Shadow Ticket

“Pynchon’s first novel in a dozen years grabs you by the collar the way a mob enforcer might to refresh your memory. Remember his genre parodies, his outrageous names, his ornate zingers, his lollygagging but frequently hilarious descriptions? It’s all here in this supercharged noir — a Chandleresque, Depression-era yarn involving a missing heiress and a disaster-prone private eye.” —The New York Times

“Bonkers and brilliant fun . . . rollicking, genially silly and ultimately sweet . . . Of all living novelists, Pynchon may have the most distinct voice — a clipped tough guy patois delivered with the rhythms of borscht belt comedy, amplified by an endless appetite for linguistic play — that has proved largely inimitable. It’s not just that no one else writes quite like Pynchon; it’s that no one even tries. The endless accumulation of incident pulls you along, but sometimes you have to stop to marvel at any given sentence, much as you might at a 170-foot-tall bottle of ketchup that suddenly looms above you during a road trip.” —The Washington Post

“Late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open. Only now can we finally see that Pynchon has been quietly assembling — one novel at a time, in no particular order — an almost decade-by-decade chronicle no less ambitious than Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine, August Wilson’s Century Cycle or the 55 years of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury. This is his Pynchoniad, a zigzagging epic of America and the world through our bloodiest, most shameful hundred years. Perhaps suffering from what Pynchon called in V. our ‘great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in,’ he has now filled in the only remaining blank spot on his 20th century map: the 1930s.” —Los Angeles Times

“A masterpiece . . . Between the novel’s sheer weirdness, its obscurity, its evocative 1930s setting and its joyously Raymond Chandler-esque dialogue – pinging back and forth between hard-boiled men and harp-tongued broads, I enjoyed Shadow Ticket more than any other Pynchon . . . The fact that Shadow Ticket is brilliant and prescient isn’t a surprise; that it exudes so much joy and sensuousness is. To have had the career Pynchon had, and still be so invigorated by your work, is all any novelist can ask. I hope this isn’t his last hurrah – but if it is, what a way to go out.” —The Telegraph (5/5 stars)

“A literary triumph . . . A gloriously language-driven detective novel that waits for no one.” —The Boston Globe

“Shadow Ticket is simultaneously caper, quest, farce, and political commentary rolled into a linguistically experimental tale, probing the fascism that gnaws at the roots of the West . . . It’s all bubbly fun until it isn’t, a performance of bravura.” —TIME, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

“More accessible than Gravity’s Rainbow, more cheerful than The Crying of Lot 49 and more political than Inherent Vice. It’s also still Pynchon, in all his goofy paranoiac glory. Rejoice.” —Carolyn Kellogg, The Los Angeles Times

“Everything is connected in Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon’s fleet-footed noir fiction about a lindy-hopping detective in prohibition-era Wisconsin . . . Most likely it connects to the current moment as well, albeit wryly and slyly, with a nonchalant swing. That’s the implied final move of this merry dance of a book: the point where the past links its hands with the present. Shadow Ticket is a Pynchon novel – the 88-year-old’s first in 12 years; his ninth overall – and so it naturally connects to the man’s back catalogue, too, and its abiding fascination with conspiracy, chaos and the churn of American pop culture . . . Pynchon’s yarn sets out with a song in its heart and mischievous spring in its step, but it edges into darkness and its final forecast is bleak. The writer knows what’s to come and where this roll of foul history will eventually lead . . . Cheese fraud is a front and period details provide cover. But the fascist past isn’t dead, it’s stinking up the joint right this minute.” —The Guardian

“Shadow Ticket is brisker than Thomas Pynchon’s other work, but it’s full of his usual vaudevillian sensibility, and it addresses his favorite theme: how to live freely under powerful systems of control.” —The New York Review of Books

