Shadow Ticket: Thomas Pynchon’s first novel in over a decade

Book cover of Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon — Pynchon’s ninth novel: ‘what a way to go out’

(Image credit: Jonathan Cape)

The US novelist Thomas Pynchon has had “one of the last A-list literary careers”, said Megan Nolan in The Telegraph. His first three novels – “V”, “The Crying of Lot 49” and “Gravity’s Rainbow” – were published to the “kind of rapt audience we all worry doesn’t exist for serious literature today”. Each novel since has been a “major event”. Now aged 88, Pynchon has published what could well be his final work.

A typically zany (and complex) whodunnit, it centres on a private eye in 1930s Milwaukee who is assigned to investigate the disappearance of a cheese heiress – a quest that takes him across the Atlantic, where he encounters “Nazis, Soviets, biker gangs, molls”, and a “good deal of the supernatural”. “If you asked me to relay in precise detail what takes place on every page,” I “wouldn’t get full marks.” But I enjoyed “Shadow Ticket”, with its “Raymond Chandler-esque dialogue” and exuberant humour, more than any other Pynchon novel. And if it is his “last hurrah”, then “what a way to go out”.

None of Pynchon’s novels since the masterly “Gravity’s Rainbow” (published in 1973) have come close to equalling that book’s “controlled chaos”, said Mark Sanderson in The Sunday Times. And sadly, “Shadow Ticket” is no exception. A “long goodbye” that “seems far longer than its 300 pages”, it reads at times like a “box-ticking exercise”. Pynchon serves up what his fans expect: “zany-monickered characters” (Dr Zoltan von Kiss etc), literary allusions, puns, silly songs, a sense that “everything and nothing is connected”. Unfortunately, the narrative quickly fizzles out in a “sequence of tall stories and narrow escapes”.