America’s high pope of paranoia looks backwards to the future
Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket, Penguin Random House, 2025.
At 88 years of age, with the last verified photograph of his person dating from the first half of the last century, proof-of-life for the man behind the name ‘Thomas Pynchon’ is scant. In fact, the outlandish Pynchon-verse appeared to have given up on expanding after 2013’s Bleeding Edge, a book many readers read as a last gasp.
But here comes Shadow Ticket, the author’s ninth novel, and his third neo-noir in succession. It coincides with Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose adaptation of an earlier novel, Vineland (1990), in One Battle After Another (2025). While characteristically baroque, Shadow Ticket is also something of a departure from Pynchon’s earlier work—shorter, sharper, more tightly focused, peopled with a smaller cast of characters. It is more manageable, some might say. Others might find it insufficiently dense.
Either way, the long silence from America’s High Pope of Paranoia is sure to tempt the eager reader to wonder what this book can tell us about our present political moment. For Pynchon—an author perennially haunted by lost possible futures, whose characters seem to exist suspended in superposition between life and death, and whose narratives branch and recoil towards inevitable collapse—this will be resisted. If there are clues to be found in relation to the conditions of our current predicament, a good place to start might be the gap between where it seemed his work was headed and where it has wound up. In literature, as in the Pynchonian fields of mathematics and signals intelligence, the shadowed zone between possible and realised trajectories yields rich positional data.
In one respect, the difference between Shadow Ticket and its predecessors is planetary—Pynchon’s divergence from patterns established in his late works begins at the levels of scale and motion. Where the previous novels tend to slip and slide elastically through time and space around the gravitational sweep of historical moments, this one cleaves relatively tightly to a single (albeit convoluted) plot and dominant (if not singular) perspective, carried forward by relatively linear momentum. It nonetheless retains a shared preoccupation with the preconditions of its core moment, obscure causalities and missed windows. All are packed with dense forests of branching possibilities that fall away only when the rush of world events has honed the spear of clear history to its devastating point.
Against the Day (2006), for example, spans the period from the fin de siècle through the First World War, right up to the edge of the Roaring Twenties, traversing the globe, even straying into inter-dimensional spaces. Bleeding Edge (2014) has a tighter focus, splitting its terrain between New York and cyberspace, wrapping and warping its events around the gravity waves of 9/11. Mason & Dixon (1997) takes the world-changing solution of the longitude problem as its pivot and subsequently circumnavigates the furthest reaches of known and unknown worlds. Pattern-seeking creatures that we are, no one should be surprised to learn that Shadow Ticket reproduces the basic method, at least in the sense that it chooses its moment, gathers together the unlikeliest threads that compose it, and stretches them to breaking point.
However, rather than slipping and sliding every which way around the globe and/or timeline, Shadow Ticket sees our ballroom-dancing, private-investigator protagonist Hicks McTaggart lindy-hopping his way almost magnetically towards his moment. This takes him from frozen Milwaukee in the prohibition era to the distant shores of Europe, where dark forces are gathering steam. Indeed, his moment is essentially the pre-Second World War rise of fascism and anti-Semitism. Unlike Pynchon’s longer works, which often span decades, this one largely confines itself to the year of our Lord 1932. It is the tail end of prohibition, the height of the Depression, and the eve of Hitler’s rise to power. Though not devoid of its own divergences and time-slips, on the whole it makes for a more straightforward story than most might expect.
Whether it’s via McTaggart’s ‘ticket’ (gumshoe slang for ‘job’), in this case the rescue of a runaway cheese heiress, or his ‘shadow ticket’ (the real, much shadier job that even he doesn’t fully understand), either way our Wisconsinite Bogart finds himself ‘shanghaied to Hungary’. More specifically, he finds himself in Fiume, a port town formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, subsequently operated as the autonomous Fiume Free State, later part of Yugoslavia, now known as Rijeka, Croatia’s third-largest city. At the time of the text’s setting, Fiume was annexed by fascist Italy.
It’s a true melting pot, and also a contingent space paradoxically surrounded and unmoved by the rush of events. It teems with all the requisite absurdity of unallocated history. From a violent, anti-Semitic motorcycle gang led by Vlad the Impaler to a jewel thief flogging second-hand autogyrocopters to millionaires, it’s a story peopled with increasingly absurd characters gradually joining the orbit of Bruno Airmont, the ‘Al Capone of Cheese’, on the lam in one of Europe’s last interstitial spaces.
