Shadow Ticket

Introduction:

Thomas Pynchon's probable last novel drops October 7th, he's 88 for goodness sakes, and I've been trying to force myself to finish Gravity's Rainbow. I'm in the 500's of a 760 page novel for the longest times as I join 3 books clubs, and don't really follow through with most of the book. It's October now and there's not much time before the book comes out. 

I'm on page 505 of Gravity's Rainbow on October 1st and I've got to read 43 pages a day, which sounds easy, but not with Pynchon when you're looking up everything. I've posted a lot about looking things up, but I can't do that down the home stretch. I can't write about what an ax bell is, a new discovery of something in the world I didn't know existed. That's what I like about Pynchon, he's always teaching me things. I will update this post as I get the book and read it. 

There are just too many amazing quotations (p. 509 GR):

"Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "∆t" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now-what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment. ...

And vocabulary:

Preterition: the action of passing over or disregarding a matter, especially the rhetorical technique of mentioning something by professing to omit it:

"the favourite rhetorical trope of the historical novelists is preterition, saying that you are not going to say something and thereby saying it"

So my bookstore called me on the 7th and said the book was there. Went over and got it. Got to nod a knowing nod when another fellow came in and got his while I was talking to the lovely proprietors. One is a Mets fan and this was her first year following the team. 

I blast my socials and tell my friends and family my excitement about possessing this fetishized book. 

It was late, so I want to start it in the morning when I'm fresh 10/8/2025. 

Shadow Ticket:

Setting: The setting is Milwaukee around 1932-3. He a detective who is hired to pick up the cheese heiress Daphne and take return her to her fiance after she'd taken up with a clarinet player. 

Characters in the first chapter:

Hicks McTaggert - Works for Unamalgamated Ops detective agency, makes 10k+ a year.

Boynt Crosstown - Hick's boss.

Bruno Airmont - the Al Capone of cheese.

Daphne Airmont - former girlfriend of Hicks and daughter to above. 

G. Rodney Flaunch of the Glencoe Flaunches - Daphne's fiance. 

Zbig Dubinksy - junior colleague of Hicks, to whom he hands off matrimonial cases. 

Skeet Wheeler - Juvenile, seems to have made money as a bowling alley detective. 

Thessalie - undescribed in passing. 

Stuffy Keegan - Owned the hooch wagon blown up. 

Pete Guardalabene - gangster

Joe Vallome - gangster

Words and concepts looked up for the first chapter:

sfincione bagherese - Italian bread and pizza combination

Imbisswagen - food truck

Loophound - they hunt shadow tickets in the Chicago loop. 

"unsociable O-O of skeet" is a deliberate piece of nonsense likely intended to be humorous, absurd, or provocative.  O-O is the notation for castling in chess. But the Shadow Ticket Wiki says: In detective and law-enforcement slang, “run an O-O” means to conduct an “observation operation,” which is shorthand for a stakeout or surveillance job.

kegler outcomes - kegler is the German word for an ancient type of bowling. 

Assessment:

Imagine a journalist assigned this novel, who hasn't read any other Pynchon, and hasn't developed an appreciation for his style. You're going to crank on him. That's what a lot of the reviews will be. I happen to enjoy Pynchon, but I do understand the frustration and anger he can provoke sometimes.

This is a fun novel that I'm going to read over and over again hopefully. 

Not since Margaret Fuller wrote her travel book about Wisconsin has a literary titan set their book in Wisconsin. Maybe Wallace Stegner's Crossing To Safety. Pynchon jokes about young women around Baraboo going into the circus, because Barnum and Bailey wintered there. He writes about the driftless area. The whole novel isn't in Wisconsin. 

I'd say that with Pynchon, I've never enjoyed a novel so much that I am utterly perplexed about.

The Rare Candy Podcast said that it's the easiest Pynchon to read. Even though Crying of Lot 49 is short, one of the podcasters said that they spent a really long time on the first page. I looked up something on almost every page, and not easy things to look up, but stuff that you spin off on, reading a couple websites to get a start on the scope of things referred to. 

