Against the Day

I should say that I haven't even finished the book yet, though I'm far enough into it to safely say that I've gotten my 20 bucks worth (Amazon's prices are great on new books, are they not?). All pretension aside, this is quite simply one of the most pleasurable reads I've encountered in years. I've read reviews both positive and negative, both sides having some valid points. I think the naysaying is a bit unfair. Why rate this wonderful book against some criteria created by Gravity's Rainbow, or any other book. On it's own merits, Against the Day is a work of genius. The language is beautiful of course and the plot just dense enough to keep readers hooked. The pages *are* full of some very long sentences, but readers with patience and fortitude will not be disappointed. This is my first Pynchon read and I was apprehensive at first due to the following things I had heard (none true, so far about ATD) about Pynchon: -the language is difficult -the format is confusing/alienating These things are not entirely true, from my perspective. After reading the first half of ATD, I can safely say that anyone who's had a decent run in with the likes of William Faulkner or James Joyce can expect to find no difficulty reading this latest Thomas Pynchon novel. While yes, there are somewhere around 100 notable characters, Pynchon has their lives and behaviors overlapped in such a way that makes them easy to remember. As a reader, I find myself becoming intimately acquainted with many of the characters. Many of them are so dynamic that it really is difficult to determine what exactly is going to happen next, who will next cross who's path, etc. Many characters are related (larger families like the Traverses and the Vibes account for a large part of the novel's plot) Characterization is truly an exciting element of the novel and very well done by the author. For the first 100 pages or so, I was wondering if the science-fiction elements that I perceived early on would dominate the novel. While sci-fi doesn't dominate the novel, Pynchon has created this incredible other-world in which certain characters are able to habitate and many other characters seek fervently. I thought maybe that this would get tired and at least appear tacky, but there's a heavy mist that covers every inch of fantasy in this book, making things much more mystical and appealing--and after all, the Earth is only so big. Pynchon runs the Earth through a nice big hunk of Iceland Spar and now we as readers are able to enjoy not only the known Earth as setting for ATD, but also some alternate dimensions. All sorts of strange inventions are mentioned (I won't spoil it for anyone yet to read the book) and many modern physical laws are broken. Historically, the book covers from roughly 1890 to 1920 (roughly, mind you). Some of the details seem pretty well-researched, though it seems also that Pynchon has created certain details with similarity to their actual real-life counterparts, though differing in minor amounts. The regional landscapes are incredibly described. There is very good continuity, with regard to temporal and cultural details. The plot, generally, involves a battling between what I'd call high-capitalism and slippery anarchism. Here are some themes: Doubling Divergence Time Travel Government Big Business History/Perception of History Electricity/Technology There's an extensive Cameo made by Nikola Tesla, which make the book interesting. The book's first pages include a disclaimer warning that inference to likenesses between characters and real-life figures is discouraged, but this to me almost seems more a flag denoting the opposite. Ultimately, it will be the readers who decide, though it is easy enough to look back in time to see exactly what literary fiction does in terms of sending a message about the world's state of affairs. Overall, this book exceeded my expectations and has proved to be pleasant reading, rather than the constant challenge (though yes it is challenging from time to time) that I had expected. I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in literary fiction.