Critically, Fiume in 1932 isn’t merely a pocket of potential energy, spring-loaded with possible timelines waiting to scatter at the sound of a starter’s pistol. It is also the product of an artificially suspended purgatory held above the rush of world events by world powers. After the First World War, US President Woodrow Wilson led efforts to maintain a buffer state between the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Once flagged as a possible home for the League of Nations, later taken over by the smallest communist party in the world, still later seized by a fascist coup, Fiume is all the while riddled with the privateers and pirates of international commerce at the apex of the Adriatic Sea.
Little wonder that Hicks McTaggart is far from the only spook drawn by the forces of history to this hotbed of undetermined reality. Even the decommissioned First World War U-boat that transports him (impossibly) from Lake Michigan across the Atlantic stands as a pocket of inertial space carved into the crosscurrents and unmeasurable atmospheres of global historical progress: ‘You might consider us an encapsulated volume of pre-fascist space-time, forever on the move’, says its skipper.
The overall effect is one of generalised containment and suspense. It is as if the entire book exists in the frozen-over moment right before an all-in brawl breaks out in some brandy-soaked speakeasy nestled on the icy shores of Lake Michigan. Contrast this with Against the Day, or Mason & Dixon, in which the course of technology and world events seems to roll forward relentlessly, albeit unevenly, like spilt milk across an enormous table-top map.
One wonders if something detected in our present has shifted Pynchon’s treatment of the capital ‘H’ historic moment from his familiar, multi-ocular process of triangulation to a more direct gaze upon the pre-moment of suspense.
Perhaps one of the key differences is this: Pynchon’s major works have largely looked back on history from a particular vantage point—if not from the end of history, then at least from the end of something. Early works like V. (1963) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) are postmodern, post-Second World War-era novels of different kinds. Spanning a plethora of early-twentieth-century crises, the former charts the relentless technologisation of society through conflict, while the latter situates itself firmly in the dying days of the Second World War’s European theatre. Pynchon’s entire enterprise is retrospective, only achieving its overwhelming sensation of instability from the stable position of ‘after the fact’.
What kind of world is a world before it becomes the world it will inevitably become?
Now, having lived into the mid-to-late 2020s, there’s a sense that Pynchon is writing, perhaps for the first time, ‘before the fact’. America is presently Making Itself Great Again. Nicolás Maduro is rotting in a Brooklyn prison cell. The Ayatollah is dead. ICE thugs are prowling tree-lined suburban streets. Powerful engines of ideological mystification are in the hands of every consumer. In the few short months since Shadow Ticket’s publication, the world has found itself in a very Pynchonian moment. There’s no knowing what’s on the other side, but for Pynchon—who has spent a lifetime, not as a journalist working in the present tense, but as a tinkerer in the clockwork mechanics of history—looking backwards as a way of looking forward makes perfect sense.
Hence, Shadow Ticket stands in for our predicament, seething with the persistent feeling that the verso pollice of history could turn one way or the other at any time, dependent on the full spectrum of incredibly complex, interrelated (and unexpected) variables. It is Pandora’s Schrödinger’s box. Of course, from our vantage in the present, we know which way things in Europe went—the box was flung open, and all the cats/evils of the world ran out screeching, tearing innocents millions limb from limb.
There is an affinity here with Fiume-adjacent (Slovenian) post-Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who has lately argued, in his 2024 Against Progress, that ‘We live in an era of the superposition of different universal visions of progress, each of them leading to a different inevitable future’. In Shadow Ticket, it seems Pynchon is writing for precisely such nebulous times. ‘This sense of radical contingenc’, Žižek says, is ‘brought about by awareness of the hologram images that might have been’. In many ways, this is an apt description of Pynchon’s entire project, and here is his late attempt to answer the question: what kind of world is a world before it becomes the world it will inevitably become?
Perhaps it is something like, in the words of McTaggart’s mentor, P.I. Lew Basnight—a character who first appeared in Against the Day—the moment before ‘seeing all the cards at the end of a hand’.
Recall how the Greek fable of Pandora ends: hope is the only residue remaining in the now-opened pithos (storage jar). While Pynchon’s gaze doesn’t extend beyond the framing of the box, optimistic readers may discern some hint of hope in the quantum gaps pervading the otherwise vast and pitiless superstructure of history. Others might find the whole thing a hopeless circus, though entertaining nonetheless.
