... maybe in some other world things would’ve been different, but here and now, in this one, Reef huddled down into his chair by the fire, the noise from the saloon downstairs where he’d been playing cards all night reaching his ears but hardly bothering him, though he did for a second think of the scum sitting down there playing on, never giving in, because why give in? why be cautious? you miss all the shots you never take anyhow. Maybe there’s a point to it.

Reef took up his book and looked at it. Big-ass motherfucker. Maybe it’d be better to go back to the Chums series. . . but hay-ull, he might as well try it. He’d done all the Chums books he had been carrying with him in any case, so it was time to move on to something different. And now that his nightly reading functioned more as a sort of gloomy serenade to his dead father than anything else it seemed reading material was inconsequential. It wasn't even for pleasure anymore, because it was fun or anything: it was like Webb was sitting right there next to him, could hear every word he was saying, even judging him: “why ain’t you out there blowin up railroads, son? you ain’t even got them yet, have you?”

Over the next two months, Reef read, or rather serenaded, to his dead father, and the more he read the more he sensed Webb’s presence in the room, and not spiritually either, but genuinely, really there, Reef feeling more and more strangled, even oppressed, as if his father’s ghost had him in a chokehold.

Upon finally finishing the book, Reef, with some struggle, took a deep breath, halfway into which he began coughing violently, as if a mosquito had flown straight down his throat (hell, maybe one did). He fell to his knees on the wooden floor, coughed some more, and after that one last liberating cough, there he stood, right in front of him: that wasn’t no ghost, that was his father.

“Pa, shit. You can’t just do that. Kit told me once about how you can’t just reassemble…”

“Listen, son, I ain’t got all day. Capitalists in heaven too… sure, they ain’t got railroads, but believe me, they got some mighty fine things you can blow up.”

“Well, Pa, you wanna know how Ma’s doin’ and the rest…?”

“Naw, son. I just want to know what the ha-yull this book's trying to say. You read me them Chums books and they were entertaining, sure, but what in the actual ha-yull this book is about?”

“Well, Pa, it’s about 1200 pages…”

“Don’t be a smartass, son. I din’t raise no smartass like that. I just can’t wrap my head around this book, ‘sall. Just give it to me quick and I’ll be on my way and give you some peace, alright? I trust you’ll get them two bastards eventually anyway, son.”

Reef thought for a second, not really knowing how to summarise the book. In fact, it seemed damn-near impossible.

“Alright, Pa. Well, shit. I hardly know where to begin. There’s a lot of weird stuff in here that is real funny though: do you remember Skip, the conscious ball lightning, Pa? Or Thorvald, the sentient tornado? And do you remember that fella who thought he was an actual Berliner, living in an actual konditorei as a Berliner?”

“Yeah, son, that was funny alright.”

“Yeah, and the themes, Pa… It seems to me to be about dualities of nature, and things colliding… maybe most prominently with anarchism and capitalism. Order and chaos... There’s a whole lot of stuff about math too, the Riemann hypothesis… stuff I’m sure Kit would love.”

“Didn’t understand nothin’ of that math stuff.”

“Neither did I, Pa. There’s some stuff about time travel too, ain’t there? Finding Shambhala, the whole Buddhist thing… there seems to be something about never reaching that world we want, never bein' able to get there… Damn, Pa, I don’t know. It’s stuffed with themes. I think you can read into it whatever you like. It’s art, Pa, ain’t it?”

“Damn straight it’s art, Son. And art’s important for us trying to transcend the boundaries of the everyday world. Blowin' shit up is one way, art another. You remember that. Just testin’ you. I gotta get back up there now, blow some shit up again… you find those two bastards.”

“Alright, Pa. I will. Nice seein’ you again.”

And with that Webb disappeared. The oppressive air gone, Reef breathing freely again for the first time in two months, feeling relaxed, having finished this mammoth of a book and the constraint on his throat alleviated, no longer feeling like he was living in a stultified world, or rather he was at least aware that he was, he was free to do what he did best. He went out the door, down the stairs and out of the saloon, dynamite in his backpack, the sun gleaming down onto his face, ready to get back to business again – ready to blow shit up, like the Kieselguhr kid.