In1963, I picked up a novel called "V" by a then unknown writer named Thomas Pynchon and was overwhelmed. I had never read anything like it. It contained everything from raucous humor to melodrama to fantasy and presented a kind of magically distorted picture of the modern world that was somehow more "real" than any of the so-called realistic novels I had read. Since then I have ready all of Pynchon's works as they were published from "Crying Of Lot 49" to "Mason And Dixon". They were all brilliant and exciting novels, but I feel this latest addition to the canon outdoes them all. But how to describe it? I could say a lot of things, all of them true. But everything I'd say would be contradicted by something else equally true. The plot takes place from 1895 to around 1920, yet it is completely relevant to today. It is filled with earthy humor (some might even say high-school humor), the characters--and there are a slew of characters--and often blessed with funny names like Scarsdale Vibe and Lindsay Noseworthy--yet at the same time the book demands a detailed knowledge of history, science, higher mathematics's, philosophy and even magic. For example, there is a secret British metaphysical society, the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys--or as it is consistently referred to--the T.W.I.T. Well a twit is a silly fool, but ineffable means indescribably and tetractys is a triangle made of ten dots in four rows (four dots forming the base, three above that, then two, then one). It has significance in the ancient Pythagorean system, it Tarot card reading, and in the Hebrew Kabbalah. So what did Pynchon have in mind? Perhaps that someting can be silly and profound at the same time. The books is stuffed with stories. Pynchon is a natural story teller and he will often stop the action to fit in another tale. But I'd say that there were two main plots. One, a fantasy about a group of boy balloonists so sail all over the world having adventures in their invisible, mysteriously powered balloon and the attempt by the anarchistic Travers family to revenge themselves on the murderers of they family patriarch, a miner and a dynamiter. The style varies from boy's adventure (think Tom Swift) to fairly dry scientific exposition. I found that even the minor characters to be compelling and human and I think the major ones will continue to haunt me for some time. To sum up, despite its difficulties this is a book I can happily recommend. Like life itself, it seems to contain everything. And like life should be, it is actually fun.

Sprawling, but never losing its place, this book covers almost everything—light, duplicates, power and control, impossibilities and alternatives, secrets, visions, history, anti-history, vectors and equations, fantasy and reality, Europe and the Wild West, sex and violence, capitalism versus anarchy, and the sky versus the earth—via multiple more or less pulpy storylines. It's as if Pynchon combined all manner of early genre fiction—boy's adventure tales, westerns, detectives and spies, Jules Verne-eque steam-tech scifi, and even some Lovecraftian cosmic horror—into one gigantic post-modern novel. The book follows several plots from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair to post-World War I, all of which interweave and untangle through the book, some of the characters dipping in and out of the realities of the others: The Chums of Chance, aerialist boys who fly a gigantic airship. The children of the Traverse family who follow different paths of anarchism, mathematics, war, love, and hate. Lew Basnight, the lost detective who falls in with a secret society. Cyprian the depraved spy and Yashmeen the math vixen. And the Rideouts, whose activities include engineering impossible machines and just bumming around Europe. The book is long, more than a thousand pages, but with all of those people, plots, and ideas, I think the man needed every page to write this book. True, there were parts I enjoyed more than others—with a book this long, how could that not be? I tended to relish the more fantastical stuff (e.g., the Chums of Chance drilling through the desert with a sand-invisibility ray to find a long-buried but still-inhabited city) than the stomping-around-Europe-on-the-edge-of-world-war, long stretches where the book turned grim, dirty, and a bit exhausting. The book was a lot less crazy and whimsical than "Mason & Dixon," which went to all sorts of weird places and rarely ever seemed grounded in truth, even though many of its characters were historical. While that book seemed more a celebration of the act of storytelling, this book seemed more concerned with emotion and searching. But the searching—whether for Shambhala, or one's father's killer, or the solution to a math puzzle, or doors between dimensions, or the meaning of life, or a person's own family—Pynchon always hooked me into the searches, and sometimes I was there, reading a book with Frank by waning light to his dead father, or forwarding a photograph's light in time with Merle to see his daughter all grown up. Pynchon, too, has a way of creating little moments or ideas, just pages long, that seem to hold entire worlds, such as an Aztec girl who commands a tree filled with glowing beetles, each one named after a person she knew. Although reading this book wasn't as revelatory as "Mason & Dixon," it both entertained and awed equally. The writing does things with ideas, characters, and words I did not know could be done; I don't know if a person could give a book like this higher praise than that.