A more practical divergence from Pynchon’s established pattern can be found in the politics of Shadow Ticket’s protagonist. The late works, in particular, often follow characters from or of, the capital ‘L’. Left, collectively mapping an enormous cast of revolutionaries in various states of conviction, conspiracy, compromise, cynicism and— often, ultimately—resignation. Vineland’s radical film collective is embedded within a secessionist commune at the College of the Surf. Against the Day’s dynasty of Anarcho-syndicalist bombers terrorises rogue capitalists among the tumbleweeds of the wild west.
The protagonists of Pynchon’s last two ‘detective novels’—anti-establishment slacker Doc Sportello and forensic accountant Maxine Tarnow, respectively—are private dicks with deep, albeit dwindling, connections to the radical Left. Squinting through clouds of California dope-smoke, Sportello observes the guttering flame of his osmotically acquired hippie ideals subsumed by a vast compact between criminal, corporate, state and institutional enterprise, while Tarnow’s left-wing inheritance from New York hippie-liberal parents pales in the shadow of the Bush era’s towering neoliberal establishment.
While Shadow Ticket’s Hicks McTaggart also takes his cues from the gumshoe manual (literally), his politics break the mould. Here we have a strike-breaking, German-speaking corporate-thug-turned P.I. whose encounters with organised labour have not been shoulder-to-shoulder but tête-à-tête. In allocating his ‘shadow ticket’ (the top-secret job-beneath-the-job), a shadowy federale explains exactly why McTaggart’s just the man: ‘Somebody who’s anti-red, but not a nazi either’.
Here’s another departure for Pynchon, perhaps to be read as a sign of the times. There is no elegy this time around for the defeated New Left, nor regret for the subconscious, libidinal compact between the fetishist forces of state vs anti-state sex and violence. Hicks McTaggart is more or less aligned with the powers that be and has made a career putting his body on the line for them. He is even sexually straightforward. But when the FBI sets up shop in Milwaukee—not to take down rum runners and mafiosos but to maintain a permanent presence as an embedded agent of control—Hicks begins to realise (or perhaps only the reader does) that the powers of global progress are utterly indifferent to their human constituents, interested only in the self-replication of authority and control. This is a timely reminder, perhaps, for standers-by on the precipice of a potential new world order who might not be old or wise enough to know what not to expect from the establishment and its envoys.
All these observations, of course, take Shadow Ticket at face value. The real-real question, however, is the following one: can this book even be read at face value? Given the fact that not a single soul has clapped peepers on its author in decades, how can we be sure this text represents fresh canon? How can we know we don’t have another Go Set a Watchman-type scenario on our hands, an archival release of a dusted-off manuscript from some opportunistic literary executor’s bottom drawer?
Who then is the author of Shadow Ticket?
Given the new book follows temporally from, and shares quite a bit of territory with, 2006’s historico-scientific epic Against the Day—including characters (the aforementioned P.I. Lew Basnight) and themes (world events as the visible peaks of strange, dark undercurrents), readers might be forgiven for suggesting it reads more like an appendix to that larger corpus, perhaps even a deleted or repurposed plotline carved out and edited to stand alone. Faithful readers will notice narrative echoes, and it remains unclear whether these are callbacks or ghosts of an editorial process. In other words, whether they exist in superposition with their mirrored strands, or whether they’re strands-of-themselves haunted by fragments of the more monumental work, is unclear.
In holography, every part contains an image of the whole. Either way, the next question branching towards us is this: how would we know? Shadow Ticket’s authorship is a claim we’re forced to take on faith. A big ask when the author’s very existence has been subject to a lifelong project in the fine art of radical uncertainty. In Don DeLillo’s Mao II, the fictional ur-reclusive author Bill Gray embodies the death of the author in superposition. He exists within a sealed box, among his books, papers and half-finished manuscripts, alive and dead to the world. We, the readers, only know he has died because we observe it in the text, the invention of another only slightly less reclusive author existing in a similar state of suspense between life and death. Leaving aside the fact that there are conspiracy theorists who suggest DeLillo and Pynchon are the same person, how can one know whether Schrödinger’s author is alive or dead?
We can only assume Thomas Pynchon is alive because nothing has changed—no announcement, no new photographs, no news from nowhere. How will we know when he is dead? Presumably, nothing will change. This is the paradox of the author in superposition: there’s no opening the box in real life. In the words of Lew Basnight, ‘In practice, “real” means dead—anything else, there’s always room for some conversation’. Does this make the new book any less momentous? I would argue not; not if the world we’re living in is, as Pynchon seems to insist, a haunted one. And if the world is indeed peering over some kind of 1932-like precipice, then not at all. Not if things are not yet as inevitable as they’re destined to seem from the other side of their eventuality.