At 1085 pages, accommodating hundreds of characters, locales, sub-plots, digressions, etc., "Against The Day" isn't exactly summer beach reading. I bought my copy the day it was released (Nov. 21, 2006) and started reading that day. I'm currently (May 23, 2007) on page 892. This pace doesn't reflect a lack of desire, or even time, but rather a cautious appreciation of this book. I figure writers gamble and devote years of their lives preparing a book, while the reader invests mere hours, or days digesting it. Given that Pynchon just turned seventy, and given the ten (or more) year spans between his novels, this could well be his last...so I'm milking it.

Pynchon has always been given the rap of being "difficult." True, you'll want to keep a dictionary close at hand, and those who desire a linear plot with fully developed themes and characters will certainly be disappointed by this novel (as goes for any of his other works), yet for the persistent few, his writing is able to elicit a kind of "unhealthy mental excitement."

In a sense, you need to learn how to read Pynchon, and really, the only way to read him is to surrender to his onslaught. It requires a spirit closely related to John Keats' concept of negative capability: "that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason..." In other words, the ability to let go, and read for sensation rather than full comprehension. Once you get into Pynchon's rhythm, style, and are able to crack his codes, there is, on nearly every page a kind of "aha!" moment. He lays little tripwires in the prose, so that upon careful reading, or re-reading, the running jokes and poetic asides have a renewed, and lasting vitality. Whether it is a turn of phrase, a strange metaphor, or a moment of comedic timing that produces a l.o.l. moment of absurdity, I am continually forced to put down the book, and silently marvel at this man's capabilites as a writer. He is a mad genius, a luminary, and I would argue, one of our national treasures.

Against the Day is unlike any other book I have ever read, and one that defies review. Thomas Pynchon’s latest epic tips the scales, packed with 1,086 pages of wonderful characters, marvels, and a tapestry of themes. Ostensibly a novel of revenge, AtD is also (among many other things) an extended rumination on various kinds of light, from the mundane to the esoteric. As the title implies, this is no glorification of spiritual Illuminism so much as a cautionary tale about excesses of light set against the consolations of night.

Taking place in the years prior to World War I, depicted as a sort of historical tipping point here, AtD explores many fascinating themes: Orphism, anarchism, espionage, the elusive nature of freedom, Utopian dreams, Shambala, secret societies, Tarahumara shamanism, peyote visions, doppelgangers, sexual escapades, emergent plutocracy, time travel, the 4th dimension, Icelandic spar, intelligent dogs, Gnostic inversions, Tarot trumps, super-weapons, Lovecraftian monstrosity, Bogomils, hollow Earth theories, Nicolai Tesla, Central Asia, the set of all sets that have themselves as a member, rembetica, fezzes, ukeleles…

The novel begins with the Chicago Exposition of 1893, and some of the best and funniest writing is devoted to this event. Here we first become aware that although this is a book that begins more than a century ago, it sheds a lot of light on our contemporary world and its problems. Much of Against the Day follows the lives of the Traverse family and their acquaintances. Webb Traverse, the patriarch, is an anarchist dynamiter who is done in by hired guns working for the mining company, the owner of which, Scarsdale Vibe, is the novel’s designated vile plutocrat. The task of vengeance falls to Traverse’s three sons, Kit, Reef and Frank. Traverse’s daughter, Lake, marries Deuce Kindred, the man who shot her pa.

This is an incredibly sprawling and tempestuous read. Erudite passages collide with goofy gags, spontaneous musical numbers and puns. Woven throughout the pages is a hilarious parody of juvenile adventure novels and pulps featuring a zeppelin crew of boy adventurers, the Chums of Chance, inspired by the likes of Tom Swift and Doc Savage. Theosophy is also lampooned as T.W.I.T., the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys. Then there are the Visitors, who come from the future or possibly another dimension. “They have been crossing here, crossing over, between the worlds, for generations. Our ancestors knew them. Looking back over a thousand years, here is a time when their trespassings onto our shores at last converge, as in a vanishing-point, with those of the first Norse visitors.”

I will admit to my share of bafflement at much of the math, and confusion generated by a multitude of characters that pop in and out of the narrative like prairie dogs. In the beginning, I leaned heavily on the in-progress Pynchon wiki to help decode obscure historical references, foreign phrases and greater context. But in the last few hundred pages, I surrendered to the flow which carried me hither and yon beyond my wildest expectations.

One of the interesting things about finishing this book is rereading reviews of it. It seems that more than a few reviewers didn’t finish reading it and covered their retreats with bluster. One or two actually admit to skimming. Malcolm Jones of Newsweek arguably takes the best approach and serializes his review in an attempt to keep pace with the novel:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15771953/...

