It’s near impossible to review Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day since there is so much going on. He apes genres for plot elements (westerns, hardboiled detective fiction, spy novels and turn of the 20th century YA science fiction). And then adds esoteric maths and science from the late 19th through early 20th century, like the esoteric battle between mathematicians who embrace vectors (think linear algebra) and those embracing quaternions (which extends the unit vector covered in first semester physics to include the complex number plane along four dimensions, three of space and one of time). Next, Pynchon creates characters with bizarre names, like a western gunslinger named Sloat Fresno, and Professor Heino Vanderjuice. And if that’s not whacky enough, Vanderjuice is a long-time associate of the Chums of Chance, a merry group of lads who spend the novel globe-trotting in a gigantic dirigible and getting into whimsical scrapes.

Wow. That’s a lot.

But then Pynchon piles it on. He grounds some elements in reality, like the oft violent struggle between union workers and mine owners near the turn of the century. But instead of a Frank Norris-style naturalistic narrative, he pits the evil capitalist Scarsdale Vibe, who climbed out of a DC comic, against his polar opposite, the anarchist bomber Webb Traverse. So Pynchon crazies-up even the serious, life/death struggle that went on between abusive, very wealthy mine owners and their overworked and underpaid employees.

If he’s that coy with the serious, you know you’re in for a ride. And, by golly it is.

Here’s an example. In Belgium, an assassin tries kill Webb’s son, the Princeton-educated math whiz Kit Traverse. But instead of shooting him, the killer attempts to drown him in mayonnaise at a mayonnaise factory. And when Kit escapes, he plops into a river, almost drowning again, until two crazy Italians in their crazy invention, a mini submarine they use to zoom around Europe, rescue him.

Zany enough?

Wait until you get to the Chums of Chance, lifted from the pages of gee-whiz science fiction circa 1900, whose antics Pynchon inflates to whimsical proportions. For instance, they study a time traveler's university while spying undercover. They’re found out, run for their lives and hide in a college for ukulele players.

Ukulele players? Huh? yessir, funny stuff, but this is one example of many.

Try these other examples of Pynchon’s whimsy. There’s the Carlos Castaneda-like shaman who introduces Kit’s brother Frank to mescalito and other hallucinogens during the Mexican Civil War. And Kit’s other brother Reef Traverse, the card shark and his kinky, bisexual S&M relationship with Kit’s fellow mathematics student, the femme fatale (and sometimes dominatrix) Yashmeen Halfcourt and the British spy Cyprian Latewood. And Al Mar-Faud, a minor character who mispronounces his R’s and L’s as W’s -- which becomes “Elmer Fudd” if you read the name in the voice of Bugs Bunny’s nemesis.

Etc, etc., etc. Comedy gold worthy of Monty Python.

Beneath these Rabelaisian monkeyshines, Pynchon traces interesting themes. Most of the novel is obsessed with the dark/ light dichotomy. The novel opens with a quote from jazz genius Thelonious Monk: “It's always night, or we wouldn't need light?” And spends the entire novel reflecting on light/ dark and day/ night. Some of Pynchon's cast meander through the half-crazed science nerds hanging around Cleveland during the Michelson-Morley experiments at Case Western Reserve. Other characters live through the wonder of Edison’s light bulbs coming to Colorado, some even involved in wiring. Others spend months in awe of the oddly-lit sky after the Tunguska event, a 1908 meteor strike in Siberia. And near the novel's end, Pynchon has Kit experience Shambala as a flood of light.

As with any literary work, you cannot take things at face value. Pynchon seems to have a deeper fish to fry. Here, he creates a world where rationality and order (light) are in constant struggle against anarchy and entropy (dark). Even the title implies this, since night is Against the Day.

The plot implies that there is a “third way” between dark and light, order and disorder: a spontaneous order exemplified by jazz. But most of Pynchon’s sprawling cast live their lives ensnared in the manichean struggle. The only transcendent characters are the Chums of Chance, who hover above reality and shoot off “at right-angles” to reality at the novel’s final pages. And Kit, who enters the mystical lightless-light of Shambhala… which turns out to be in his head.

Pynchon's attractive zaniness, however, is also a weakness which blunts this “third way” by making it absurd. For instance, the plot’s core plot dark/light struggle is between anarchist bombers and gangster-like capitalists. Both kill without remorse, detached from the blood and tragedy they cause. The only difference is that the bombers kill to oppose order, while the capitalists kill to impose order. Problem is. neither side is realistic. Neither side seems grounded in the blood and guts reality of the pre-WW I period Pynchon so exhaustively researched. Instead, they are characters. Worse, neither side takes the blood spilled seriously.

