Over the course of his writing career Thomas Pynchon has gained a reputation as a difficult author. Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day are usually cited as his most challenging books, but Mason & Dixon and V. also contribute to that reputation. Even The Crying of Lot 49, his shortest and purportedly easiest book, presents difficulties for readers unprepared for Pynchon’s style. Pynchon’s novels are known for their word play, allusions, for their historical settings which often featuring bizarre, clandestine organisations whose presence seems to defy logic or what is credible: for their multitudes of characters, some of whom have weird names and play several roles or angles in confusing relationships: and complex plotting with crazy, hilarious scenarios and storylines that are apt to veer along unexpected tangents; or scenes that wander into other scenes without you at first realising it, or into different conversations. It can be difficult to hold the multitude of details in your head. At the same time, you are not likely to understand all allusions and references that are being made. Some readers create Wikis or personal websites about Pynchon’s work to help themselves and others grapple with his oeuvre. (See https://pynchonwiki.com/" as an example). Knowing this, I found that Shadow Ticket is a far more accessible novel, particularly in its first half, while the second half develops a somewhat more complex narrative as it introduces more characters and situations; more akin to what we might expect of Pynchon, though not mind bending like Gravity’s Rainbow, which is one of two Pynchon novels I have previously read. The Crying of Lot 49 was my first. Now, Pynchon is 88 years old at the time Shadow Ticket is being published and it may be his swan song: his last book.

Shadow Ticket is initially set in Prohibition America. It is 1932 and Al Capone, the notorious gangster, has been locked away in Federal prison. It’s only a few years since audiences were introduced to movies with sound and the era of theatrical vaudeville is in decline. The Depression is biting economically and workers’ unions are at loggerheads with business owners. Hicks McTaggart, Pynchon’s protagonist, a former strike breaker, part of an “industrial goon squad”, has had a change of heart and yearns for a quieter domestic life. He realises the risks he has been running, fighting workers on the picket lines. Not that he is thinking of his own safety. Rather, he is thinking of his legal exposure after he realises he may have come close to potentially killing a man. Unamalgamated Ops Detective Agency – U-Ops – has given Hicks a new start, and now he has a dance partner too, April, with whom he has become intimate. Hicks yearns for a future with her. The only problem is, April openly likes affairs with married men, a situation which is further complicated by her involvement with Don Peppino, a local godfather figure, who sees April as his own. He intends to marry her.

To be frank, Hicks is one of the least interesting characters in Shadow Ticket, a novel populated with a cast of colourful characters. But he has his moments. One of his best scenes involves a confrontation with two of Peppino’s goons, Nunzi and Dominic, who are sent to intimidate him over April. Instead, Hicks turns their aggression against them. He knocks out Dominic and Nunzi is smart enough to beg for a release form to show Peppino they actually tried to do their job. There’s another good scene in which Hicks is handed a ticking package wrapped in Christmas paper by two thugs who describe themselves as “Santa’s elves”. It’s much like a scene from a Looney Tunes cartoon, in which there is likely going to be a comic explosion. That’s Pynchon. His scenes are populated by detectives, femme fatales, prohibition police, Nazis and any other manner of person or group that would normally lend themselves to drama, yet Pynchon twists the situation into farce.

Hicks’ personal woes are the least of everything. There is an heiress to a cheese fortune, Daphne Airmont, who has gone missing, and Hicks is assigned to bring her back from Europe because he once broke her out of a mental asylum on a speedboat and delivered her to an Indian reservation. This makes him responsible for her life in perpetuity, apparently. Her father, Bruno, likens himself to Al Capone – the “Al Capone of Cheese” – and he is on the run after he extorted money from the International Cheese Syndicate (InChSyn). Meanwhile, Hicks’ friend, Stuffy Keegan, has escaped Milwaukee on a U-boat, stolen by its captain after the Great War ended, rather than follow orders and have it broken up. Stuffy has become paranoid because his truck was blown up as part of the street wars over alcohol, and now he sails about in U-13, turning up at critical moments. There is also a mystical element to the story. Hicks is introduced to the mystical world by his work colleague, Thessalie, a psychic who used to play in vaudeville and now helps police. She explains that he may have been saved from murdering the strike breaker because his beavertail sap, the weapon he was using, likely asported from his hand. Think of ‘asporting’ as something magically disappearing. ‘Asportation’ is a word which usually means something close to ‘theft’ or ‘larceny’, but Pynchon gives it mystical overtones by associating it with ‘apporting’, which Thessalie explains means to make objects mystically appear, which is in line with the word’s usual meaning, the transportation of objects by paranormal means.