Having lived with this book for three months, I can’t imagine reading it on a deadline. It’s accessible even if one doesn’t run all of the references to ground, but I would recommend savoring it and doing a little bit of reference legwork. If it touches on a subject you happen to relish, you will find plenty of delightful in-jokes and references. But even without a compass, you can appreciate this wild and wide-ranging ride, by turns hilarious and horrifying, intimate and cosmic.

For those interested in Pynchon’s meta-fictional innovations, a running theme of doubling is woven through the book, along with the material symbol of doubling, Icelandic spar, which acts as a sort of mystical lens. Toward the end of the novel, the narrative splits off into an alternate fictional “reality,” one in which we discover the destinies of the major characters as they unfold there. Even in this alternate reality, one character makes an escape into yet another reality, where he is informed that he just returned from Shambala. Fans of the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics will find much to enjoy here.

As long as Against the Day is, I didn’t find myself wanting to skim pages or eager for it to be over. I savored the experience to the very last page, enjoying Pynchon’s ability to conjure so much in this play of light and darkness. Ultimately, the experience of reading becomes lysergic, phantasmagorical and transcendental. The novel, like Biblical Leviathan, swallows you whole and spits you out, exhausted but happy to be alive, on some strange beach.

I once criticized The Crying of Lot 49 for its brevity. I said "Pynchon needs room to breathe; he should be a sprawling, beautiful, terrible mess." I'm about to eat those words, because with this book I have discovered the other side to that coin, that when Pynchon indulges all of his impulses, he becomes much too much of a sprawling, beautiful, terrible mess.

This is a behemoth of a book. It's more than a thousand pages, so it's automatically one of the longest book you'll ever read. But then it's Pynchon, so it's automatically one of the most difficult books you'll ever read. There are hundreds of characters, hundreds of plotlines, and hundreds of times where you'll scratch your head and say huh?

I'm surprised at the people who say that this is one of Pynchon's easier novels. It's long, they say, but it's surprisingly readable and less complicated than, say, Gravity's Rainbow. I mean, yeah, it's probably less complicated than Gravity's Rainbow, but that's hardly a major feat. That's like saying that something is less racist than Donald Trump, or more satisfying than fat-free frozen yogurt. It's just not hard to clear those bars.

But the book itself, what's it about? It's basically Pynchon doing steampunk. The book opens on a dirigible en route to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. It is piloted by a crew of young boys who go on Wellsian adventures around—and sometimes even through—the globe. The cascade of characters begins right away: we meet a talking dog, an Anarchist bomber in Colorado, an alchemist and his young daughter, a psychopathic robber baron and his henchmen, a shaman who can be in two places at once, an amnesiac private investigator, a mystical organization who tracks the human representations of the Tarot deck, a sentient ball of lightning... you get the picture.

Plot-wise, it's all over the place. There are too many threads to keep track of, but the most prominent one is a story of revenge. It's a wonderful story, and I can only imagine how much more potent it would have been had Pynchon reigned himself in a bit. However, this book suffers from the same disorder as George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Both authors are great at introducing new plots and characters, but they get themselves into a bind. There's no way to tie it all together. Not that everything has to be wrapped up neatly with a bow, but I kept thinking to myself, why am I spending so much time reading about the undersand search for Shambhala when I could be reading about Kit, Frank and Reef avenging their father's death?

Theme-wise, it's also all over the place. The thing that ties everything together—or tries to, at least—is bilocation or doubleness. Things have a way of copying themselves—characters, storylines, places. But that's more of a motif than a theme. There's a lot about the evolution of science, of the frontiers of knowledge around the turn of the century. There's much about the evils of capitalism, and the duties one serves to one's family.

I knew that reading any Pynchon novel for a thousand pages would take a huge amount of stamina, but this nearly killed me. By page 800 I was ready to be done with it. I didn't want to meet any new characters or experience any more plot twists, but Pynchon kept force-feeding them to me right up to the end of the book.

Some people say this is their favorite Pynchon novel. There were some sections of this book that ranked near the top of my Pynchon experiences (like when I realized what was going on with the Chums of Chance, or witnessing the construction of Tesla's unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower), but as a whole, this doesn't even come close. V. is still my favorite, then Gravity's Rainbow, and I don't care for any of his California books. I guess this is me now... I think of myself as a big Pynchon fan, but I've liked less than half of the books of his I've read.

