Thomas Pynchon’s Lasting Triumph

Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, is built around doubles. It takes place in 1932, and there’s a strong feeling that “unfinished business” from the Great War – “so many wrongs unresolved” – will soon produce another one. It concerns a private investigator, Hicks McTaggart, who travels from Milwaukee, the junior twin of Chicago, to Budapest, itself two cities and here invoked as the lurid, supernatural flipside to sombre, psychoanalytic Vienna. McTaggart is on the trail of Daphne Airmont, who is both his old girlfriend and the daughter of a sought-after public enemy, the Al Capone of the cheese industry. Moreover, Shadow Ticket is two novels in one, or two kinds of genre exercise: a full-dress pastiche of the hardboiled detective novel which does homage, after Hicks is packed off to Europe, to the spy novels Pynchon loved as a boy – full of what the narrator calls “manoeuvring” and “go-betweening”.