Using the Night

A representative scene in Shadow Ticket, the ninth novel by Thomas Pynchon, sees Hicks McTaggart—a Milwaukee private eye newly marooned in a stylized noir fantasia of 1932 Central Europe—receive a theory of political economy by way of a stranger’s account of the workings of a multinational cheese cartel. “Most civilians,” asserts this customer (a coked-up Viennese Interpol operative of dubious allegiance named Egon Praediger), don’t have “the least idea how difficult the International Cheese Syndicate can become.