Like I've done for the other big Pynchon books I've reviewed, I'm including the character list/descriptions that I kept so as not to get completely lost. Like with Gravity's Rainbow, it won't fit within the character limit of this review, so I've put a Google Draft link below. I haven't actually counted the characters, but I've got twenty pages at about 12-14 characters per page, so somewhere in the 260-odd range. Disclaimer: I got lazy and stopped writing down new characters around page 900, so the last twenty or thirty that should be there are not. Some people read the big Pynchon novels without keep a list like this, which I think is just madness, but there you go. LOOK HERE.

Just one more word here: I think this would make a phenomenal, batshit crazy TV show. Amazon is looking for its very own Game of Thrones, and I think this could be it. It's got fantasy elements, historical fiction elements, cameos from historical figures, action, romance, weird sex. Somebody could make a really fantastic six- or seven- year run out of this. This is the most cinematic of Pynchon's novels (that I've read so far, of course.) It's not going to happen, but it would be cool.

Y'ever been at a party and the conversation turns to books and one comes up that you've read but when someone asks what it's about you freeze and blurt something that sort of makes sense but doesn't do it justice and then small talk passes on while you spend the rest of the night kicking yourself over a missed opportunity?

Well anyway, this book is about America.

But seriously, folks, if we want to get specific, this book is like what happens when you sew a Spaghetti Western to a Steampunk Sci-Fi, graft on a bit of Spy Thriller, tie the whole shebang to a Tesla coil and let 'er rip.

3.25 stars out of 5. I have heard it said that the really great writers can only be compared with themselves. Nobody out-Shakespeares Shakespeare, and nobody out-Pynchons Pynchon. So yes it's great writing but it's all over the map (har!) and in my opinion is well overshadowed by his other work. Something about all these far-flung pieces refused to cohere for me and I often felt like I was being yanked about with little reward. And maybe that's the point, but if so—blech.

All told this one seemed to me like maybe a halfway point, work-to-enjoyability-wise, between Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon. The big payoff wasn't there for me at the end.

And now, as has become my Pynchon tradition, a series of dynamite (har again!) quotes:

"Oh, it's the usual. They think he'll lead them to some greater apparatus, he's content to let them go on dreaming. Bit like marriage, I suppose." (866)

History has flowed in to surround us all, and I am left adrift without certainty, only conjectures. (748)

"...no one ever speaks plainly. Whether it's Cockney rhyming codes or the crosswords in the newspapers—all English, spoken or written, is looked down on as no more than strings of text cleverly encrypted. Nothing beyond." (224)

"[T]he American West—it is a spiritual territory! in which we seek to study the secrets of your—national soul!"
"Ha! Ha!" Merle slapped his knee. "You fellows, I swear. What 'national soul'? We don't have any 'national soul'! 'F you think any different, why you're just packing out pyrites, brother." (293)

Had they gone, themselves, through some mutation into imperfect replicas of who they once were? meant to revisit the scenes of unresolved conflicts, the way ghosts are said to revisit places where destinies took a wrong turn, or revisit in dreams the dreaming body of one loved more than either might have known, as if whatever happened between them could in that way be put right again? Were they now but torn and trailing after-images of clandestine identities needed on some mission long ended, forgotten, but unwilling or unable to be released from it? (423)

"We were always at the mercy of Time, as much as any civilian 'groundhog.' We went from two dimensions, infant's floor-space, out into town- and map-space, ever toddling our way into the third dimension, till as Chums recruits we could take the fateful leap skyward . . . and now, after these years of sky-roving, maybe some of us are ready to step 'sidewise' once more, into the next dimension—into Time—our fate, our lord, our destroyer." (427)

"We have had no choice," fiercely... "No more than ghosts may choose what places they must haunt . . . you children drift in a dream, all is smooth, no interruptions, no discontinuities, but imagine the fabric of Time torn open, and yourselves swept through, with no way back, orphans and exiles who find you will do what you must, however shameful, to get from end to end of each corroded day." (555)

"But look here, it's wartime, ain't it. Not like Antietam maybe, big armies all out in the light of day that you can see, but the bullets are still flyin, brave men go down, treacherous ones do their work in the night, take their earthly rewards, and then the shitheads live forever." (727)

Go read Geoff's review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Then go read Theroux's great review in the WSJ - http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB1164...

