I've read Pynchon over the years. The Crying of Lot 49 is reviewed on this blog, but I also read Mason & Dixon when it first came out and really enjoyed it. Shadow Ticket is more Lot 49 than Mason & Dixon, but we've got to remember Pynchon was in his late eighties when he wrote it, and it's a lot better than many late books by other authors who lived nowhere near so long. It may have been, and probably was, worked on over a long period; I notice, for example, that it links to promotional material that Pynchon wrote for Against the Day twenty years earler, though little resemblance to Against the Day (we are talking Pynchon the prankster, after all). Even so, Shadow Ticket seems remarkably fresh and bursting with ideas.
The plot is both simple and bizarre. The year is 1932. Private gumshoe and former strikebreaker Hicks McTaggart is on the trail of the daughter of the notorious Al Capone of Milwaukee Cheese (the Chicago Al Capone of Hooch being currently incarcerated). The trail leads him to the Great Lakes and the new-fledged Balkan states which he finds to be in the early stages of Nazification. Along the way he encounters masters of Swing, auto-gyros, spies and spymasters, and masters of apports and asports.
Most of the book is conducted in hip dialogue of the era, which manages to be cool and quaint at the same time. As always with Pynchon, he is at his best when he gives his fancy free rein. I especially enjoyed his account, late on, of the endless motorcycle race going on around Hungary. The down side is that some manic interludes don't appeal so much. It's a personal thing. Pynchon provides the sideshows and we all drift towards our favourites.
Overall, a remarkable achievement some of which is likely to take up permanent lodging in my brainbank.
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