Multiplications of Effect: Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket feat. Devin Thomas O’ Shea (Premium E321) Sample
Devin Thomas O’Shea transports Travis to Milwaukee, 1932, where Thomas Pynchon’s newest novel Shadow Ticket kicks off with speakeasy intrigue, Depression misery, and a precision-engineered car bomb. Devin unpacks Pynchon’s characteristic hinge-of-history setting, when everyone’s forced to pick sides, as the book’s reluctant bruiser-turned-investigator Hicks McTaggart gets thrashed around by forces he can’t (and won’t) understand.
Shadow Ticket’s paranoia, occult object-mysticism, and explosive politics connect to the real history of American labor violence: the Haymarket bombing and riot, the Bay View massacre, and the 1932 Ford hunger march. What can the novel, probably Pynchon’s last, teach us about our current strange moment in history?
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Devin Thomas O’Shea
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The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis by Devin Thomas O'Shea — Coming June 2026
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Welcome to the QAA podcast premium episode 321, Multiplications of Effect, Thomas Pynchon's Shadow Ticket.
As always, we are your hosts, Travis View, and Devin Thomas O'Shea.
All right.
We're back for another contemplative literary episode with Devin.
Yo, I think people's nerves are a little fried right now.
So I think let's get a little cerebral and thoughtful.
Yeah, let's go into the wide world of literature where nothing sort of applies to any current politics that's happening right now.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is a good one.
New about Pynchon's latest.
Yeah, we're going to get everybody caught up.
They're going to know some of the structure of Shadow Ticket because let's be honest, getting into Pynchon is a hard thing.
So we're going to do a little rundown of the important stuff, maybe.
All right.
Let's get into it.
It's Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1932.
You and your best gal are doing the Lindy Hop in a speakeasy, just a stone's throw from the misty, icy waters of Lake Michigan.
It's colder than the North Pole out there, and just like Shadow Ticket's protagonist, Hicks McTaggart.
You're broke beyond broke, a permanent renter, but inside the warmth of a hideaway lounge, you and your polycurious professional singer-girlfriend are cutting a rug.
Mid-dance, you remove a comb from your jacket pocket and rake your hair back after dipping it in some radium jelly.
The bowling ball crown of your head now glows in the dark, just like the dial on your radium watch.
And you smile, then seamlessly return to jazz dancing to a song named after an American Nazi, Charles Lindbergh, who flew a plane pretty far one time and then completely lost a baby.
I believe we talked about Charles actually on the last episode when he buzzed the Noonday Club.
Do you remember that, Travis?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The secretive elite gentleman's club.
That's right.
That put some cash in Charles's hand to fly across the Atlantic and set Europe ablaze, as he said.
Well, here in 1932, in the third year of the economic crisis, unregulated manufacturing has created all kinds of secretly deadly consumer goods, while consumer spending power has plummeted and continues to drop.
Partly because everyone who was having so much fun in the roaring 20s is now sitting atop their mountains of wealth and operate the Washington political apparatus as a kind of subsidiary of Ford Standard Oriel, Carnegie Steel, and so on.
Both of Pynchon's media products of 2025, Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another and his newest novel, Shadow Ticket, are, I think, hitting pretty close to home right now.
Did you, Travis, see OBAA?
I did.
I did.
I enjoyed it a lot.
I mean, it's a lot of fun just as a film, you know.
I think it's like genuinely surprising in some parts and genuinely funny and shocking.
But man, what I really like most is their portrayal of the white supremacist secret society, the Christmas Adventurers.
Absolutely.
I mean, it's like, I think it really captures how both self-serious and, you know, ludicrously absurd those kinds of organizations are.
Yeah, the like setting where they appear in like both the fancy hotel and then also the bunker underneath somebody's mansion.
It's like that seemed very perfect.
Very Pynchonian, but also that's like a PTA thing too, of like an uncanny, weird, self-serious group, you know?
Pretty good, but again, hitting pretty close to home.