“A confession: I laughed my way through Thomas Pynchon’s flashy, vertiginous Shadow Ticket, much as I did when I first read Vineland in 1990 . . . [Pynchon has] still got his finger on the pulse of our body politic, its comic hijinks, its stabs of paranoia, slangy rhythms and casual cruelties . . . The novel’s an interrogation of America on the ropes — this is Pynchon, after all — yet it swings with a verve worthy of the Lindy Hop . . . No writer fillets a sentence like Pynchon, scattering fragments and flashbacks like so many fine fish bones. He cuts across timelines, dialing up the absurdity. Shadow Ticket is not just a trippy picaresque; Pynchon revisits themes familiar from his Mason & Dixon and Gravity’s Rainbow, reminding us that our nation was founded on conspiracies as well as compromises . . . Pynchon’s ear for exaggerated dialogue is both dense and effervescent . . . Full of frenzied fun.” —Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Bombs, xenophobic spies, Champagne cocktails, motorcycle gangs, jazz critics, and cult leaders abound . . . It’s impossible not to project the parallels of the creeping fascism in 1930s America in Shadow Ticket onto our current political climate . . . Our world does not seem all that different from a Pynchon novel . . . Pynchon knows how to drive his readers towards deluded suspicion. No one is free from paranoia when the world descends into chaos.” —GQ

“Pynchon has written his most urgent novel yet thanks to a newfound narrative grounding that maintains his distinctive style of cartoonish maximalism and high-flown beauty. It is filled with his famously overstuffed paragraphs, often one thrumming sentence each. But his words go down a bit more smoothly than usual without sacrificing any of his crackle. The result is a Pynchonian reduction simmered to delectation.” —Vulture

“A swaggering, hard-boiled caper . . . [Pynchon’s] writing simultaneously promises esoteric insight into how the world really works — that it’s governed by unseen forces and powerful players moved by dark motives that lurk in the languages and devices of science, technology, finance and politics — and relentlessly satirises any effort to make sense of how the world really works . . . This is Pynchon’s genius: what seems ridiculous at first glance might just also be a faithful rendering of earnest American culture.” —Financial Times

“Wised-up bewilderment is the quintessential temperament of Mr. Pynchon’s P.I.s—the people paid to follow leads learn to accept that they have no idea where they’re going—so a lot of the book relies on the freshness of the comic embellishments. I liked them . . . Why, in what may be his final novel, has Mr. Pynchon chosen this time period, ‘the last minutes of a break’ before historical darkness descends? On a few occasions the author tips his hand, implying connections between interwar Europe and the America of today . . . Readers will have to decide whether this is reflexive Pynchonian paranoia—the endless search for meaningful patterns—or an earnest warning from an author who has seen the world catch up to his wildest imagination.” —Wall Street Journal

“With his casually playful and chillingly resonant ninth novel, Pynchon delivers a warning against global fascism, a slapstick symphony whose antic comedy can’t begin to conceal its hopelessly broken American heart . . . Belying his reputation as an intimidating genius of weighty ideas and unresolved plots, Pynchon is simply telling it like it is: life is crushing, and nothing’s ever over. The novel’s heart-freezing finish is as plaintively moving as anything he’s ever done. Irresistible and deeply satisfying, this makes clear Pynchon’s powers remain undiminished.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“For all the frenzy, multidimensional strategy, and wit, there is deep longing here for truth, light, and peace as unlikely yet crucial alliances and love persist in spite of chaos, cons, betrayals, and bloodshed. And all is shadowed by the gathering forces of fascism and genocide. Pynchon’s rollicking, virtuoso, knowing, subtly philosophical private-eye caper is a fun-house-mirror reflection of a treacherous and tragic time unnervingly relevant to our own.” —Booklist, starred review

“[Shadow Ticket is] short, it’s funny, and its core plot—private eye chases runaway dame—is familiar enough to give a cautious reader something to cling to as the book gets stranger . . . Shadow Ticket is eminently quotable, and I could probably lay down another couple thousand words relaying good lines . . . But at some point I’d just be retyping the book, and who needs that? Better to go straight to the source. And to savor it.” —Reason Magazine

“Who’d have thought that what we needed in this mean literary-political season, now that American fascism has entered its Reichstag fire and ‘Action Against the un-German Spirit’ phase, was a new novel by Thomas Pynchon, set in the US in 1932 and populated by Nazis, gangsters, corrupt businessmen, and technological novelties? . . . Many of Shadow Ticket’s pleasures come from immersion in its period, to a point way beyond parody or pastiche and into some wildly imagined but sedulously recalled (or researched) level of precision . . . But most impressive is the language, a mix of authentic slang and Pynchon’s own coinages that makes every page a joy and just demands to be noted and recited.” —4Columns

“Like the best of Pynchon’s work, [Shadow Ticket] tackles humanity’s capacity for violence and cruelty, our sadness and stupidity, with an unflinching yet compassionate eye.” —NewCity Lit