If the Gumshoe Fits: The Thomas Pynchon Experience

Summary

THE PATERNITY OF Hicks McTaggart—defender of dames, dodger of bombs, twirler of spaghetti, the amiable behemoth hero of Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket who prowls the streets of Depression-era Milwaukee—is a question his author leaves open. His mother, Grace, and her sister, Peony, “grew up in the Driftless Area, a patch of Wisconsin never visited by glaciers, so that its terrain tends to be a little less flat and ground down than the rest of the state, free of the rubble, known as drift, that glaciers leave behind.” (Despite its charming name, the Driftless Area is a real place, not a Pynchonian invention.) Once old enough to hitchhike (“Soon as they could figure out how to bring their thumbs out of their mouths and into the wind”), Grace and Peony started consorting with circus performers wintering in Baraboo, a town at the Driftless Area’s northeastern edge, before making their way to Milwaukee to take ordinary jobs and marry ordinary men. Grace’s marriage to Eddie McTaggart was interrupted by the discovery of her ongoing affair with Max, a German elephant trainer back in Baraboo. Eddie skipped town and headed west, never to be heard from again. Of Max we are told: “When other boys got sentimental they talked about all the children you were going to have, with Max it was more likely to be elephants.” Whoever his father, Hicks is not unlike an elephant: large and powerful but gentle by nature and with a memory that keeps leading him down nostalgic pathways, a heartbreaking quality since his story will fling him far from home and offer no way back. A good memory is an asset for a private detective, charged at the start of the novel with finding a missing cheese heiress named Daphne Airmont. Gumshoeing is the more humane line of work Hicks took up after an apprenticeship as a strikebreaker for hire. He had been an accidental corporate thug since the job seemed merely a “logical” extension of high school in Milwaukee. “It didn’t get as political for Hicks as it did fo...