Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, “Shadow Ticket,” set in 1932 in the perilous transition time between two world wars, has a lot to say about contemporary politics.

The 88-year-old author’s latest book, his 10th, is getting praised by everyone from the New York Review of Books to Reason Magazine, and that is not just because of his propensity for clever acronyms. (My favorite in this book is BAGEL, or Bureau Administering Golems Employed Locally.)

Yes, it’s a familiar private-eye plot, starring a swing-dance loving, one-time strikebreaker named Hicks McTaggart, whom we meet in Milwaukee and is then sent to chase an heiress on the run in Budapest. Amid that trope, the story portrays the unstable, planet-wide nuttiness as people try to make sense of the Great Depression, Prohibition in the United States, the collapse of empires in Europe and the subsequent rise of fascist and communist nation-states. As fun as a read as it is, we also know what awaits the detectives, mercenaries, spies, crooks and ordinary people after we finish the book: millions and millions of deaths.

When Pynchon scholar Sean Carswell, a professor at Cal State Channel Islands, was last on the Political Theater podcast, we talked about Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland and how that book was adapted to the recent movie “One Battle After Another” by Paul Thomas Anderson. We focused on the post-war politics that the book (the Vietnam War, the War on Drugs) and movie (immigration, race and nationalism) explore.  

There is a lot about “Shadow Ticket” to fit into one podcast, but Carswell and I did our best to unwrap why this book is a good read, what parallels there are to the 1930s and now (and what is markedly different), Pynchon’s “genre-poaching” penchant and why people should keep on the lookout for “hyperreality” in their own lives.

Show Notes:

• Hill insiders share favorite books of 2025
• Taking the ‘Vineland’ express to ‘One Battle After Another’
• Immigration, race and ‘One Battle After Another’
• Suspect arrested over Jan. 6 pipe bombs on Capitol Hill
• Word of the Week: Hyperreality
• The Political Theater Podcast archives
• Political Theater on YouTube
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