Against the Day

Nearly a decade after Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon returns with Against the Day. I have not read this beast yet, but I have spent the last hour drinking coffee and reading reviews. They are not favorable to Pynchon's new novel, and some are almost angry at the 1,120 page length, lack of coherence, and seemingly plotless construction. The Guardian made me laugh by concluding "And the book itself has no particular reason to end where it does, other than perhaps the adhesive limits of book-binding glue."


The Pynchon enthusiasts are excited about it though. I have read many a great review of the novel, so I am encouraged that the decade-long wait won't dissapoint. You know what you are in for when you pick up a Pynchon novel, and there is a bit of understanding and perhaps preperation on behalf of the reader. It's just that Pynchon's novels get so Fucked up, and as a reader it is really difficult to not lose your way...sometimes competely. It doesn't help when the author doesn't help. Pynchon is an exercise in critical reading strategies.

Pynchon is a mad scientist, and I don't think the apparent flaws are by accident. I have read enough of his work to know he is too smart to not calculate his work. He knows what he is doing. Releasing a book without a clear plot line or adequate ending seems a propos with the rest of his work. The Pynchon canon is anything but conventional, and almost impossible to critique or assess.

Nobody really knows anything of depth about Pynchon , other than he used to be an engineer and he used to work for Boeing. There are some technical articles which can be found, and Pynchon has also contributed his fair share of album/book notes for such artists as Spike Jones and George Orwell. There are a few photographs of the author, but they are old. Nobody really even knows where he lives beyond a house somewhere in New York and maybe a flat in London. I once read about a guy who visited Pynchon's apartment, and inside he said there was nothing but bookshelves and books about pigs. In an effort to complicate this biography a bit more, and to further his post-modern stature, Pynchon appeared on the Simpsons several years ago, appropriately wearing a paper bag over his head. Several online sites offer monomaniacal Pynchon critique and enthusiasm, such as Spermatikos Logos which features, among other things, the brilliant illustrations of Gravity's Rainbow .


Pynchon did, however, surface long enough to write this blurb about his newest offering:

"Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.
As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.
Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.
Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck."

—Thomas Pynchon

And then he leaves the world with a 1,120 page monster to grapple with. And the reviews roll on and on. I generally only listen to critics when I trust their work (Menand, Denby, et al.), and even then it is only to complicate my own analysis. And when you wait nearly 10 years for a book, critics seem even smaller...
Luis Menand offers a very smart take on the new book, and in his own way is discouraged by the the publication:

From The New Yorker, Menand writes,
"Still, none of this is simple self-indulgence. From one point of view, perhaps a narrow one, there is an error of scale here. As we read, we are frustrated looking forward and forgetful looking backward—episodes open and fail satisfactorily to close, or, when they come back on line, we can no longer remember how they started. But compared with the hill in your back yard, Mt. Everest is an error of scale. The universe is an error of scale. Scale and form are functions of our capacity to perceive them. The preposterous length of the new book does include a vertiginous sensation, somewhat in the way of a "Where’s Waldo?" cartoon: the text exceeds our ability to keep everything in our heads, to take it all in at once. There is too much going on among too many characters in too many places. There are also too many tonal shifts, as though Pynchon set out to mimic all the styles of popular fiction—boys’ adventure stories, science fiction, Westerns, comic books, hardboiled crime fiction, spy novels, soft-core porn. There are echoes of L. Frank Baum, Louis L’Amour, Raymond Chandler, John le Carré, "Star Trek," and even Philip Pullman’s children’s trilogy "His Dark Materials." This was all surely part of the intention, a simulation of the disorienting overload of modern culture. As always, it’s an amazing feat. Pynchon must have set out to make his readers dizzy and, in the process, become a little dizzy himself."


The reviews are all over the place. The NYT book review was very kind, but most are unhappy with Pynchon's book. I don't think I really care, though. Critics are everywhere. But I do find myself trusting a few, so I do think I will wait for it to come out in QP. Besides, I still need to read V. and The Crying of Lot 49.