https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/post-american-blues
Ryan Ruby
10 October 2025

When last we heard from Thomas Pynchon, it was the Year of Our Lord 2013. Charismatic neoliberal Barack Obama had recently defeated generic plutocrat Mitt Romney to win a second term. Whistleblower Edward Snowden was typing under a bedsheet in a hotel room in Hong Kong, having leaked information about the NSA’s surveillance programmes to Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian. Real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump told a British interviewer that if he were to run for president his campaign slogan would be ‘Make America Great Again’; the interviewer scoffed that it would never catch on. Bleeding Edge, Pynchon’s eighth novel, set in New York between the popping of the tech bubble and the global war on terror, was published in September, when the most interesting conspiracy theories going were that the President wasn’t born in the United States, 9/11 was an inside job, and that the government was doing research on psyops and time travel at the Montauk Air Force Station in Long Island. Simpler times.

From QAnon to PizzaGate to RussiaGate, to Jewish space lasers to the dead internet theory to microchips in the vaccines to congressional hearings on UFOs to the Epstein files, the last twelve years have provided a rich vein of baroque paranoia. Yet Pynchon, whose name is virtually synonymous with both things, has chosen to set his new novel in the Depression-era Midwest, in the days of Hoovervilles, Prohibition, pre-code Hollywood and Big Band swing. In Shadow Ticket, Hicks McTaggart, a private investigator employed by the Unamalgamated Ops Detective Agency is tapped to track down Daphne Airmont, heiress to the fortune of cheese mogul Bruno Airmont, who has left her fiancé for a clarinet player from a band called the Klezmopolitans. This ‘ticket’ – private ops lingo for a job, so called because of the paperwork involved – will take a reluctant Hicks from Milwaukee to New York and then on an ocean liner across the Atlantic to Budapest and the other national shards of the smashed Austro-Hungarian Empire. Along the way, he will attract, like flies, the usual Pynchonian cohort of intelligence agents, adventurers, intriguers, occultists, racketeers and pilots, including the captain of a decommissioned U-Boat, an autogyro flyer and a swarm of fascist bikers. The ensemble cast finally comes together in Fiume (today Rijeka, Croatia), where twelve years earlier Gabrielle D’Annunzio declared the Italian Regency of Carnaro, a fifteen-month-long political experiment that mixed anarchism, fascism and music into one riotous autonomous zone.

Four of Pynchon’s previous eight novels – Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, Inherent Vice – have been historical novels; five if you count V. Nevertheless, the 1930s setting of Shadow Ticket has been viewed as a puzzling choice – a missed opportunity – in some quarters. Reviewing the novel for the New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz summarizes the matter well:

even if you squint, it’s difficult to determine whether Shadow Ticket is a commentary on our current era…This will disappoint any fans who were hoping for a rousing Pynchon riposte to our depressingly Pynchonesque era . . . If our reigning artist of paranoid convictions, of high crimes and deep states, of the peculiar combination of depravity and absurdity found in those who lust for power – if that guy hasn’t made use of the present political moment to craft a satire or a survival manual or a swan song or even an ‘I told you so’, then what has he come here, after a long silence and in all likelihood for the last time, to tell us?

Shadow Ticket is undoubtedly minor Pynchon, though for me the pleasures of even a minor Pynchon novel are, to borrow a baseball term, above replacement compared to the predictable, league-average novels cranked out by the US publishing industry. If you enjoy, as I do, his zany shtick – the pinball machine plots whose plunger is an ineffable conspiracy, whose flippers are coincidence, and whose ramps and slingshots are supra-Dickensian character names, bad puns, silly acronyms, dick jokes, recondite allusions, technical-manual exposition, and sudden eruptions of song – then you will like Shadow Ticket; if not, this book is probably not going to change your mind. I will leave it to the Pynchon-heads to track down all the connections between this novel and the others, particularly Against the Day, which is set in the years between the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the Italian Regency of Carnaro. Yet as someone who picked up Shadow Ticket hoping for just such a ‘rousing Pynchon riposte’ to the present, I acknowledge the force of Schulz’s question. But as I read, I caught the words ‘brain fog’, ‘Zoomer’ and ‘FaceTube’. In fact, the more I squinted, the more I saw contemporary America appear out of the novel’s portrayal of the 1930s as if it were an autostereogram. In setting his novel in the years immediately before his birth, the eighty-eight-year-old Pynchon has indeed come to tell us something about twenty-first century America – about its particular forms of labour, distributions of capital, and the political order that is crumbling atop them both.