Review Links for Shadow Ticket that I'll read after I read it and form my own opinions first: 

Unherd by William T. Vollmann

Washington Post

Telegraph

Times

New Yorker

Book Marks: Collects reviews, I have the same 4 when I look at it. 

NY Book Review

Guardian

The New Republic by John Semley

LA Times

The Quietus

New Statesman: Reactionary rage viewpoint. Not a fan of Leo Robson.

The Economist

New York Times Dwight Garner

New Left Review

Pynchon’s Farewell to America’s Vanishing Dream Counter Punch

Parul Sehgal in NY Times

Other links:

Stephen Piccarella: Did New York Times Staff Book Critic Dwight Garner Research His Review of Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket by Googling “Thomas Pynchon Cheese”?

General appraisal by A. O. Scott in NY Times

Thomas Pynchon Has Been Warning Us About American Fascism the Whole Time Literary Hub

Article on the line to get Shadow Ticket on Lithub: “His insanity matches how insane I feel the world is right now,” Michael said.

There's a great Reddit post explicating some text, regarding Les Paul. 

Great story by Laurie Anderson.

Rare Candy Podcast YouTube.

Uncollected Pynchon

Reference Links:

Shadow Ticket Wiki

Wikipedia

Bridge Murder case

Spotify playlist: There's the publisher, Jessica Stockton Bagnulo who is associated with a book store in Fort Greene, and "Leviathan". I followed him just in case it's Thomas Pynchon, but I don't think it's him. I honestly don't remember some of the people I follow. Following someone isn't that much. 

Quotes:

P. 43

"See, at the time you had a number of corrals in Tombstone, there was the Mighty Fantastic Corral, deluxe indoor stalls, gourmet nosebags, what they call 'oat cuisine, and right around the corner in the same price range the Just as Stupendous Corral, but then if you didn't want to spend that much money, why there was always .."

P. 46
"Just so long as you ain't another one of these metaphysical detectives, out looking for Revelation. Get to reading too much crime fiction in the magazines, start thinking it's all about who done it. What really happened.

Hidden history. Oh, yeah. Seeing all the cards at the end of a hand. For some, that kinda thing gets religious mighty quick."

"I have enough to worry about with real life."

"Well good luck, sonny. Hate to tell you but the only time real' comes into it is when they're shooting at you. In practice, 'real' means dead— anything else, there's always room for some conversation."

P179

“To waste my talent not on an evil genius but on an evil moron, dangerous not for his intellect, what there may be of it, but for the power that his ill-deserved wealth allows him to exert, which his admirers pretend is will, though it never amounts to more than the stubbornness of a child…””

Once you've finished this one, you can read the others, or begin your reread:

Read: Crying of Lot 49, V, Vineland, Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge

Almost done with: Shadow Ticket, Gravity's Rainbow

Unread: Slow Learner, Mason & Dixon, Against The Day

Say what you want about AI, but it doesn't list The Congress Dance 1931 as a film mentioned in Shadow Ticket, when I ask it for a list of films in the book. Generally it is more helpful than weeding through the list of links, and I'll appreciate it while it's still free, before enshitification sets in. 

It took me 2 months to read, I looked up so many things, and sometimes I get lost on my computer following links and thinking and asking more questions, that some days I only read a few pages. There were some genuine funny moments, and weird conceptions, and amazing concepts. Feels like I learned a lot about Hungary. For me Pynchon is like Shakespeare you can read him young and throughout your life and keep developing a deeper and deeper appreciation, or you can feel put upon at the cognitive load of such complicated fictional prose that you hate him, and I'd say I have at least 1% anger and hatred for some of the obscurity, but mostly I flung myself into the unknown and discomfort of wrestling with comprehension, trying to get my bearings. Thank you to this community, I need the support here and the Wiki, and the internet in general, man imagine trying to look all the things up after reading V in 1963. The world has changed quite a bit since then.