'Shadow Ticket' review: Thomas Pynchon's bonkers crime novel

Thomas Pynchon has never been all that interested in coherent plot, let alone in positing some definitive master plotter authoring it. If his work traffics in the conspiratorial, it does so by suggesting that all possibilities are true at once, even if they conflict with one another, which scrambles any impression of emergent order and thereby short-circuits the reassurance that conspiratorial fantasies offer.

The mafia, or something like it, exists in his new Prohibition-era novel, “Shadow Ticket,” but so do disquietingly genial Nazi policemen, scheming spymasters and, perhaps most important of all, the International Cheese Syndicate (InChSyn), an outfit at once menacingly omnipresent and bumbling. It’s true that InChSyn is sometimes pulling the strings, but most of them are made from low-moisture mozzarella.

Like his most recent novels, this one is also centered around private detectives. As the wonderfully named Boynt Crosstown argues in “Shadow Ticket,” the PI doesn’t really set out to “solve” things in the way a mathematician does an equation or a police officer a crime. “This isn’t about bringing crooks to justice,” Boynt says. “We try any of that, licenses are sure to get pulled. What we do is, it’s only investigation. It’s like going to the movies. Sit quietly, eat popcorn, get educated.”

Hicks McTaggart, the book's primary protagonist, is a former strikebreaker who joined the Unamalgamated Ops detective agency after a crisis of conscience on the picket line.

Pynchon's rollicking, genially silly and ultimately sweet novel, is set in early 1930s Milwaukee, a minor metropolis increasingly occupied by the mob (or the “Outfit,” as Pynchon calls them), but the real trouble comes in the form of a bomb that explodes under booze smuggler Stuffy Keegan’s “hooch wagon.” Though Hicks is curious, Boynt soon has him on another case, attempting to track down the missing heiress Daphne Airmont, who seems to have ditched her fiancé and headed off to parts unknown with a clarinet player. Through it all, Hicks is haunted by an incident from his strikebreaking days, when his leather sap disappeared from his hand just before he could bean a union agitator with it. Before long, he’s getting advice from a psychic who sends him to Lew Basnight, an old school type visiting this novel from Pynchon’s lumbering masterpiece “Against the Day” (2006), for gunfighting tips.

Things quickly get shaggier than a “Vineland” hippie. (That Pynchon novel from 1990 was an inexact inspiration for Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie, “One Battle After Another.”) To attempt to describe everything that transpires in “Shadow Ticket,” or even just in the first half of this refreshingly brief novel, would be to risk madness, but here are a few notable incidents: With the help of Hicks’s street urchin pal Skeet, Stuffy absconds onto a decommissioned Austro-Hungarian submarine that improbably rises out of the frigid waters of Lake Michigan. Soon, Hicks himself is drugged into unconsciousness and wakes on an ocean liner bound for the Old World in the custody of a husband-and-wife pair of British secret agents. Onboard, he falls under the spell of the beguiling Glow Tripforth del Vasto, who is researching “a series of articles on how to be a Jazz Age adventuress on a Depression budget.” Before long he’s being dragged through the continent, an experience less Grand Tour than whitewater rafting trip that finds him entangled with Hungarian “apportists,” thieves with the ability to make objects appear and disappear, some of whom may be literal wizards. And when he checks in with his local handlers, it turns out that his real mission may be to track down not Daphne but her father, Bruno Airmont, the “Al Capone of Cheese in Exile.”

If all of that (and there’s so much more) sounds a little goofy, it mostly is, in a winningly loopy way.

 The joy of reading Pynchon is that you don’t come to him for the whole story, which he never promised you, but for the little treasures you carry away intact: a perfect sentence here, a ludicrous scene there, too many goofy songs and names to count. That doesn’t mean “Shadow Ticket” is a book with nothing to say - it is, after all, a story set in an era of rising authoritarianism that resounds in our own - only that it encourages us to find our comforts in parts rather than the whole. In Pynchon’s world, there’s always more than we can manage, which means that there’s always more to discover. And if your findings are sometimes kind of stupid, so much the better.