*

Let’s begin with labour, which is crucial to understanding the zany, the trademark feature of Pynchon’s style. Pynchon is sometimes compared to Rabelais, but the word ‘zany’ is derived from Zanni, the itinerant servant from the commedia dell’arte. According to Sianne Ngai, in the definitive treatment of the term, it is the ‘strained, desperate, precarious’ form of labour that gives rise to the freneticisms of the ‘savagely playful’ aesthetic category. The Pynchonian zany, she writes, meaning here the figure, is a servant or administrative assistant, ‘unusually flexible or capable of fluidly switching from task to task’, whose work demands that he or she is ‘able to take on any job at any moment, in a virtually incessant stream of activity’. Pynchon’s style is sometimes criticized for being cartoonish and hysterical, but as Ngai points out these apparent distortions of realism are really the formal equivalents – flattening of character and multiplication of incident, respectively – of the alienation specific to his characters’ labour. In a Pynchon novel, she writes, ‘zaniness is essentially the experience of an agent confronted by – and endangered by – too many things coming at her at once’, paradigmatically by ‘hundreds of informational bits that may or may not add up to a conspiracy’. In order to survive, they develop ‘extroverted’ and ‘elastic’ personalities, every bit as ripe for physical comedy and slapstick as the mechanical rigidity of the assembly line in Bergson’s day.

Ngai’s description arguably fits Hicks better than any of Pynchon’s previous protagonists – most of whom, like him, work as some kind of low-level detective. Let’s have a look at his CV. Hicks’s first job out of high school is as a ‘corporate thug’, that is, as a strike-breaker, which he takes less out of ideological animus toward unions and Bolshies, as the former are invariably coded, than out of a genuine talent for skull-cracking. During one particularly heated picket-line struggle, he comes close to killing a union organizer, undergoes a crisis of conscience and seeks work as a private eye for U-Ops, where he mostly investigates ‘wandering spouses’ and the local Italian mafia. And it’s just as well, says Boynt Crosstown, his boss, because now that the demand for ‘kicking ass on behalf of management’ has moved to factories out west, he is available to shore up two other pillars of state capitalism: the nuclear family and white markets.

As the name of the company suggests, private ops is a distressed sector – if you have to say you’re unamalgamated, you probably won’t be for much longer – seemingly headed toward economic obsolescence under the twin pressures of bureaucratization and globalization on the eve of the consolidation of the FBI in the United States, MI6 in Britain and Interpol in continental Europe. In Shadow Ticket, the ‘federales’, Pynchonese for ‘evil villain’, are not merely an incipient state security apparatus, they are a front organization for a ‘nationwide syndicate of financial tycoons’ whose primary concern is to stop the ‘Red apocalypse’, i.e., the election of ‘class traitor’ Franklin Delano Roosevelt in November 1932. Although FDR will win a landslide, taking forty-two of forty-eight states, including Wisconsin, no one in Hicks’s lumpen milieu has a kind word to say about him; from Hick’s uncle Detlef Flaschner to his old school chum Ulrich Schaufl, they all prefer Hitler.

Hicks’s career trajectory is from physical, but not-quite blue-collar labour to mental, but not-quite-white-collar work. It does not amount to upward mobility. Starting with the cheese heiress, Hicks is forced to move from one ‘ticket’ to another, without ever being able to see the job to completion to say nothing of pay day. As his Gumshoe Manual advises: ‘always be watching for the next ticket to be sprung on you with no advance word, no front money, plus that all but certain promise of uncompensated overtime.’ Having participated in the weakening of the power of organized labour, he has in effect become a gig worker, a temp – a bit of twenty-first-century post-Fordism that Pynchon has parachuted into the Age of Henry Ford. Promotion is almost unheard of at U-Ops, and Hicks’s sole quality-of-life request – no out-of-town tickets – is spectacularly dishonoured by Boynt. He ends the novel marooned in Eastern Europe.