The temptation with a huge novel like "Against The Day" is to read it at breakneck speed. Pynchon discourages readers from that option early, signalling within the first 60 pages that this is going to be a tale of many characters, many narrative lines, at times realistic, at others fantastic, often rooted in history, at other times unquestionably about the present. For such a mysterious writer, Pynchon's influences are well known and fully on display here -- the Western scenes evoke Oakley Hall's "Warlock", the discussions of anarchy jibe with Pynchon's own reading (misreading?) of Orwell's "1984", allusions to "Finnegans Wake" are everywhere (even in the name of the comical adventure troop the Chums of Chance.) The book was savaged by some critics with a notable air of self-pity ... oh it's so long, oh it's so meandering, oh I didn't bother to finish it. Yes, there are major reviews in major American publications where paid critics admitted to skimming over most of the last 300 pages. A crime and a pity, because it's only in the last few hundred pages where "Against The Day" fully reveals itself. Critics (and readers) who enter this journey with hard and fast rules of what a novel should (or must) be are warned here ... you may very well hate it. Pynchon's characterizations can be muddled at time -- it took a second reading with the help of the superb audiobook (I don't know if they give Grammys for audiobook performances, but Dick Hill's is outstanding and worthy of some kind of award) for me to fully appreciate the cavalcade of characters. There is no central character, no central plot, but there are a multitude of character arcs and human interactions that I found heartbreaking. All of the great drama of human life is here -- but it's told in the signature, detached Pynchon style. Critics have pointed out one clear flaw -- the book is all over the place. Pynchon jammed everything into this book, leftover threads from every other novel he's written, plus bits from all his favorite books and whatever scientific or philosophic musings he has left on the table. It has the feel of a big book by an aging master who fears that he might not write another. The four Traverse children have enough development for maybe two fully drawn characters. Kit, because of his resemblance to other Pynchon intellectual heroes, you expect to be the main character, but he disappears into the plot for hundreds of pages, much like Tyrone Slothrop did in the waning pages of Gravity's Rainbow. Eldest son Frank Traverse just isn't all that interesting and his meanderings in Mexico are the weakest part of the novel. Daughter Lake and out-of-control drifter Reef are the most compelling of the litter and a book focused solely on them might would have been more tightly focused (Although Kit is clearly needed as a bridge to all the mathematical warfare central to the book's second half.) So it could have used a more thorough edit ... and yet, I'm glad it's all there. Once you get through it once, you'll be glad to revisit even the sections that seemed dull the first time around. Pynchon wrote a book big enough to encompass all of his thoughts about the fall of leftist politics in the West (as anarchism fell and Marxism rose), the dual nature of, well, nature, the various ways capitalism co-opts science and shapes it to its needs, the thin line between mysticism and mainstream religious faith. It's all there and much much more. If you take your time and let this big, strange, overwhelming book sink into you (or, again, listen to the audiobook, which by its 20 pages per hour nature forces you to go slow), you might start to think about whether civilization was crushed by World War I and will never recover. Or whether our war on terror is no different from anarchist bombings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Or whether mankind is in a perpetual cycle of rebirth and destruction, always on the cusp of grand discoveries that go hand in glove with horrible threats, both promising beginnings and ends that never quite arrive. If you want to examine big questions like these and want to be entertained with Monty Python-like broad humor and ridiculous songs out of nowhere and a mix of virtually every genre-prose style in existence, then this might be your book for the next month or two. If not, no worries, there are plenty more books that will suit your needs. As for me, my nine year wait to hear my master's voice has finally ended. Mock me for it if you wish, I'm just glad to have another 1000+ pages to obsess over before I die.

He always has something to offer but his later work is more skillful and generous and open to the reader who isn't interested in tracking down every allusion: people have human feelings and relationships and so are relatable even as you follow them through their encounters with the systems and forces of our specific world. Understanding these, and what they might mean, is Pynchon's great obsession and gift. His later novels show that same mind and spirit from Crying or GR turning to understand things like friendship, love, and family, so I encourage those intrigued by him to start here or with Mason & Dixon, both masterworks though not as likely to be assigned reading. All the Pynchon brilliance from a better novelist who has lived more life. The fact that he has so much to share and to share with so much soul, life, humor and joy is just astounding. And I come to that opinion only after reading these two later works.

i didn't like this reading initially. the jocular tone of the initial section i found jarring, but this is a difficult book to read -- the tone changes so quickly and much of the text is irreal. it's not like a conventional narrative where the speaker can concentrate on the pace of the story. the story isn't really the story here. it's just a wonderful book, and i feel very grateful to the speaker for committing so much of his time to transforming pynchon's wonderful book into a verbal work of art, which isn't what i expected, but i have grown to appreciate. this is literature, not writing. there is so little of it being written any more. I am so grateful for mr. pychon for continuing to write and provide us with such beautiful and funny and profound and silly words. i wanted to change this to 5 starts, but i couldn't redo that part. i really missed the wonder and intelligence of the speaker because this is a "serious work" and i braced to see if i could even get through it, but it's really not literary in that sense at all. pynchon has unlike barth, coover, hawkes been reinventing himself with each novel with something really wonderful. i hope he has another one at least left him to provide us. i highly recommend this ...

