{"id":5648,"date":"2025-10-02T10:04:37","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T10:04:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/thomas-pynchons-shadow-ticket-reviewed-darkly-comic-detective-caper-set-during-prohibition-era-151637\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T10:04:37","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T10:04:37","slug":"thomas-pynchons-shadow-ticket-reviewed-darkly-comic-detective-caper-set-during-prohibition-era-151637","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/thomas-pynchons-shadow-ticket-reviewed-darkly-comic-detective-caper-set-during-prohibition-era-151637\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Pynchon\u2019s Shadow Ticket reviewed: darkly comic detective caper set during Prohibition-era"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Thomas Pynchon<\/strong>\u2019s ninth novel starts out as a case for Hicks McTaggart, a private dick hired to find the daughter of \u201cthe Al Capone of Cheese\u201d. (\u201cA byword of terror in milk sheds throughout the land\u201d.) Hicks is \u201ca big ape with a light touch\u201d whose style of investigation is peculiarly passive. As he is spirited from Milwaukee onto a transatlantic ocean liner and then to Europe, where fascism is sprouting, he becomes a hatstand for the author\u2019s playful use of pulp detective tropes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe Al Capone of Cheese\u201d<\/h2>\n

Thomas Pynchon<\/strong>\u2019s ninth novel starts out as a case for Hicks McTaggart, a private dick hired to find the daughter of \u201cthe Al Capone of Cheese\u201d. (\u201cA byword of terror in milk sheds throughout the land\u201d.) Hicks is \u201ca big ape with a light touch\u201d whose style of investigation is peculiarly passive. As he is spirited from Milwaukee onto a transatlantic ocean liner and then to Europe, where fascism is sprouting, he becomes a hatstand for the author\u2019s playful use of pulp detective tropes.<\/p>\n

The book completes Pynchon\u2019s fictional jigsaw of the 20th century. The story\u2019s relationship with time and place is fluid. The main feature of\u00a0Milwaukee in 1932 is that it isn\u2019t quite Chicago. Pynchon refers to \u201cpre-fascist space time\u201d. Also \u201ca strange time .. one of those queer little passageways behind the scenery\u201d. Readers in search of contemporary echoes won\u2019t be disappointed. In a tale of goons, conspiracists, electoral jiggery-pokery and popcorn cooked in goose fat, the most feared of organised crime groupings is New York Real Estate.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t trust the newsreels\u201d<\/h2>\n

There is talk of ancient plutocrats being de-aged, a diverting new technology called Face-Tube, robot girls, and lurid headlines in the Lowlife Gazette. There are \u201carguments on both sides\u201d. And Hitler? \u201cYou can\u2019t trust the newsreels\u201d. There are other kinds of Hitler movies, presenting \u201ca warmer, gayer Hitler, impulsive, unorthodox, says whatever comes into his head\u201d. So it\u2019s 1932, but relatably so.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The language is brightly-painted with, as Pynchon concedes \u201cfull cognisance of, and frequent reference to, The Gumshoe Manual\u201d. There are torpedoes and tomatoes, elves and vampires. An unsurrendered Austro-Hungarian submarine, picking up tobacco, hooch, dope, guns, live passengers with dubious papers. A secret Indian reservation. Magic. Things come and go, or\u00a0apport<\/em>, in a dream-like way. There are hats. The reader, most likely, will identify with \u201cthe sombrero of uneasiness\u201d.<\/p>\n

prose that flows like jazz<\/h2>\n

As the title suggests, Shadow Ticket<\/strong> exists in a glorious state of flux \u2013 the shadow of what, a ticket to where? Uncertainty, mostly, is the destination: the tale flits through a dreamy wonderland that invokes unreliable memories of every Hammett, every Chandler, every film noir ever made.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not un-confusing. Weirdly, it isn\u2019t depressing. Though Pynchon muses about an erotic desire for \u201cthe shuddering instant of clarity, a violent collapse of civil order\u201d, he approaches this from a position of dark mockery, in prose that flows like jazz. Of the detective business, he writes \u201cwhat we do, it\u2019s only investigation, it\u2019s like going to the movies.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sometimes, you got to laugh. Happily, worryingly, Shadow Ticket is a hoot.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The post Thomas Pynchon\u2019s Shadow Ticket reviewed: darkly comic detective caper set during Prohibition-era<\/a> appeared first on UNCUT<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Thomas Pynchon\u2019s ninth novel starts out as a case for Hicks McTaggart, a private dick hired to find the daughter of \u201cthe Al Capone of Cheese\u201d. (\u201cA byword of terror…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3341,88,3991],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book","category-reviews","category-thomas-pynchon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5648\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}