Even in his leisure activity – lindy hopping in the speakeasies of Milwaukee and Chicago with his squeeze April Randazzo – Hicks is a perpetual-motion machine. The voice assigned to him and the other characters – a pastiche of gumshoe and hepcat patter – is no less antic, and Pynchon does away with dialogue tags like ‘said’, ‘asked’ and ‘replied’, as if he were a DoorDash driver trying to shave off a few seconds’ of delivery time for the reader waiting at home. Here we have Hicks bantering with April during their last meeting:

Hicks with a tremble in his voice she has never yet mistaken for anything but strategic, ‘Maybe I always knew about’ – almost naming Don Peppino – ‘that . . . and maybe I don’t care?’

Sure. But, ‘That could change quick enough, ya ten-minute egg, you. I keep hoping . . . if we could just get past it this one time, who knows, I mean if there is a next time – ’

‘If’ is seldom a good sign. Pretending he didn’t hear, ‘Careful with that “we”, Angel.’

And so forth, to use one of the narrator’s repeated phrases, a twenty-minute egg being slang for ‘hardboiled’, and Hicks being only half that. Plagued by an ‘untreated guilt complex’ about the strikebreaking incident, Hicks is sent to ‘brainy and resourceful’ Thessalie Wayward for counselling, because the insurance package at U-Ops – another anachronism – doesn’t cover mental health. A former stage mentalist and vaudeville act put out of business by a new media technology – the talkie – Thessalie now works as a psychic contracted by U-Ops and the Milwaukee Police Department. Pynchon stages the meeting between Hicks and Thessalie at the aptly named Velocity Lunch – speed of service being of the essence – as a send-up of a psychoanalytic session; the ‘beavertail’ with which Hicks was going to strike and kill the ‘four-eyed’ striker suddenly disappears in what is clearly a joke about impotence. Thessalie gives a different explanation, however. Objects, like people, are ensouled; both can disappear, or ‘asport’, and appear, or ‘apport’, out of nowhere, moving through space as well as time. Pynchon takes the idea of apportation from the trick played by spiritualist mediums at séances, who – this one is for the Freudians – sometimes concealed the objects in their vaginas or rectums, and marries it to the physical universe of general relativity. (He calls it ‘ass-and-app’, which makes it sound like a joke about Tinder and Grindr.) For the Marxists, disappearing and appearing out of nowhere is a power at least one real object has had since wire transfers were invented in the 1870s: money.

Unlike Hicks, Thessalie is actually good at her job, despite the fact, like most feminized labour, her paranormal skills are not taken seriously by the other detectives at U-Ops and the MPD, with the notable exception of Hicks himself (whose paranoia is dialled pretty low for a Pynchon character). Whereas he is always in an information deficit relative to the other characters, who are constantly telling him ‘you’re the investigator, you figure it out’, what she knows proves to be the key feature of the metaphysics of Shadow Ticket. Hicks’s ‘man who knew too little’ incompetence provides the novel with narrative momentum down its road to nowhere; Thessalie’s knowledge of apportation, as we shall see, provides it with the central mechanism by which Pynchon brings his historical fiction into contact with the present.

*

Throughout his career, Pynchon has shown an abiding interest in the collision between science, technology and economics, on the one hand, and the paranormal and the occult, on the other; the point at which, in the words of British intelligence agent Alf Quarrender, ‘the needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact’. In this respect, the writer he most closely resembles is Edgar Allan Poe, the American pioneer of both gothic horror and detective fiction. The epigraph of Shadow Ticket is taken from a film adaptation of Poe’s short story, ‘The Black Cat’, spoken by the Hungarian-born actor Bela Lugosi: ‘Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney . . . perhaps not.’ The modifiers ‘ghost’, ‘ghostly’ and ‘haunted’, and the number thirteen appear repeatedly in Shadow Ticket. The mythical creatures in it range from the Chippewa Windigo (a werewolf-like being whose name in Ojibwe means ‘He Who Watches in Secret’) to the Prague golem summoned, in yet another anachronism, by the shomrim (a Haredi Jewish self-defence group founded in Brooklyn in the 1970s, whose name means ‘watchers’ in Hebrew). Native American and Jewish culture can be said to represent the poles of ethnic territorialization and deterritorialization that the book’s white American characters find themselves anxiously betwixt and between.

