Against The Day: A

As a reader - nay, a critic even - who took nearly four months in which to finish Thomas Pynchon's byzantine, labyrinnthe, massive novel Against The Day, I feel I stand on pretty good grounds in which to state: this is a difficult book. Filled with vocabulary that requires you to be both sharp and current, multi-national language usage (some of which, I'm sure, is purposefully incorrect), and references to a myriad of concepts ranging from the mystical to the mathematical - none of which date farther forward in the world timeline than the 1920's - the author is practically begging you to be at some point so frustrated with his book that you will leave it to gather dust on a shelf somewhere far, far away. In fact he would be the first to say that the reader is forewarned in picking up his book.

They should know of course, having had some previous experience with Mason & Dixon, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow, that Pynchon is famous for his incredibly dense, incredibly intellectual, incredibly murky writing. However, what he is also famous for (to those that bother to lift the heavy burden entailed, both physically and metaphorically, by picking up one of his novels) is his hilariously ridiculous humor, rapid fire exchanges, and those moments of brilliance so insightful they will make you wish he were a less difficult writer.

In his latest offering he takes on a subject perhaps more sprawling than nearly any of his other targets. He chronicles the lives of nearly a dozen characters over the course of roughly twenty-five years (those being 1893 to 1918). Each of his many creations does wildly different things - there are baloonists, spies, bisexuals, tranvestities, mystics, psychics, brothers, fighters, and capitalists - and yet they manage to converge on each other at times so random and constant that to say Pynchon is mocking Fate would be putting it lightly. But it isn't just Fate he is mocking. He's also poking fun at various styles of writing, historical accuracy, and all of current American politics. But as much as there is humor here (and trust me, Pynchon's stabs and parodies of life and culture are spot-on and immensely side-splitting) there is also a surprising amount of power and insight. You may be laughing wildly at such activities as "Anarchist Golf" and yet Thomas Pynchon's dialogue-free passage on the Great Chicago Fire will leave you speechless.

His stories are themselves also alternately theatrical, theoretical, fanatical, and grim. Here, a few samples: a trio of brothers try over a course of years to kill the rich man that killed their father, a girl goes off to see the world (and maybe the mother she never knew that is purportedly lurking some therewithin), several different revolutions occur, a sodomitical British Spy goes cavorting about the precarious political scene of Europe right before the Great War (and manages to be entangled in a threesome of both man and woman that provides a deliriously romantic near-end vision of sex and heart), a group of skyship pilots termed the Chums of Chance go flying to the sky doing nice and Boy Scout-y things, and a detective first chased out of Chicago finds himself enlisted by a mystical "darkness fighting" organization in order to satisfy demands made on him by people who may not even exist.

I feel it is necessary to say again that undertaking this book requires patience, for the author's endless indulgence in, well, indulgence, as well as enormous amounts of heart and mindpower. And yet if one is willing to undertake this ordeal, they will discover a work of near literary brilliance that has done what no other book I have read has done to date: envisioned the world full of menace and apathy and that the great tragedies that were to follow would merely grow out of that. In fact the greatest of world tragedies here is everyone's mad descent into a hellish and bloodthirsty system. That system is capitalism and to Pynchon, a wily liberal anarchist in his own right, it is the ultimate fall from grace. Yet he ends his creation on a hopeful note, suggesting that we need only to fall in love to start flying towards grace.