsch of Bleeding Edge amplified an ironic commentary: he took a science-fiction subgenre and historicised it, thereby reminding us that the future has already happened. In a similar way, Shadow Ticket is a pastiche of various hardboiled fiction tropes precisely because 1932 was the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction.

On an aesthetic level Pynchon borrows and appropriates a range of hardboiled conventions, including slang-filled and quippy dialogue, late-night rendezvous at speakeasies, strangers soliciting adventures from the detective protagonist, streets glowing with neon. The surface-level pastiche is abundantly clear, even from the opening line: ‘When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line.’ But it’s worth examining what makes the hardboiled genre a particularly useful mode by which to examine the era. The Golden Age of detective fiction unfolded in the Interwar period and was pioneered by popular writers such as Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Hardboiled fiction was a predominantly American reaction against the ‘cosier’ escapism of the British school of mystery writing, and many of its defining qualities can be understood through this lens. The flawed maverick detective was the antithesis of the heroic genius sleuth – the likes of Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. Moreover, the British whodunit model usually unfolded in a closed system, in which a few related characters explored a mystery within a confined setting (e.g. a train or an estate).

While pastiche borrows conventions from a genre in a general way (as differentiated from parody, which tends to cleave to a single hypotext), it is possible to trace Shadow Ticket’s inspiration to the novel Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. Published in 1932, Red Harvest follows an unnamed detective working for the Continental Ops agency. (In Shadow Ticket, Hicks works for the Unamalgamated Ops agency, a likely nod towards his influence.) The protagonist of Red Harvest investigates a string of murders connected to mining operations, labour unrest, and institutional corruption, painting a bleak portrait of an early 1930s America overrun by economic hardship and bitter feuding.

And so Pynchon captures a turning point in how American society was self-representing. He has Hicks refer to the ‘gumshoe manual’, a set of instructions for ways to respond to a particular situation. As the novel progresses, the manual provides less and less useful guidance. Sure, it provides clear advice about romantic relationships (don’t go there). But what of fascists and corrupt cheese magnates? Here, Pynchon turns the detective genre on itself and uses it to trace the developments in private investigation as a profession. Like Hicks, private investigators emerged from the period of labour disputes in the 1890s and early 1900s. Boynt Crosstown, Hicks’ boss at the Unamalgamated Ops agency, blames Prohibition for the rising engagement of freelance detectives, while also noting a shift in the type of work they do, ‘from skips and small-time offenses into more of an espionage racket’. In Shadow Ticket, Pynchon acknowledges that his most beloved character archetype, the hardboiled detective, is based on the real-life private investigators who were later absorbed into the sinister postwar espionage and intelligence networks from which his characters are forever fleeing.

And so Shadow Ticket leaves us right before crossing a historical threshold from which there was no return. The novel’s burlesque spectacles, gumshoe antics, and overall velocity all stage history as farce, resulting in many of its ethical observations feeling abbreviated, requiring the reader to speculate about the deeper meanings. This is a far cry from the Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, whose encyclopaedic mode took his readers deep into every archive he could find within his storyworlds. Shadow Ticket is simply too restless to capture all the nuances of Pynchon’s parabolic designs. This isn’t due to a lack of over-politicking, but rather a consequence of architecture. It may even be intentional. Redeploying the hardboiled detective as a form of mediated historiography, Pynchon shows Hicks failing to recognise the rise of fascism because his ways of understanding the world are already obsolete. He’s stunned by future shock. This is an idea that resonates with our present and may be the true second story beneath Shadow Ticket. Our own times continue to accelerate and fragment like a Pynchon novel, too convoluted to figure out, somehow fatalistically driven towards catastrophe, bound for an unseen future.