Against the Day [Hardcover]

Thomas Pynchon (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 21, 2006

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them. Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

-Thomas Pynchon

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Knotty, paunchy, nutty, raunchy, Pynchon's first novel since Mason & Dixon (1997) reads like half a dozen books duking it out for his, and the reader's, attention. Most of them shine with a surreal incandescence, but even Pynchon fans may find their fealty tested now and again. Yet just when his recurring themes threaten to become tics, this perennial Nobel bridesmaid engineers another never-before-seen phrase, or effect, and all but the most churlish resistance collapses. It all begins in 1893, with an intrepid crew of young balloonists whose storybook adventures will bookend, interrupt and sometimes even be read by, scores of at least somewhat more realistic characters over the next 30 years. Chief among these figures are Colorado anarchist Webb Traverse and his children: Kit, a Yale- and Göttingen-educated mathematician; Frank, an engineer who joins the Mexican revolution; Reef, a cardsharp turned outlaw bomber who lands in a perversely tender ménage à trois; and daughter Lake, another Pynchon heroine with a weakness for the absolute wrong man. Psychological truth keeps pace with phantasmagorical invention throughout. In a Belgian interlude recalling Pynchon's incomparable Gravity's Rainbow, a refugee from the future conjures a horrific vision of the trench warfare to come: "League on league of filth, corpses by the uncounted thousands." This, scant pages after Kit nearly drowns in mayonnaise at the Regional Mayonnaise Works in West Flanders. Behind it all, linking these tonally divergent subplots and the book's cavalcade of characters, is a shared premonition of the blood-drenched doomsday just about to break above their heads. Ever sympathetic to the weak over the strong, the comradely over the combine (and ever wary of false dichotomies), Pynchon's own aesthetic sometimes works against him. Despite himself, he'll reach for the portentous dream sequence, the exquisitely stage-managed weather, some perhaps not entirely digested historical research, the "invisible," the "unmappable"—when just as often it's the overlooked detail, the "scrawl of scarlet creeper on a bone-white wall," a bed partner's "full rangy nakedness and glow" that leaves a reader gutshot with wonder. Now pushing 70, Pynchon remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below and sex from all sides. His new book will be bought and unread by the easily discouraged, read and reread by the cult of the difficult. True, beneath the book's jacket lurks the clamor of several novels clawing to get out. But that rushing you hear is the sound of the world, every banana peel and dynamite stick of it, trying to crowd its way in, and succeeding. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

The Seattle Times sums up critical reaction to Against the Day best: "Like Bruegel's painting 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,' this is a portrait of mankind's attempt to transcend our mortality—or at least push up against its very edge." Thomas Pynchon's previous novels, including V., The Crying of Lot 49,and Gravity's Rainbow, tested boundaries as well—not only of our own human understanding but of the fiction craft itself. This newest offering contains familiar elements—a whimsical humor, an erudite intellect, leftist ideals, and a sense of historical logic. Despite its magnificence, however, Against the Day tested most reviewers' patience (especially Michiko Kakutani's). The novel's length, digressions, and intellectual complexity will not please everyone, but those who stick with it are, well, probably smarter than the rest of us.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1085 pages
• Publisher: The Penguin Press; 1st edition (November 21, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159420120X
• ISBN-13: 978-1594201202
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (84 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #136,863 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

302 of 318 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Slow Down, Enjoy The Ride November 24, 2006

By Daniel M. Conley

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

The temptation with a huge novel like "Against The Day" is to read it at breakneck speed. Pynchon discourages readers from that option early, signalling within the first 60 pages that this is going to be a tale of many characters, many narrative lines, at times realistic, at others fantastic, often rooted in history, at other times unquestionably about the present. For such a mysterious writer, Pynchon's influences are well known and fully on display here -- the Western scenes evoke Oakley Hall's "Warlock", the discussions of anarchy jibe with Pynchon's own reading (misreading?) of Orwell's "1984", allusions to "Finnegans Wake" are everywhere (even in the name of the comical adventure troop the Chums of Chance.)

The book was savaged by some critics with a notable air of self-pity ... oh it's so long, oh it's so meandering, oh I didn't bother to finish it. Yes, there are major reviews in major American publications where paid critics admitted to skimming over most of the last 300 pages. A crime and a pity, because it's only in the last few hundred pages where "Against The Day" fully reveals itself.

Critics (and readers) who enter this journey with hard and fast rules of what a novel should (or must) be are warned here ... you may very well hate it. Pynchon's characterizations can be muddled at time -- it took a second reading with the help of the superb audiobook (I don't know if they give Grammys for audiobook performances, but Dick Hill's is outstanding and worthy of some kind of award) for me to fully appreciate the cavalcade of characters. There is no central character, no central plot, but there are a multitude of character arcs and human interactions that I found heartbreaking. All of the great drama of human life is here -- but it's told in the signature, detached Pynchon style.

