Thomas Pynchon. Shadow Ticket . Penguin Press, 2025. I. A representative scene in Shadow Ticket , the ninth novel by Thomas Pynchon, sees Hicks McTaggart—a Milwaukee private eye newly marooned in a stylized noir fantasia of 1932 Central Europe—receive a theory of political economy by way of a stranger’s account of the workings of a multinational cheese cartel. “Most civilians,” asserts this customer (a coked-up Viennese Interpol operative of dubious allegiance named Egon Praediger), don’t have “the least idea how difficult the International Cheese Syndicate can become. The Roquefort police, the Gorgonzola squadri , even Switzerland—harmless by comparison.” OK, seems at first to be your basic deployment of Pynchon’s canonical “shady conglomerates with cheeky names” schtick.…