Yes, all this is a thing in the story, and asportation will later play a bizarre if somewhat minor role, since this and any number of other details and situations are merely a part of the setup for the second half of the novel, which takes place in Europe. Hicks tries to track Daphne down in Europe, and finds himself being sent on numerous side quests, like a character from a computer game, in order to achieve his main objective. During the course of his travels he will meet spies who will try to recruit him, have the opportunity to show his prowess as a dancer, which he likes best, and confront apporting illusionists: all this while the story is infiltrated by Vladboys who are definitely of Nazi inclination and may be vampires, a clarinet player who has won Daphne’s heart, and Czechoslovakian golems who may not be technically alive, while the question of whether cheese is sentient is best addressed by the Bruno Airmont Dairy Metaphysics Symposium held annually at the Department of Cheese Studies.

The novel becomes more chaotic as it progresses and the number of characters, some of whom are difficult to remember – they are so minor – multiply. Sometimes, as you read, it only takes a moment, a lapse, a missed word, and you discover a page or two later that you are now reading a conversation between a different set of characters than when you first started. It’s what we might expect of Pynchon, but Shadow Ticket doesn’t have the same pizzaz of Gravity’s Rainbow, and its plot, ultimately centring on cheese and the cheese heiress, has not quite the same gravity (forgive the pun) as the subject of war or the V2 rocket program in Gravity’s Rainbow. Sometimes this feels more like a Benny Hill skit – for those old enough to remember – as certain situations devolve into a chaotic conga line of fleeing or chasing characters, all of whom may just end up chasing their own tail. Sure, there are Nazis and Fascists, along with spies working on various sides, but the situations are so manifold that none feel adequately developed and their import – the matter of asporting is one example – never fully realised. The elements seem performative rather than purposeful and their increasingly bizarre nature feels like a function of a vaudevillian skit writ large that eventually trundles into a conclusion, a kind of ‘what’s-happening-to-them-now’ style monologue delivered by a minor character.

In the end I wondered whether this panoply of incident and character, as entertaining as it is, is simply not developed enough. This is one of Pynchon’s shorter novels, despite its nearly three hundred pages, and there was a sense as I concluded my reading of it that the reader needs a chance to live with characters and scenes more fully: it needed to be longer. That, as a last hurrah, as this novel may well be for Pynchon, it needed to flesh out its golems and vampires and asporting illusionists, and make something more of them and other elements in the plot, so that they work more purposefully together.

With that being said, fairness requires an acknowledgement that this novel captures a certain flavour of the interwar period. There is a sense of great forces at work, just below the surface: a U-Boat literally beneath the surface of Lake Michigan, speakeasies that are haunts for Nazi sympathisers and a cheese empire that seems at once to resemble elements of the liquor trade, as well as the clandestine plays for power and wealth that are happening in the wider international cultural and political sphere. The cheese empire suggests purpose, planning and the inexorable sweep of history: of the impact on market prices, “incursions” and “hijacking” of stock, and cheese cartels working together to dominate the market, like the political and military machinations of nations preparing for another war. The cheese empire is like Trump’s ‘dark state’ – there are several very modern allusions in the novel, even a scene in a club where people meet up through screens with a social media-like program very much like Facebook – suggesting machinations below the surface of everything and the powers that really control the world. Bruno, who finds himself at the head of all this, is really “as bewildered as anybody”, “as the last man, if not standing, at least able to stumblebum around somehow finding himself in supreme command of a darker project he may never have learned the true depth of.” So, there is a sense of great powers at work, concurrent with a sense of chaos and opportunism.

On another level, a more human level, Hicks perhaps represents a generation yearning for quietude after World War I (“back to the U.S., marry, raise a family, assemble a life you can persuade yourself is free from fear”), while, at the same time, finding the forces of history thrusting him forward and taking control of his life. Is it possible for Hicks to remain ignorant of what is developing in Europe when there are people he could save? Might he take on another new role in life? So many characters in the novel appear to be one thing – magazine columnists, tourists, couriers, performers – while they clandestinely work towards a larger purpose. Hop Wingdale, Daphne’s Jewish clarinet-playing boyfriend, risks himself to play in front of Nazi crowds as he tours Europe, while secretly gathering information as a spy. Even his booking agent, Nigel Trevelyan, is a field supervisor for an agency working to put in place infrastructure and plans to save thousands of European Jews. Meanwhile, Hicks begins his career as a thug and gains insight through a dangerous moment – the striker he almost kills except for the grace of mystical intervention – along with his reading of Oriental philosophy that pacifies him, somewhat. By the end of the novel the circumstances leading to World War II and the conditions that created the Holocaust are already beginning to take shape, and Hicks sees a possibility of a greater purpose for his life: that history may be larger than his personal dreams.

So this last Pynchon novel doesn’t have the scope or depth of Gravity’s Rainbow, but we can see it is employing some of the same techniques and tropes in this story set shortly before his earlier novel, and there is still much to think about. The book isn’t perfect. It could have benefitted from further development, sure. But does this mean I wouldn’t recommend it? Of course not. This is still Pynchon and all the elements that fans have come to expect from him are still there. Besides, if you are a Pynchon fan you’re not likely to be reading this review, anyway. You will already be reading Shadow Ticket and enjoying it, no doubt.