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[by Stacy Borah]

The announcement of a new Thomas Pynchon book constitutes a landmark event in literature, regardless of the trends reflecting the industries of the times. This statement rings personally true: It's not just my styles, sensibilities, and tastes have been shaped by the words that Pynchon and his forebears committed to the page.  Ever since I discovered a near-mint paperback of Gravity's Rainbow in Boaz, Alabama 21 years ago, I've been spoiled and exasperated by everything he has conjured. Even Vineland.

Which is why reviewing Pynchon's new tomeAgainst The Day is hard for everyone. And to tell the truth, I started out hating it. 

It bears the benchmarks of Pynchon's style: puns and allusions galore, a massive cast that would make Dickens proud, and the same wars, polarities, and paranoia lurking within interlocking plots and subplots. Few of which have anything to do with the story, other than to show off his astounding range of knowledge on labor unions, quantum physics and mayonnaise.  But, as one would guess, none of these taste good together. Not at first. 

The story that resembles a plot hinges on a miner-turned-anarchist named Webb Traverse, who is killed by hit men hired by a dirty capitalist named Scarsdale Vibe, and the efforts of his four children to find his killers. Where Pynchon's last novel Mason & Dixon featured characters with new depth and Gravity's Rainbow raised the bar on complexity so high that few may reach it, Against The Day introduces its cast so feverishly that their only diferentiation lies in their farcical names or unlikely occupations. Free-range characters waltz in and out of the novel, with tenuous connections to each other and themselves. Some go off on quests, most are destined for dead ends. And whenever their lives or journeys intersect, it happens under the most implausible of circumstances. There are no emotional connections, and this absence propels most characters into directionless existence, until they are given assignments to fulfill.

One such character is Lew Basnight, a private investigator for White City Investigations, one of many such freelance agencies that provided surveillance within and over Chicago during the World's Fair of 1893.  Basnight becomes a “spotter” for the Chums of Chance, a group of adventurers who fly around in a mechanized hot-air balloon called the Inconvenience doing jobs for an unnamed employer.  Basnight has no home and he wanders into the job of “spotter” mainly because of an unnamed moral lapse that he committed against some unnamed person or persons.  No one will explain what it is he did, which makes his story all the more disappointing.  Even his estranged wife, Troth (a pun as good as any Pynchon has ever dreamed up), and close business associates refuse to reveal what he did.  When, at last, Basnight meets up with Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand during a tangential plotline to his usual job of watching local anarchists, he learns that he has possibly stepped into another world, a parallel dimension where “invisibility was a sacred condition” and “had its own vast, incomprehensible history, its perils and ecstasies, its potential for unannounced romance and early funerals.”

IParallel universes and time travel are prominently featured throughout Against The Day. The Chums of Chance parodize “boys literature” of an earlier, so-called innocent era in American history. Its fears of anarchist bombers and panoptic surveillance by airships echo our struggles to find a balance between stopping terrorists before they strike and losing our civil liberties. The mirrors are everywhere, and obvious. A crystal known as Iceland Spar generates image twins so precise that one character explains it as “the mysterious shamanic power known as bilocation." Going more meta,  Pynchon names a chapter “Bilocations.” 

Trudging through the novel, insights experienced by Basnight coalesce into structure, even as Pynchon's always-announced cast moves on and off the stage. There are slowly developing stories hosting Pynchon's usual assortment of scientists, occultists, and nihilists searching for hidden laws of light and math. And everywhere they go, they find Scarsdale Vibe's shadowy presence looming over Against the Day, finally converging on the trail of the mysterious city of Shambhala.

Pynchon has a particular taste this time for Newton's Third Law of Motion -- for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction -- one which echoes his consistent interest in polarities.  Even the Theory of Relativity makes a cameo, and not just for time travel.  But entropy, the headliner of The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, gets short shrift this time around. It doesn't even come up or until the last tenth of the novel, 800 pages later. And unlike the pawns in the surreal chess match called Gravity's Rainbow, the characters in Against The Day only exist as waking dreamers, as if their lives and worlds hadn't been fully realized before they were conceived.

So maybe that's the overarching parabola of the novel, if you're looking for one.  It fills the Pynchonian timeline between V. and Gravity's Rainbow, the period spanning the end of the Victorian Era and spreading across the global carnage of WWI, Ulysses and The Waste Land.  The ephemeral characters that went nowhere in those novels heralded the emergence of the corporate-military-industrial complex and its systems of control. As the novel's Reverend Moss Gatlin explains while speaking out against anarchism: “If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroy those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself?  It must be negotiated with the day, from those absolute terms.”

Against The Day may only be the equal of Gravity's Rainbow in pages and cast, but it's more accessible and emerges as a smoother ride, even with the labyrinthine machinations Pynchon heaps upon his devoted readership.  It's probably not the novel that the casual Crying Of Lot 49 reader should pick up, but it's close. And it boasts an equal mix of obfuscation and comedic showmanship, which helps. But that's not enough to turn its overall incoherence into as solid a perfomance as prior novels.

Even so, Pynchon can still warm you with his beautifully rendered passages, including this description of the Gold Rush for electromagnetic information from the Arctic Circle:

“There was a ‘Ray-rush' in progress -- light and magnetism, as well as all manner of extra-Hertzian rays, were there for the taking, and prospectors had come flooding in, many of them professional claim-jumpers aiming to get by on brute force, a very few genuinely able to dowse for rays of all frequencies, most neither gifted nor unscrupulous, simply caught up in everybody else's single-minded flight from reason, diseased as the gold and silver seekers of earlier days.  Here at the high edge of the atmosphere was the next untamed frontier, pioneers arriving in airships instead of wagons, setting in motion property disputes destined to last generations.  The Northern Lights which had drawn them from their childhood beds in lower latitudes on so many deep winter nights, while summoning in their parents obscure feelings of dread, could now be viewed up here at any time from within, at altitude, in heavenwide pulses of color, dense sheets and billows and colonnades of light and current, in transfiguration unceasing.”

Or this passage describing, of all things, an anarchist's bomb going off in a small cafe:

 “A dense, prolonged shower of glass fragments, green and clear and amber and black, from windows, mirrors and drinking glasses, carafes and bottles of absinthe, wine, fruit syrups, whiskey of many ages and origins, human blood everywhere, blood arterial, venous and capillary, fragments of bone and cartilage and soft tissue, wood splinters of all sizes from the furniture, shrapnel of tin, zinc and brass, from torn ragged sheets down to the tiny nails in picture frames, nitrous fumes, fluid unfurlings of smoke too black to see through -- a huge, glittering passage skyward and back again, outward and across the street and down the block, passing through the rays of a completely indifferent noontide sun, like a long heliograph message sent too fast for any but angels of destruction to read.”

As a hallmark of satire, Pynchon's Against The Day doesn't stack up to his usual standard.  But it is ultimately fun, held together as it is by the force of his personality. As with all his work, forcing yourself through the first three hundred pages on the first try pays off nicely, and you'll feel rewarded for having done so. And having read what Pynchon thinks of American expansionism and apocalypse, I can't wait to read how he bridges his own timeline between Mason & Dixon and V. 

I just hope I don't have to wait another decade to read it.

December 27, 2006

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