But the central figure in the novel is undoubtedly the vampire. On a date, Hicks and April go to see Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, occasioning a nice Bauhaus joke (the band rather than the art school). The name of the Austro-Hungarian submarine seen first in Lake Michigan and then in the Adriatic is revealed to be the Vampire Squid, two words I cannot see together without recalling Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article about Goldman Sachs. Egon Praediger, the coked-up Interpol agent Hicks meets in Belgrade, pronounces Bruno Airmont ‘the way Dracula pronounces Van Helsing’. In Transylvania, ‘the vampire motherland itself’, the characters encounter the fascist motorcycling gang, the Vladboys, named for Vlad the Impaler, the historical source for Dracula, which doubles as a reference to the Night Wolves, aka ‘Putin’s Angels’. Hicks’s last ticket, the motorcyclist Ace Lomax, one of the ‘small creditors’ whom Bruno has ‘stiffed’, explains to an ‘apprentice vampire’ with the Vladboys, that the tattoo he got in Berlin means ‘the dead ride fast’, a line from Gottfried August Bürger’s ballad ‘Lenore’, which would go on to inspire Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’, and be quoted in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, where we also learn that vampires cast no shadows.

Marx, as is well known, was fond of comparing capital to vampires, most famously in the passage in Capital that reads: ‘Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ In ‘Dialectic of Fear’, Franco Moretti argues that the figure of Dracula in particular, which Marx did not live to see, refers to a more specific set of anxieties, experienced by the British bourgeoisie at the height of what the Budapest-born social theorist Karl Polanyi called ‘the international system’ – held together by the balance of power, the self-regulating market, the gold standard and the liberal state – and what we might call the ‘first era of globalization’. According to Moretti, the Romanian Count represents the threat of monopoly, and thus of backsliding from market liberalism into ‘feudal’ despotism.

Because Stoker does not recognize that the self-regulating market is a utopian myth, and that unfettered market competition is itself what generates monopoly, it is necessary that he frame the threat to economic liberalism as ‘oriental, tyrannical. It cannot be a part of that very society he wants to defend.’ His solution to the threat of backsliding is to forge an ideological collectivity that is strong enough to fend off the ‘foreign’ vampire without compromising existing individual property relations, represented in the novel by marriage. The panacea he arrives at is nationalism – albeit with a little help from such free-market friends as Dutch academic Abraham Van Helsing and Texan financier Quincy P. Morris. But as Moretti reminds us, Dracula does not end with the death of the Count, it ends with the death of Morris, a pre-emptive narrative strike against the rising American empire that doubles as a bit of wishful thinking on Stoker’s part.

The particular commodity undergoing monopolization in Shadow Ticket is cheese. In the months following Black Tuesday, Kraft corners 40% of the US market, first acquiring Velveeta and then absorbing ‘more modest cheese operations all over Wisconsin’, before merging with National Dairy Products; meanwhile, in Europe, the British company Lever Brothers has merged with the Dutch cartel Margarine Union to form Unilever. Bruno, who owes his multi-millions to Radio-Cheez, a sort of undead cheese that stays fresh forever thanks to a radioactive ingredient, runs into trouble when the product is axed by the nascent Food and Drug Administration. Suspected of profiting off public discontent with rising dairy prices and masterminding a region-wide supply-decreasing cheese heist, he flees to Europe, where he first acts as the ‘invisible hand’ of the shadowy International Cheese Syndicate (InChSyn) – whose major geopolitical aim is to support the ‘cheese-based or colonial powers’ of western Europe in their attempt to open up ‘cheese markets’ in the lactose-intolerant nations of Asia – before double-crossing it and embezzling its money. One Milwaukee soda jerk Hoagie Hivnak, who is not sure whether Bolshevism or Bruno, the Al Capone of Cheese, is ultimately to blame, opines that the rising cost of an ice cream could be the spark that sets off a second ‘civil war’ – a subject that could have been drawn from the headlines of any number of mainstream publications, including the New York Times, Time Magazine and the Milwaukee Independent, since 6 January 2021.