" If there is an inevitability to arrival by water, he reflected, as we watch the possibilities on the shore being progressively narrowed at last to the destined quay or slip, there is no doubt a mirror-symmetry about departure, a denial of inevitability, an opening out from the point of embarkation, beginning the moment all lines are singled up, an unloosening of fate as the unknown and perhaps the uncreated begins to make its appearance, ahead and astern, port and starboard, everywhere an expanding of possibility, even for ship's company who may've made this run hundreds of times…"

Paranoia is a sensation one would naturally associate with Pynchon, and one should always read his texts with almost pathologically heightened spider-sense. So when, for example, we discover that all of his novels contain a reference to "singling up all lines" (a nautical term indicating the moment before departure) one would be wise to note that this tells us something important about what his novels are doing (a nod here to Geoff and others who, in comments during his reading of V, made this clear).

The quote above, from page 821 of AtD is a pretty obvious metaphor for his work. The use of the word "uncreated" is not accidental, nor is the suggestion that we as readers may have made this journey many times before. But, for Pynchon, and for those of us lucky enough to read him, possibility is always expanding, is illimitable and, as such, story and hi-story can take us anywhere it damn well chooses.

And so, though this is a novel about love and about family (a journey we have traveled a hundred times before) it is also about the violent collision of both with the mechanised horrors of the 20th century. It is about the Dream of Rationalism, about illimitable hope for progress and the advancement of our species. And about dirty, puerile, disappointing Life.

But most of all, and this stands out most strongly when I read criticism of the book, it is about Webb, Mayva, Reef, Lake, Kit and Frank Traverse. Their friends, enemies and lovers. It is about these parents and their children, about loyalty, failure, betrayal and memory. How anyone can possibly find these characters "flat" or "flimsy constructions" is entirely beyond me. Every event, every person, in this novel orbits around this family. They are the novel's core and its lightening rod. To see, for example, the science sections as somehow unconnected to, or not relevant to, this family is to entirely miss the point.




A crystal of Iceland spar has a fascinating property. Because of its natural polarization it is birefringent, meaning light rays entering the crystal become polarized, split, and take two paths to exit the crystal - creating a double image of an object seen through the crystal. This property had a huge impact on the scientific developments of the late 19th and early 20thc. Its shortage in the late 19th century was considered an emergency of international import.

The design of the ATD book cover has the text doubled as though we are reading it through a piece of Iceland Spar. The crystal is mentioned and riffed upon repeatedly in the text, and we even have one of the sections of the novel named after it. This crystal and its properties are obviously something TP means us to notice. We have many mirrors reflecting the world, characters are bilocated, Tesla is contrasted with Edison...If multiple dimensions, multiple possible worlds exist beside one another, with only tissue-thin walls between them, what happens to the factual and the counter-factual? What happens to the True?

It was certainly interesting to come across issues of doubling again so soon after finishing Miss MacIntosh My Darling...

The difference between TP and MY is that TP is an engineer, a scientist, a lover of gears and cogs and equations and electrons and oil-stained fingers. MY, on the other hand, writes from some cloud-cluttered height, a place of light and dreaming and utopias in the sky. TP's Anarchists are farcical, or at least the world around them is, MY's have a nobility and a loftiness of purpose. TP sees Being as mediated by technology, MY seeks the unmediated Soul. TP also loves the low-brow: smut; puns; and sexcapades of countless types. I am fond of a good dick joke or two, so love that about him. MY can be witty, but I would be suprised to find a dirty joke in her work...

The temporal location of ATD is also key, of course, when technical progress and unfettered imagination seemed to promise other worlds, radical changes to human nature and society. Until, sadly, 1914, when humanity woke up, face down in the mud. The hangover would continue to worsen right up to the present day.

"You have been so easy to fool - most of you anyway - you are such simpletons at the fair, gawking at your Wonders of Science, expecting as your entitlement all the Blessings of Progress, it is your faith, your pathetic balloon-boy faith."

I loved the idea that the great weight of all the dead from WWI, all that trauma, was dense and violent enough to fracture time. It certainly fractured History. It certainly fractured Art.

There were moments in this book, and most acutely during a scene late in the story involving statues of the Angel of Death, that I felt genuine fear for these people and their world because of what was coming (and, of course, the fear was really for the "real"world and all those millions of "real" people) - I have never had that sensation while reading before. It has lingered with me all day. It is certainly a powerful work which can re-create, can summon up, that kind of dread, that kind of acknowledgment of all the blood and suffering which began precisely 100 years ago.