Pynchon is always very careful to choose what he thinks is the liminal edge between eras for his novels.
He's always looking for transitionary periods between the old and the new world.
And so his books are usually concerned with protagonists like Doc Spicello, who is the witness to the end of the 1960s counterculture in California.
And Doc sort of vanishes in a ghostly convoy at the end of Inherent Vice because his archetype is sort of used up.
He's done and disappearing from history itself as the 1970s roll in.
In Vineland, Zoid Wheeler is also the last of a dying breed of hippie trying to make it through to the 1980s, but his daughter Prairie discovers the truth of her anarchist mother and fascist father right as the Reagan Revolution starts to transform both of their lives.
In Shadow Ticket, 1932 is the year everyone has to start picking sides.
The chain of events which leads the United States through World War II is not there.
It's totally wide open and nebulous, veiled.
All of the ingredients of the conflict are present, but they haven't quite been blended together into the right configuration.
As Hicks' uncle Lefty puts it, The Milwaukee Police Department finds we gotta deal not only with the Reds, who've been troublesome forever, but also with the Hitler movement.
Sometime soon, they're heading for a showdown.
More than just pushing and shoving like out in West Allis lately, but real blood on the streets of Milwaukee.
Let's hope not too much higher than trousercuffs level till one priority prevails.
West Alice is a city right next to Milwaukee with a large German-American population, and it was also host to a number of dust-ups between American Nazis and, you know, Antifa.
Antifa back then was mostly Jewish Americans and trade unionists and progressives who did the bruiser work of making Nazism feel threatened and despised.
Back when I was learning about history in high school and college, we were ready to admit stuff like this, but more have become keen to the fact that there was a big American Bundes movement, with the Friends of New Germany establishing a chapter in West Ailis in 1933.
That's the same year Hitler was no longer the Chancellor of Germany, but instead took over as an official dictatorship, entering into the post-seizure of power phase of the Reich.
Well, yeah, I'm sure it seemed like they were on the come-up, so they were hitching their wagon because of something that was, that was ascending.
One of the Nazis Hicks runs into in Milwaukee says, you know, you can join the party now, it's pretty easy, and in the future, it might not be so easy anymore.
Shadow Ticket's year, 1932, is the year of the Reichstag fire, but those in opposition are still hoping to unelect all these guys who seem totally insane and drunk on power and keep passing laws to make it more and more illegal to oppose them.
But here's the thing about Pynchon.
His conception of history fundamentally rejects the idea that history repeats itself.
It never repeats.
Every era is totally and genuinely unique, situated in a specific geopolitical configuration in a very specific technological moment with a totally unique and never-before-experienced cultural thing going on.
On top of that, fascism and sadism are big parts of every Pynchon novel, whether it's the 1690s or the 1960s.
So what's most important and interesting in Choosing 1932, which is possibly, you know, this might be Pynchon's final novel, is not the warning about the existence of American Nazis.
For me, what's most interesting in Shadow Ticket is the protagonist that Pynchon chooses to navigate this year and how unique Hicks McTaggart is in the wider Pynchon verse.
Pynchon was born in 1937, and his first novel, V, is very much written about the 1950s as a stark contrast to the Depression decade.
As Benny Profane, V's protagonist, returns from life in the Navy, Pynchon writes, On the way downtown on the subway, he decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we are born in, because he felt now as if he were living in some private depression days.
Unique Protagonist Insights00:01:39
The suit, the job with the city that would not exist after two weeks more at the most.
Spiritually, Thomas has always felt himself to be of the 1930s.
As Profane rides the bus through the 1950s consumer mecca of New York, Pynchon writes, All around him were people in new suits, millions of inanimate objects being produced brand new every week, new cars in the streets, houses going up by the thousands all over the suburbs he had left months ago.
Where was the Depression?
Flash forward 62 years later and the 1930s are still on Pynchon's mind, but in Shadow Ticket, the class war part is loud and clear.
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Travis, why is that such a good deal?
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Travis, for once, I agree with you.
And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QA.