If at first the dairy industry seems like a less satisfying conceit than the postal system in The Crying of Lot 49, and InChSyn a less compelling version of Tristero, it is probably worth allowing cheese to stand for what it is slang for. Yet money, as a store of abstract value, can take on many forms, depending on the historical moment. When Bruno is finally reunited with Daphne in Fiume, he gives his daughter the account number of a bank in Geneva – home of the League of Nations, freeports and international finance – which contains, not cheese, but something Bruno claims is far more valuable: ‘information’, which came to be widely understood as a form of capital only in the 1960s. What about? The ‘secret history’ and ‘membership’ of InChSyn, Bruno says, presumably for the purposes of insider trading, or better still, blackmail, which has proved to be a lightning rod for bipartisan paranoia from the Steele Dossier to the Epstein Files.

*

Because Pynchon – the ‘most publicly private of American novelists’, in the words of Joshua Cohen – doesn’t do readings, give interviews or pen op-eds, we can only speculate about his views of current events. It seems unlikely, for example, that he would share Stoker’s concern with monopoly on the nineteenth-century grounds of maintaining market competition, rather than on the twenty-first-century grounds of, say, preventing the concentration of power, or that he would endorse nationalism as a solution to the problem of backsliding, rather than seeing it as itself a form of backsliding. Still, you would be hard-pressed to look at the United States today – where three asset management firms (Black Rock, Vanguard, State Street) are the largest shareholders in around 90% of the S&P 500; where a single Big Tech company, Nvidia, is responsible for over 10% of GDP; where Warner Brothers is soon to merge with the recently merged Paramount Skydance under control of the world’s richest family – and not see monopolistic consolidation everywhere. Nor, unless you supported it, would you fail to see a parallel backsliding in the nation’s political institutions, whether you thought the term that best characterized it was oligarchy, techno-feudalism, or neo-fascism.

Indeed, you probably wouldn’t set a novel in 1932-3 – which saw not only the election of Roosevelt but Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany – if you didn’t want to court the reading that the two periods at least rhymed, the rhyme being the sound of the respective death rattles of the liberal and neoliberal international systems, leading to what Polanyi called, in The Great Transformation, the ‘fascist solution’. Sometimes we forget that this ‘solution’ was an offer not just in Italy, Hungary and Germany, inter alia, but in the United States as well. According to Polanyi, it was Roosevelt’s New Deal – with its ‘departure from the gold standard’ and its ‘political dispossession of Wall Street’ – that saved the country from a ‘social catastrophe of the Continental type’.

We can’t say for certain where Pynchon comes down on the now decade-old ‘fascism debate’, though if, as he made clear in Vineland, he thought Nixon cleared the bar, he probably thinks Trump, MAGA and Project 2025 do as well. In any case, Pynchon and Polanyi seem to be on the same page about the New Deal. Less than a thousand words after Daphne receives her inheritance, something apparently out-of-left field occurs, even by the volatile standard of narrative expectation Pynchon has established. As Hoagie predicts, revolution breaks out in the US, following a general strike over milk prices demanded by the nation’s dairy farmers. Then the newly elected FDR is overthrown in a coup d’état organized by the nation’s financial tycoons, who install General Douglas MacArthur, of the Milwaukee MacArthurs, as dictator – no doubt with the enthusiastic support of Hicks’s uncle.

This is based on a historical event, the Business Plot, a July 1933 conspiracy of self-described fascist Wall Street financiers who, worried that Roosevelt was about to increase government spending on behalf of the unemployed and take the US off the gold standard, wanted to replace him with Major General Smedley Butler; MacArthur was their second choice (a misjudgement since it is Butler who will break the news of the plot, dismissed by organs of polite opinion as a hoax, in his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee – yes, that one – and MacArthur who would later test the boundaries of civilian control of the military in Korea). Whereas the Wall Street Putsch, as it was also known, never got beyond the planning stages, in Shadow Ticket, it is successfully implemented. As we have seen, Pynchon’s novel is marbled with anachronism. But what accounts for this eleventh-hour swerve into full-blown alternative history?