*************

To finish, a little bit of TP prose:


"After passengers for Telluride had changed at Ridgway Junction, the little stub train climbed up over Dallas Divide and rolled down again to Placerville and the final haul up the valley of the San Miguel, through sunset and into the uncertainties of night. The high-country darkness, with little to break it but starlight off the flow of some creek or a fugitive lamp or hearth up in a miner's cabin, soon gave way to an unholy radiance ahead, in the east. It was the wrong color for fire, and daybreak was out of the questions, though the end of the world remained a possibility. It was in fact the famous electric street-lighting of Telluride, first city in the U.S. to be so lit, and Frank recalled that his kid brother, Kit, had worked for a while on the project of bringing the electricity for it up from Ilium Valley.

The great peaks first sighted yesterday across the Uncompahgre Plateau, snaggletoothing in a long line up over the southern horizon, now announced themselves at every hand, fearsomely backlit, rearing before the gazes of the passengers, who had begun to rubberneck out at the spreading radiance, chattering like a carful of tourists from back east."

This little passage, from around page 300 or so, and selected pretty randomly, gives a pretty good example of Pynchon's technique and his skill. He dances between the lyrical, the satirical, the geographical and the historical with breath-taking ease. He knows landscape, he knows people and he knows the history of both. He moves effortlessly between the language of the elite and the language of the street, often within the bounds of a single sentence. Personally I would be happy to simply sit at his feet and listen to him give birth to Story for the rest of my life. Here's hoping he has at least another big, masterful book in him.

Against the Day is a book of terrorists.

Bomb huckers, outlaws and anarchists lurk everywhere and—surprise, surprise—nearly all of them are likable. Against the Day is like a Louis L’Amour novel in reverse but instead of the saga of the Sackett family moving westward, endlessly crossing the frontier, Pynchon’s Traverse’s travel from West to East, hurling themselves against the tide of history and humanity and into the teeth of American enterprise during the time when her fortunes were being made.

These are not basement anarchists building bombs with English dynamite but mavericks employing the very tools used to extract wealth from countless mines with little or no thought to the human cost. Yet in recent reviews by Kirsch and Kakutani, we’re led to believe that the Traverse family’s relationship to violence makes them morally inferior, as if the gears of Capitalism weren’t leaving a trail of corpses in its wake, as if violence was an instrument to be used only as a last resort, as if bombs don’t make sense, as if life wasn’t cheap and getting cheaper by the minute.

If most novels are like nature narratives on the Discovery channel, Pynchon’s are like long shots of ants scurrying about in an ant farm; at first their antics seem utterly random, but the more one watches, the deeper the suspicion that the participants in the drama are communicating with one another in meaningful ways. To put it another way, the organizing principle of the modern novel is the family; Pynchon is interested in systems.

Pynchon's novels have been dizzyingly dazzling from the get-go. His first novel V. has all the earmarks of his mature work. His early stories, his self-proclaimed juvenilia, were celebrated for his astonishing maturity to the same degree that his most recent work is being castigated for its outrageous silliness. Embedded in Kirsch’s and Kakutani’s criticisms are their disappointment at Pynchon’s refusal to come around to the fluorescent side of the moon and commit to hyper-realism; Pynchon cultivates such extreme fandom because his readers understand that they have to come him.

The Chums of Chance are simultaneously characters within the novel and characters in a series of boy’s adventure books called The Chums of Chance (the first of literally dozens of doubles at work in the novel). The Chums fly around onboard airships filled with an assortment of impossible gadgetry. But as the years wear on and the Chums become salty old vets in their own right they come to question where their orders are coming from, and why they should carry them out the way they’ve always carried them out when their work seems not to make a bit of difference on the ball of confusion below. Like the Flying Dutchman, they become the stuff of storybook fantasy while the world erupts in total war.

Perhaps in some way Kirsch and Kakutani see their own situation here: assigned a tiresome chore, they carry it out without relish or zeal because the results fail to register an impact on the landscape.

Critics: abandon ship; Pynchon fans: full speed ahead.

(Excerpted from a review that appeared in November 2006 at The Elegant Variation:
[http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2...])

Some say life is too short to read a book like Against the Day.
But I say that life is too short not to read a book like Against the Day!

Full video on Leaf by Leaf:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzx7GL...

