It’s a great day to be Paul Thomas Anderson. Thomas Pynchon—postmodern novelist and the inspiration behind multiplePTA films—is back. Penguin Random House just confirmed that the author has a new novel, titled Shadow Ticket, coming out on October 7. It will be his first since Bleeding Edge in 2013.
While the novel doesn’t have an official cover yet, the publisher did release a lengthy description of its plot. Check it out below:
Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.
It’s a pretty great time to be a Pynchon fan in general. PTA’s highly-anticipated One Battle After Another—loosely adapted from Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland—is due on September 26 from Warner Bros. The film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the kooky, wannabe revolutionary protagonist, just got its first trailer, which you can watch below. Maybe these two will become the next great actor-director pair and DiCaprio will one day get to add Hicks McTaggart (a great name, by the way) to his resume.
