The President of the United States is busy redecorating the White House and bent on buying Greenland. Yet here we are—and here comes “Shadow Ticket” (Penguin Press), the first new work by Pynchon in a dozen years. This will disappoint any fans who were hoping for a rousing Pynchon riposte to our depressingly Pynchonesque era, but it’s hardly a problem. Our hero, however, is loyal to neither group, a fact that might be inferred from his name, Hicks McTaggart. Bruno himself is preëxistingly missing, having vanished some years earlier, when things started getting uncomfortably hot in the cheese underworld.