I’ve been on a Pynchon read/reread recently. Know what? Pynchon rules. Seriously. AtD is better the second time around. The little things are so important to Pynchon. He takes the mundane and makes them as important as anything in the world. He’s better and better the second time around. Can I give more than 5⭐️?

Mammoth novel (1000+ pages plus), with the time taken to read it further magnified by the need to consult a Wiki for detail on the many factual references in the book. Further, in contrast to a Haruki Murakami novel) the book is easier to understand on a macro level (where the overall themes of the book are varied and clear) but very difficult to follow on the micro level particularly for some of the more mystical scenes in Asia or the Balkans where the reader feels in a state of partial incomprehension.

All of this make this a book that, particularly for a first reading, becomes somewhat of a Herculean task and almost a chore to complete - however a chore which on completion appears retrospectively worthwhile.

The plot is set around the turn of the 20th Century – focusing mainly on the growing European crisis and the battle in America between the unions and plutocrats. The battle of anarchists against capitalism using the only weapons available of bombs and assassinations is a key theme in the accounts – with clear analogies to the Islamic terrorism of the 21st Century. In the US, it is clear that capitalism is defeating anarchism and organised labour, and the book also presents WWI as the death knell of anarchism by reversing the decline of national states – with a link drawn between the rise of US capitalism and European industrial/capitalist/militarist fascism. Other main areas are the development of the Middle East/Caspian region; the search for the mystical Shambala under the desert and the civil wars in Mexico; Venice and the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (including the rise of the Balkan crisis); the intrigues of the European powers and their spies.

Key characters in the bewildering list include the three sons and daughter of Webb Traverse – a Union activist and secret terrorist murdered by two hired hands on the orders of a plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe.

The other main themes of the book centre around dual identities, involving such areas as: the rise of electricity and radio; comic book hero balloonists inhabiting a world between fiction and non-fiction and towards the end of the book observing WWI only from a distance; tarot cards, mysticism and Pythagorean cults; dreams and fantasy lives; a world in the interior of the world accessed via the polar regions; the aether; the development of movie technology; complex mathematics – such as the Riemann function and imaginary axes (including Quaternions); parallel lives and universes; time travel; two Palindromic scientists Renfrew and Werfner at Cambridge and Gottingen; Iceland spar – a crystal which produces double refractions.

Is "As they came in low over the stockyards, the smell found them, the smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality—like the dark conjugate of some daylit fiction they had flown here, as appeared increasingly likely, to help promote" the best sentence Pynchon ever wrote?

It's gotta be that, or:

"'[S]pheres of influence' modified to toruses of Rocket range that are parabolic in section...
"...not, as we might imagine, bounded below by the line of the Earth it 'rises from' and the Earth it 'strikes' No But Then You Never Really Thought It Was Did You Of Course It Begins Infinitely Below The Earth And Goes On Infinitely Back Into The Earth it's only the peak that we are allowed to see, the break up through the surface, out of the other silent world, violently (a jet airplane crashing into faster-than-sound, some years later a spaceship crashing into faster-than-light) Remember The Password In The Zone This Week Is FASTER—THAN, THE-SPEEDOFLIGHT Speeding Up Your Voice Exponentially—Linear Exceptions Made Only In Case of Upper Respiratory Complaints, at each 'end,' understand, a very large transfer of energy: breaking upward into this world, a controlled burning—breaking downward again, an uncontrolled explosion...this lack of symmetry leads to speculating that a presence, analogous to the Aether, flows through time, as the Aether flows through space."

...but that one doesn't really count now, does it?

This is a rather long read, but I, for my part, will be brief. It takes more than a thousand pages for the Chums of Chance to fly over the Chicago World Fair, Colorado’s railroad and mining facilities, London and Venice and Vienna and Shambhala and the North Pole, anarchists and dynamite freedom fighters, gunslinger in Nochecita, a sexy aristocrat named Chirpingden-Groin, photography and conjuring, electromagnetism and alchemy, vectorial and quaternionist mathematicians, Professors Renfrew and Werfner and Vanderjuice, twits and twats, Frank, Kit, Reef, Lew, Lake and Webb and who the hell was that again?... In the end, and to put it in Pugnax (the dog)’s own insightful words, it’s all quite “Rr Rff-rff Rr-rr-rff-rrf-rrf” (page 5), notwithstanding that “Rr rr-rff rf rrr rrf-ff rr rrff rr rrr rrff-rf rf!” (page 443).