Imagine America now – The President of the United States busy redecorating the White House, a new wonder drug is making people skinny, Department of Efficiency, which was started by multi billionaire with a sideline in unusual forms of transportation including Hyperloops Cybertrucks and rockets. How do you see the world depends on your perspective where you start from? If you imagine that the centre of the known universe is the Milwaukee-Chicago, on the shores of the Lake Michigan, once the heartland and cross-roads of American farming and industry: Wisconsin’s vast dairy herds to the west, Flint and Detroit’s  automative plants and steelworks to the east. Railroads from the Chicago switchyards to deliver cargoes across the continental United States, as far as the Atlantic gateways fo Philadelphia and New York, the gulf ports at Houston and New Orleans, San Francisco for shipping to Pacific markets. Firefighters, Schooners, whaleback steamers carry lumber, grain, coal and iron ore across the Great Lakes, with fleets of trap-net fish tugs operating out of Sheboygan, and from this powerhouse the rest of the planet can seen very distant.

In Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon’s time is 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression-strike-breakers hired to bust heads at union marches, anarchist actions against the police, inter-mob violence, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labour-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strike-breaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets send 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 wondering. 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 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 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.

 Milwaukee is a riot of colour and sound, of dancefloors and speakeasies and good times being had.  Prohibition on the way out, big-band jazz on the way in the Aragon Ballroom in Uptown Chicago has “cork, felt and spring-cushioned floor, plan trees, archways, tile, the Spanish Courtyard treatment”.

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press, £22, 304 pages.