Even the dark/ light vs “jazz way” seems corny. Consider the characters who experience transcendence: Kit and the Chums of Chance. Kit’s an odd duck given to mathematical abstraction. And the Chums are comic-book like fictions, even within the slightly less comic-book world of the novel. This over-reliance of irony makes any interpretation fraught with peril. Is it possible that Pynchon is contending that the only way to transcend is to create your own, enclosed fictional world?

Regardless, Against the Day is worth reading for Pynchon’s exuberant, half-baked, topsy-turvy world. A place where stage magic is real magic. A world where the optical illusion created by viewing reality through Icelandic spar creates a separate reality that concords with the illusion. Where still photos can be manipulated to show a “moving picture” of what happened in the subject’s past. And where Boys Life-style action heroes exist and, through spunk and determination, they can transcend the world in their half-imaginary zeppelin and shoot off at right-angles to reality.

Five stars. Hard to read but funny.

"si sciolga il Dispiegamento Speciale del Cielo" con questo ordine solenne impartito dal capitano Cosmo, dell'aereonave a idrogeno Inconvenience, ha inizio uno dei romanzi più incredibili della prima metà di questo primo secolo del terzo millennio. Un romanzo devastante che inizia alla fine del 1890 e finisce all'indomani della fine della Grande Guerra. 30 anni raccontati attraverso lotta di classe, capitalismo, spionaggio sia politico che industriale e di complotti. Un romanzo di vendetta, un romanzo d'Italia (anzi di Venezia)... una trama intricatissima che tentare di spiegarla risulterebbe ostico. E' un romanzo storico si racconta la Storia... ma a raccontarcela non è Paolo Mieli e nemmeno Alessandro Barbero bensì Thomas Pynchon. E questo dettaglio cambia tutto... con Mieli ti addormenti, con Barbero rimani sveglio ma con Pynchon vedi i draghi. come se ad ogni pagina ci fosse una striscia di coca... arrivi alla fine che sei in astinenza e sbatti la testa contro il muro perché dopo aver provato una coca del genere di primissima qualità di andare al SERT non se ne parla nemmeno.


il Re del Postmoderno

The word on the street about this - Pynchon's longest book by a good three hundred pages - is that it's his most accessible. Granted, this word started kicking around the Pynchon cult before the more fitting candidate Inherent Vice came out, so maybe this point is now moot, but I'm a little divided on that. On the one hand, Against the Day is a big book. We're talking almost eleven hundred pages of this sucker. Furthermore, it's eleven hundred pages of Pynchon, which means the usual: bizarre conspiracies, a thousand different plotlines, a multitude of characters, weird sex, and a plot that takes us all around the globe, from Mexico to central India. Hollow earth, time travel, and cloning are just a few of the impossible technologies addressed.

Still, I can see why this book has a reputation for being more accessible than usual. It's still convoluted and still his longest book, but more respect is paid to the rules of narrative than Gravity's Rainbow (whose plot can be summarized as "Slothrop tries to find Rocket 00000 and a bunch of weird shit happens), it's written in modern English, unlike Mason and Dixon, and unlike Pynchon's first two novels (two of his easiest), all of the various plot threads resolve to some degree. It's strange: things actually wrap up as the novel reaches its end.

None of this is to suggest that age has blunted Pynchon's edge. Once you've written Gravity's Rainbow, you've established that edge as unbluntable. Besides, this is Pynchon's most incendiary novel to date. The novel's central conflict pits anarchists against capitalists, with the anarchists as the good guys. It's easy to see this in black and white terms, but that's not as big of a deal to me as it usually is: the anarchists, in the form of the Webb Brothers, have plenty of personal foibles to balance out the romantic portrayal of their politics, and the C. Montgomery Burns-esque businessman Scarsdale Vibe is so deliciously slimy that you love to hate him. Besides, it's fun to get swept along in Pynchon's starry-eyed speeches: this is the most romantic work in the Pynchon canon.

It also features some of the most beautiful writing. Just check out this sample passage, torn from page 805: "As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day." The book is full of moments like this, to go along with the typical shady backroom dealings, high intellectualism, and goofy songs.

It's no accident that large parts of this were stylized after adventure serials from the turn of the twentieth century: Against the Day itself is a great adventure, the most pure fun you'll ever have with Pynchon. The "literary pulp" aspect the guy began with V. is perfected within these pages: you get assassinations, plots, betrayals, and ship-to-ship combat to go along with themes of paranoia, revolution, doubling, and power relations. The overall effect should leave you in a state of slack-jawed wonder, if Pynchon did his thing right. If you're a fan and haven't read this yet, give it a go as soon as you can. If you haven't begun your Pynchon journey, this might not even be a bad place to start.

i should write a review on the novel but im too lazy. pynchon is my all time favorite author after reading this novel.

“It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day.”