Publishers Weekly
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With his casually playful and chillingly resonant ninth novel, Pynchon (Bleeding Edge) delivers a warning against global fascism, a slapstick symphony whose antic comedy can’t begin to conceal its hopelessly broken American heart. It begins as a 1930s gangster story, focusing on Hicks McTaggart, an honest but hungry detective on the hunt for Wisconsin cheese heiress Daphne Airmont, who may well have disappeared into “pasturelands so far away the cows go oom.” Known around Milwaukee for his rumpled honor and general romantic haplessness, Hicks trails Daphne to Hungary, where a foreign correspondent named Slide ominously warns that “the smart money is on war.” A surreal motorcycle race around Central Europe ensues, including a daring pig rescue that ends with the freed porker in a sidecar, “done up in helmet and goggles, beaming, posing like a princess in a limousine.” Ultimately, the homesick Hicks wonders whether there’s no going back. Belying his reputation as an intimidating genius of weighty ideas and unresolved plots, Pynchon is simply telling it like it is: life is crushing, and nothing’s ever over. The novel’s heart-freezing finish is as plaintively moving as anything he’s ever done. Irresistible and deeply satisfying, this makes clear Pynchon’s powers remain undiminished. (Oct.)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Pynchon returns, this time with a wacky whodunit that spans two continents. What’s a sub without cheese? That’s not to be taken literally, like so much of Pynchon. The sub in question is a German one plying, in an unlikely scenario, the depths of Lake Michigan. There, in Milwaukee, we find Hicks McTaggart, gumshoe, who “has been ankling around the Third Ward all day keeping an eye on a couple of tourists in Borsalinos and black camel hair overcoats from the home office at 22nd and Wabash down the Lake”—the Chicago mob, in other words, drawn to Milwaukee in the void created by the absence of one Bruno Airmont, “the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile,” having legged it with a trunkload of cash some years earlier. Where could Bruno be? And why are those Germans, in those prewar days of Depression and protonationalism, skulking about under the waves? McTaggart will soon find out, sort of, having already been exposed to plenty of chatter—for, “this being Wisconsin, where you find more varieties of social thought than Heinz has pickles, over the years German American politics has only kept growing into a game more and more complicated.” Complicated it is. Trying to keep tabs on the twists and turns of Pynchon’s plot is a fool’s errand, but suffice it to say that it involves bowling, Les Paul, organized crime, Count Basie, a Russian bike gang, Nazis, and, yes, cheese, as well as some lovely psychedelic moments, including one where “fascist daredevil aviators are playing poker with Yangtze Patrol veterans who believe all that airplanes are good for is to be shot down.” Pynchon did the private dick thing to better effect inInherent Vice (2009), a superior yarn in nearly every respect, so this one earns only an average grade—but then, middling Pynchon is better than a whole lot of writers’ best. A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Hicks McTaggart abruptly lost his appetite for busting skulls as a strikebreaker and grabbed the chance to sign on with the Unamalgamated Ops detective agency in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It’s the height of the Great Depression; Prohibition is still in force, and bootleggers and competing gangs are fighting for territory. Hicks looks like a big galoot, but he’s sensitive and scrupulous to a fault, pausing in the midst of showdowns to consult The Gumshoe’s Manual to be sure to do things right. He’s also a fantastic dancer and the ladies like him, though the gal he’s enamored with, April Randazzo, is as dangerous as dynamite, and the heiress he’s assigned to track down is another boatload of trouble. Daphne's multimillionaire father is Bruno Airmont, the “Al Capone of Cheese.” Yes, even Wisconsin’s signature commodity is caught up in fraud and organized crime as well as metaphysical debate. Hicks has rescued Daphne before; this time she’s run away with Hop Wingdale, a jazz clarinetist.Shadow Ticket is Pynchon’s third elaborately detailed, shrewdly satirical, rapid-fire, hilarious, and keenly revealing crime novel. Inherent Vice (2009) is set in 1960s Los Angeles, Bleeding Edge (2013) in New York City at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Now Pynchon, himself a great mystery at 88, having stayed out of the public eye for decades while publishing ten resounding books, touches down in the heart of the country. He gleefully toys with myriad Milwaukee and Wisconsin traditions beyond the dairy industry, from beer to brats, fish fries, the card game Sheepshead, Harley-Davidson, and German Americans, including a sect of Nazis using a snazzy new bowling alley as a front. Hicks does not want to leave town nor take this case, but he is given no choice as he's hustled off to New York, then shanghaied onto an ocean liner, ultimately landing in Budapest.Pynchon dynamically and incisively renders the atmosphere of each setting, bringing technology and transport into the mix, as he always has, in this case ham radios, the talkies, a rogue submarine, all kinds of motorcycles, a zeppelin, and an autogyro. The supernatural also plays a role as Hicks’ assignment morphs at every turn even as he insists, endearingly and hopelessly, that each new undertaking requires its own job ticket. A cosmopolitan array of gangsters, enforcers, psychics, informants, spies, a jewel thief, a golem, and courageous and resourceful women round out the animated cast. The slang and banter are quick and hilarious, a bracing cocktail of historical lingo and Pynchon’s coinages. The cultural allusions are provocative—follow Hicks and April’s very different response to seeing Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and, later, life-or-death confrontations in Transylvania. The soundtrack is jazzy and the archly choreographed action is madcap and suspenseful. For all the frenzy, multidimensional strategy, and wit, there is deep longing here for truth, light, and peace as unlikely yet crucial alliances and love persist in spite of chaos, cons, betrayals, and bloodshed. And all is shadowed by the gathering forces of fascism and genocide. Pynchon’s rollicking, virtuoso, knowing, subtly philosophical private-eye caper is a fun-house-mirror reflection of a treacherous and tragic time unnervingly relevant to our own.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Legendary Pynchon's first novel in a dozen years, one of his most readily relished, is major literary news.