“Cheese – wait, cheese… has feelings, you say? You mean like… emotions?”
“Long-time spiritual truth in Wisconsin. Thousands of secretly devout cheezatarians…”
“Secretly?”
“Only waiting for our moment. We have to be careful, don’t we… wouldn’t want to go through all that Christian-and-Romans business again, would we?”
I once had a shirt that read “I am Thomas Pynchon.” I’m pretty sure I stole it from some guy, but I have seemingly lost track of it as well. I need another one in my life because people don’t talk about Pynchon enough. Every so often a grainy photo shows up allegedly of the author, but Pynchon is never in the spotlight. He has long held the policy that his works should speak for themselves, and he has furiously guarded his privacy. I wanted him to get longlisted for the Booker, but the requirements of the nominees directly conflict with his longstanding pattern and practice of not doing appearances and interviews. At 88 years old, his recent novel, Shadow Ticket (Penguin Press 2025) is likely his last chance – maybe he’ll come out of the shadows for it.
V. was Pynchon’s debut novel and my favorite – and that satirical, postmodernm wtf am I reading voice is still the same. Shadow Ticket is the third of his “detective” novels. It’s set in 1932 Milwaukee – smack dab in the Great Depression with the Nazis beginning their rise – and follows a private detective named Hicks who has been tasked with finding the heiress to a Wisconsin cheese fortune. (An heiress he’s a bit familiar with already.) The “ticket” will see him drugged and tossed on a transoceanic liner, eventually ending up in Hungary. There’s a sub marine hanging out in Lake Michigan, a missing Al Capone of Cheese, crooked cops, a Statute of Liberty made of Jell-O to welcome immigrants, radioactive cheese, would-be assassins masquerading as Santa’s elves, and fascists on the cusp of a war that would change the world as Hicks knows it.
“Somebody better sell you a ticket on the next train out forever,” his once girl April croons on the album he loses. But this job is Hicks’s ticket out. And there’s something about the novel that reads like a goodbye.
The satire, the absurd, the pop culture references, the writing in general … Shadow Ticket is Pynchon. And it does speak for itself.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 