Against the Day

So we have another weighty tome from Thomas Pynchon to contend with. ‘Against the Day’. It’s some kind of Biblical reference I think. Or perhaps from the French…contrejour. It’s about a fellow called Webb Traverse who gets shot. His sons decide to avenge him. Of course there’s a lot more to it that than. Much, much more. Maybe too much.

It’s very long. I got through it but it was an exhausting experience. You’d think after something like that I’d go and have a lie down somewhere for a while with no books and no forms of communication but no. I have to write about it.

It starts as a 19th century boys adventure story but it develops into something modern and even scifi. Star Trek is the obvious choice of influences but there are many others as well. It's fun to see how many you can spot. It’s written in a mixture of styles and, in true Pynchon fashion, it’s loaded with riddles and constantly flying off on little sidetrips. Those are the best bits. I’m still not sure if Pynchon has anything important to say about the human condition but it’s fun going along for the ride. The characters came across as a bit flat and there’s a lot of scientific stuff in it. But it’s not stodgy. The pedantry is relieved by the flamboyance. That’s the thing about Pynchon, he does love to show off. Look at this passage for instance…

“Time moves on but one axis,” advised Dr. Blope, “past to future—the only turnings possible being turns of a hundred and eighty degrees. In the Quaternions, a ninety-degree direction would correspond to an additional axis whose unit is √-1. A turn through any other angle would require for its unit a complex number.”
“Yet mappings in which a linear axis becomes curvilinear—functions of a complex variable such as w=ez, where a straight line in the z-plane maps to a circle in the w-plane,” said Dr. Rao, “do suggest the possibility of linear time becoming circular, and so achieving eternal return as simply, or should I say complexly, as that.”… As if the hour itself in growing later had exposed some obscure fatality, the discussion moved to the subject of the luminiferous Æther, as to which exchanges of opinion—relying, like Quaternions, largely on faith—often failed to avoid a certain vehemence.
“Bloody idiots!” screamed Dr. Blope, who belonged to that British school, arisen in the wake of the Michelson-Morley Experiment, of belief in some secret Agency in Nature which was conspiring to prevent all measurement of the Earth’s velocity through the Æther. If such velocity produced, as Fitzgerald maintained, a shrinkage of dimension in the same direction, it was impossible to measure it, because the measuring device would shrink as well. “It’s obvious Something doesn’t want us to know!”

Sounds lovely Chuck, but I don’t know if I can handle 600 pages if it’s all like that. What’s it about then? Are there any sexy bits? Can you give us a brief synopsis so I can pretend I read it like?

OK then, it’s apocalyptic. There’s a lot of nuclear physics in it. It jumps around a lot in time and space but basically it’s about power. Who’s got it and how do they use it. Cynical stuff really but it looks like family life might have changed Pynchon. There’s a kind of optimism in it that only a father would understand. And yes there is quite a lot of sexual activity. Some of it quite bizarre.

Pynchon certainly cranks out the words. And he’s no slouch when it comes to research. The best thing about him to my mind is his uncanny ability to project himself back in time which makes his observations so lively and credible. He reads a lot. History books mostly I think, but is it all more than just random vignettes strung together? Is there an underlying philosophical thread that actually sheds some light on this great Byzantine mystery we are all involved in? Well apart from the entropy, I’m not sure. That’s the problem. Pynchon always bites off more than he can chew and he overloads the reader in the process.

Good? Not good? I can’t decide. It’s convoluted and wordy but another ‘Ulysses’ it ain't.

© Chuck Woww. All rights reserved by the author.