All of Pynchon’s twenty-first-century novels have been preoccupied, to a greater or lesser extent, with parallel timelines and time travel (see: the Chums of Chance and the Trespassers from Against the Day, the soap opera Dark Shadows from Inherent Vice, the Montauk Project conspiracy from Bleeding Edge). The mechanism in Shadow Ticket is the aforementioned apportation. Nor is it likely to be a coincidence that Hicks shares a surname with Cambridge philosopher J. E. M. McTaggart, author of ‘The Unreality of Time’. Alf reveals to Hicks that his contact inside the Soviet Union may have been ‘thrown by some occult switch work over to an alternate branch line of history, where Stalin and his crew are no longer possibilities’. When the motorcyclists descend on Fiume a few chapters later, a carnivalesque spirit reigns, ‘as if somebody has found the ignition key to a time machine, the secret equations of social turbulence are once again in effect as in the days of D’Annunzio.’ Granted, every historical novel is a kind of time travel story, but when time travel, alternate history and anachronism are explicitly added to the historical novel as subgeneric features, they allegorize and intensify the relationship between the narrated past and the narrating present; such meddling with history must, of necessity, speak to contemporary desires or anxieties.

When, in Against the Day, one character asks, ‘What are any of these “utopian dreams” of ours but defective forms of time travel?’, he is thinking about the future. Alas, one man’s utopian dream is another man’s dystopian nightmare, and vice versa. Earlier this year on Sidecar, Aziz Rana noted that rolling back the ‘distinct twentieth-century US constitutional order’ of multiracial democracy and a limited welfare state – an unwritten, or shadow constitution whose foundation stone was laid by Roosevelt in 1933 and kept upright by elite foreign policy consensus during the Cold War – has been a conservative project since, well, the Business Plot. Today, conservatives believe that they have finally succeeded, or at least are on the verge of victory.

In April, Paul Dans, the architect of Project 2025, took to the pages of the Economist, the mainstay of liberal ruling-class opinion since the days of Poe and Marx, to crow that the ‘revolution’ of the first 100 days of Trump’s second term ‘closed the book on FDR’s 90-year progressive era’. The only thing the right will retain from Roosevelt’s shadow constitution is an executive whose powers have become almost as centralized and autonomous in domestic affairs as they are in foreign affairs, the boomerang of unchecked power suffered by the peoples of South East Asia, Central America and the Middle East coming home. (Incidentally, in its section on the Federal Reserve, Project 2025 advocates for placing the nominally independent central bank under executive control, or, failing that, pinning the dollar once again to gold.)

The fictional coup in Shadow Ticket is thus a historical counterfactual, for 1933, and simultaneously a delayed-release time capsule, for 2025. Before she flies off to Spain to become an ‘anarchist saint’ in the impending civil war, the pilot and lifestyle columnist Glow Tripforth del Vasto says: ‘Whatever it is that’s about to happen, once it’s over we’ll say, oh well, it’s history, should have seen it coming.’ All of Pynchon’s novels are dark comedies, but Shadow Ticket is particularly pessimistic. In this novel, which may well be his last, there is no counterculture acting as a refuge from the hegemon, let alone a counterforce against fascism, only the ‘counter-domain of exile’ in which Hicks along with many of the other characters find themselves trapped at the end, the United States having become the producer of exiles, rather than the recipient of them, as it was in the 1930s. When the U-Boat, ‘a bit of pre-fascist spacetime’, which is detaining Bruno surfaces briefly in New York harbour, the captain tells him: ‘It’s the US but not exactly the one you left. There’s exile and there’s exile.’

Pynchon calls this ‘post-American life’, a temporal rather than spatial condition that only started to become thinkable in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Usually, the term is used to refer to the decline of American influence abroad, but he clearly has something more domestic in mind: a change in the national character resulting from the cancellation of the twentieth century he grew up in, and over the course of which he became one of its exemplary literary figures. What Pynchon has come to tell us in Shadow Ticket is that we should have seen it coming, because it was already there.