At 87, Thomas Pynchon is stepping once more into the literary spotlight—or just close enough to cast a shadow. Shadow Ticket, his first novel in over a decade, marks the elusive writer’s tenth book and a return to the noir territory he’s explored before in Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. The story follows Hicks McTaggart, a Depression-era detective with a dancer’s flair, on a hunt for a missing cheese heiress that propels him far beyond the industrial fog of Milwaukee and into the shifting allegiances of 1930s Europe.
Billed as a genre caper that tangles with Nazis, Soviet agents, British spies, outlaw motorcyclists, and the paranormal, Shadow Ticket is set against the rhythms of the swing era—a surprising backdrop for the grimy investigations and cosmic uncertainty typical of Pynchon’s universe. As the blurb teases, Hicks’s dancing might be his only hope of escape, his lindy hop a kind of metaphysical compass. Like many of Pynchon’s protagonists, McTaggart seems both in control and utterly adrift, chasing clues through a world fraying at the edges.
Pynchon, famously reclusive since the early 1960s, continues to cultivate his mythos even as he releases new work. Refusing to be photographed, avoiding interviews, and writing through the night, he remains a specter in American letters. But the books—densely plotted, wildly referential, and suspicious of all systems—keep coming. Shadow Ticket arrives October 7 via Penguin Press in the US and Jonathan Cape in the UK, a long-awaited dispatch from a writer whose imagination refuses to dim.
Text by Rich Aubern
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