Shadow Ticket

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.)