Ticket to the past

Conspiracy, fear and raucous humour pepper the pages of the 10th novel from the famously reclusive Thomas Pynchon.

- BY DAVID HERKT

About all that Hicks can recall," Thomas Pynchon writes of his latest protagonist, private detective Hicks McTaggart, “is having what he thought was an innocent beer, which turned out to have been visited by a needle full of something in the chloral hydrate family, sending him off to dreamland before he could remember how to find a coaster to set his glass upon.” This is 1932 America on the brink of repealing Prohibition and almost anything goes.

Shadow Ticket is the 88-year-old author's first published work since 2009. He is famously reclusive – a possible 2018 paparazzi shot aside, Pynchon has not been photographed in more than 60 years - so any new book is a surprise. But the book, his 10th, also reveals that someone who has written some of the 20th century's most important novels is having fun - seemingly - and letting the reader share in it.

Shadow Ticket preserves many of Pynchon's tics while being the most audaciously comedic of his novels. It takes its cue, and its language, from 1930s American pulp fiction. It is a fantasia on pre-World War II true history put through a blend of the Marx Brothers with a dash of True Detective, and offering more than a nod to the present.

Dashiell Hammet, author of books such as The Maltese Falcon and a real-life private detective and strikebreaker, is the model for McTaggart. Despite Pynchon’s humour, his often vaudevillian sensibility and his vast store of recondite information, Shadow Ticket has a subtext of conspiracy, paranoia and fear, even more apparent in a world on the brink of war.

“Maybe he saw something, but doesn’t know what he saw,” Pynchon writes. “Knows enough not to talk but not exactly what he shouldn't be talking about. Or who to. Which makes him dangerous, putting forces he never knew existed to the trouble of putting things right again.”