This book really is "that good". It's sort of, maybe, got something to do with the turn of the century. The 20th century (1890's into 1900's). But anyway. That's kind of just surface detail, like some shiny sunbeams reflecting off the chrome, momentarily blinding and dazzling you, to distract you from the pickpocket reaching for your mental wallet to steal your brain right out of your head... It's like, it's filled with big stories, and little stories, all inside of each other, or next to each other, or cross-cut with one another.... and each one is just so so fascinating, so weird, or funny, or amazing, ...... or weirdly fascinating, or amazingly funny, or .... and of course they do all contribute to the whole, in some way, sooner or later, all these weird people with funny names, who say such wondrous smart memorable things, have even met each other, somehow, more than once .... yes you've got to flip back through the pages sometimes just to confirm your suspicions, or allay your doubts... There are so many tiny fine details, both mundane and outre, which appear to have been so well researched, so well laid out, that they are just perfect. This is an exhaustive, painstaking (yet also painless) work, of momentuous, mountainous, monstrous effort and importance and wondrousness. Yeah, and there are awfully goofy names for characters, and those awful songs every once in a while, just to remind you that it's Pynchon again... plus lots of real good hallucinogens. But those aren't the weirdest parts, not by far. If you are reading this review, if you have gotten this far, then you are probably one of us, "us" in this particular case being those who should buy this book, or who already have. Now me, I have read all Pynchon's other novels too (haven't read the short stories in "Slow Learner" yet), but I don't think that's entirely relevant. I think this would be a fine one to start with, even if you've never read Pynchon before, even if you wouldn't know a V. from a transit of Venus.

Five Things that I learned from Thomas Pynchon. 1) There is no holy grail or philosopher's stone or ur-text of any kind; in the place of these illusory dreams of wholeness what we have is the secular epiphany or the illumination. Scientists, corporate executives, politicians, artists, the insane, and cognitive pilgrims of every kind have them. In other times shaman and prophets were able to gather the tribe together under one unifying fiction; in our time politicians attempt the same. But the tribe has grown skeptical, and has fragmented. The result is a psychic dissonance between the one and the many. Many strange fictions now proliferate where formerly there was one. 2) The American sensibility lives on. We love independence and despise institutionalized or standardized anything. Our heroes are and have always been oddballs and misfits: Ben Franklin, E.A. Poe, H.D. Thoreau, Ambrose Bierce, Groucho Marx, Bob Dylan, R. Crumb. Its not surprising then that Americans love movies, because nowhere is American independence (or at least the fantasy of independence: important qualifier there!) more on display than in the B-film. We all love a good cowboy movie (where the one is always stronger than the many), a good scifi extravaganza (where the individual, despite momentary setbacks, is always able to harness science and technology to his own ends), a good screwball comedy (where the individual is always able to knock down with laughter everything that everyone else holds sacred), and a good cold war thriller (where one good spy can foil the best laid world domination plans). Lucky for us, in the age of channel surfing, web browsing, and Thomas Pynchon novels (where all of these classic genres are appropriated for all manner of paranoid nonsense) we can enjoy these favorite things all in one sitting. 3) Politicians are the true progenitors of cornball fiction. Conservatives want to return to an originary cultural unity (but instead of wearing fig leaves they want us all to wear bowties); liberals find variety to be the spice of life (problem is too much spice tends only to lead to further fragmentation and a concomitant alienation). 4) Satire of the human condition and parody of its sense-making devices, as Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne knew, are timeless. Laughter might not help us make sense of things, but it helps us see the nonsense that too often passes for sense. Because satirists and parodists make fun of everything, its often hard to tell what they really believe and I think the satirists and parodists like it that way. But laughter is political because it is (usually) against hierarchies and against power (which are against the day). Laughter is the great leveler. 5) To treat all forms, from the sacred scripture to the matinee, with equal reverence/irreverence is the ultimate democratic act.