A world of possibilities
Thomas Pynchon gives us a dog who reads, a narchist bombers, scientific mystics and amazing quests.
By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published December 10, 2006
For a novel that weighs in at 1,085 pages and nearly 4 pounds, Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day is a remarkably buoyant book.
Pynchon's most famous (or infamous) novel, Gravity's Rainbow, won the National Book Award in 1974, inspiring several generations of novelists and untold numbers of lit dissertations.
Set during World War II, Gravity's Rainbow opened with the iconic image of a V2 rocket tearing into London: "A screaming comes across the sky." If its sprawling tale has keywords, they're "paranoia" and "entropy."
If Gravity's Rainbow falls, despite its imaginative exuberance, into disorder and despair, Against the Day soars. Pynchon gives the reader a jokey nudge in the new book's opening image of "the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience, its gondola draped with patriotic bunting, carrying a five-lad crew belonging to that celebrated aeronautics club known as the Chums of Chance."
Hardly sounds like an omen of chaos. Moving from the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago to post-World War I Europe and America, Against the Day takes place in a world where possibility - scientific, political, personal - seems limitless. Of course, so does the potential for conspiracy, betrayal and exploitation.
Pynchon's novels are all about quests, and, with main characters bearing surnames like Traverse and Rideout, Against the Day is no different. The book has a cast of dozens wandering in and out of almost as many plot lines (and Pynchon acolytes are already busy annotating it; see against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com). But the Traverse family is one of its main threads.
Webb Traverse is a miner and union man, rambling around the San Juan Mountains with his wife and four kids from job to job. But that's a cover for his real passions: anarchy and bomb construction. When he blows up one too many railroad trestles, evil tycoon Scarsdale Vibe (the book abounds with delicious Pynchonian names) orders his murder.
That sets his three sons and daughter - practical Frank, gambler Reef, math prodigy Kit and restless, beautiful Lake - off on quests they couldn't begin to define but must pursue.
Against the Day expands far beyond the Traverses' stories. Its settings stretch from Colorado to Venice, from Mexico to Siberia, and to some places you won't find on any maps; its characters include mathematicians, outlaws, courtesans, detectives, shamans, guerrillas, cameos by characters from other Pynchon novels as well as Groucho Marx and Bela Lugosi, and a dog that reads Henry James.
The last is a companion of those aforementioned Chums of Chance, who, as a framing device, seem partly to be fictional characters in a series of boys' books (The Chums of Chance and the Curse of the Great Kahuna) and partly real chaps sailing all over the world (or something like this world) in a gigantic airship.
Their literal bird's-eye view of history - which can be pretty darn clueless - may be another authorial joke. The notoriously reclusive Pynchon, whose only public appearances in his four-decade career have been a couple of stints voicing himself - depicted with a bag over his head - on The Simpsons, has always made the nature of fiction itself one of his themes.
It's part of a larger obsession with the nature of reality, or how we perceive and make sense of it, that powers Pynchon's books. In Against the Day there is a whole catalog of systems for understanding the world (and Pynchon does love a catalog): mathematics, magic, the Manichean heresy, sexual obsession, science, revenge, revolution and a startling range of mind-altering substances.
Yet reality resists. The book's characters are forever wandering into some hidden region, often underground: tunnels through mountains populated with creatures unknown to the surface world, a Mexican prison that expands into a subterranean city, an expedition in a sort of submarine that travels beneath desert sands in search of a lost city. Mystery abides, no matter what your system for penetrating it.
Time is just as resistant to human understanding. Pynchon revels in history, our main system for ordering time, but he makes it live not by focusing on the famous and powerful but on the ordinary people who live it. One of his most intriguing themes is human memory - our power to remember and our perhaps greater power to choose to forget.
But whether we understand the world or not ultimately may not matter. This is a novel of hard-won redemption: lovers reunite, families reconcile, babies are born, and here and there a little justice is done.
And, as he always has, Pynchon celebrates the quotidian world. His richly lyrical writing has never been lovelier, and, despite their numbers, many of his characters become vivid and affecting. Pynchon has never been one to psychoanalyze his creations; one of the novel's many hilarious bits is a benighted analyst who keeps assigning his own worst characteristics to his patients. Pynchon reveals character in actions, and he is a master of tiny, telling moments that can take your breath away.
Against the Day is not a fast read or an easy book. Readers who insist upon having mysteries explained and plot lines tied up should apply elsewhere.
Few readers are Pynchon's match when it comes to depth and breadth of knowledge - of sciences, mathematics, history, politics, philosophy, culture high and low. But one of the most glorious things about his books is that he never dumbs down. He always expects us to climb into that airship of imagination and sail along with him - and how exhilarating it is to be asked.
The book
Against the Day
By Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Press, 1,085 pages, $35
REVIEW BY COLETTE BANCROFT