Critics have pointed out one clear flaw -- the book is all over the place. Pynchon jammed everything into this book, leftover threads from every other novel he's written, plus bits from all his favorite books and whatever scientific or philosophic musings he has left on the table. It has the feel of a big book by an aging master who fears that he might not write another. The four Traverse children have enough development for maybe two fully drawn characters. Kit, because of his resemblance to other Pynchon intellectual heroes, you expect to be the main character, but he disappears into the plot for hundreds of pages, much like Tyrone Slothrop did in the waning pages of Gravity's Rainbow. Eldest son Frank Traverse just isn't all that interesting and his meanderings in Mexico are the weakest part of the novel. Daughter Lake and out-of-control drifter Reef are the most compelling of the litter and a book focused solely on them might would have been more tightly focused (Although Kit is clearly needed as a bridge to all the mathematical warfare central to the book's second half.)

So it could have used a more thorough edit ... and yet, I'm glad it's all there. Once you get through it once, you'll be glad to revisit even the sections that seemed dull the first time around. Pynchon wrote a book big enough to encompass all of his thoughts about the fall of leftist politics in the West (as anarchism fell and Marxism rose), the dual nature of, well, nature, the various ways capitalism co-opts science and shapes it to its needs, the thin line between mysticism and mainstream religious faith. It's all there and much much more.

If you take your time and let this big, strange, overwhelming book sink into you (or, again, listen to the audiobook, which by its 20 pages per hour nature forces you to go slow), you might start to think about whether civilization was crushed by World War I and will never recover. Or whether our war on terror is no different from anarchist bombings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Or whether mankind is in a perpetual cycle of rebirth and destruction, always on the cusp of grand discoveries that go hand in glove with horrible threats, both promising beginnings and ends that never quite arrive.

If you want to examine big questions like these and want to be entertained with Monty Python-like broad humor and ridiculous songs out of nowhere and a mix of virtually every genre-prose style in existence, then this might be your book for the next month or two. If not, no worries, there are plenty more books that will suit your needs. As for me, my nine year wait to hear my master's voice has finally ended. Mock me for it if you wish, I'm just glad to have another 1000+ pages to obsess over before I die.

134 of 140 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Ignore the early reviews November 25, 2006

By Heavy Theta

Format:Hardcover

Opinions vary, but the numerous reviews that were produced at the time of this books release will likely be long forgotten by the time most folks actually make their way through this thing. One guesses that these reviewers must have felt pretty agitated being put in a position of having to rush through over a thousand pages of Pynchonian sophistication in the short time they had from receiving their pre-release copies to the start of the holidays. So in a rush to speed read through the thing's numerous characters, and overlapping and not always synchronous plots, and, mainly, the detail points of social and scientific abstractions that abound, seemed an unwelcome nuisance to deadlines for last weekends book section.

Taken at a more leisurely pace, this novel is, in fact, very accommodating, especially compared to the delightful, but verbage challenging Mason Dixon. Far from the blur of comically named stereotypes that have been alleged, the characters are more than adequately drawn with sufficient depth, if not to the unusual (for him) affection that Pynchon displayed for the aforementioned boundary makers.

The accessibility of the book also comes from a consistent level of humor, more droll than uproarious compared to his earlier work. It is this consistency of observation and discourse that makes Against the Day stand out from all that has proceeded it. In a way, it seems somewhat reminiscent of the stylistic change that Melville produced in The Confidence Man that distinguished it from the dramas that proceeded. Like the new novel here, there is a constant motion to the story as the focus changes from on character to the next, producing a works that are more esoteric than heart-wrenching.

Is too much of a good thing bad? Not if you have the time to savor all the wondrous elegance that goes into it. As long as you don't have a deadline haunting, you may find this the best voluminous post-modern epic of all (at least since Barth's Letters, and requiring a lot less effort).

55 of 56 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Against the Odds, Pynchon pulls it off January 2, 2007

By Christopher Holden

Format:Hardcover

I'll be the first one to admit that I'm a radical Pynchonophile. And I'll be the first to admit that Pynchon is not for everyone; reading his books requires patience, an eclectic sum of knowledge (or the willingness to browse through an encyclopedia), and the ability to, every so often, accept that you will never fully penetrate the mysteries that the author creates. Against the Day is no exception.

Yet the Pynchon of Against the Day is not the Pynchon of Gravity's Rainbow. 33 years ago, that Pynchon was loading every page with deep emotion, fear and paranoia in a sort of urgent desperation. Now, this latest book contains many of the same themes that have followed Pynchon throughout his long career, yet with much more refinement, finesse and subtlety than ever before. The plot is more complex than any of Pynchon's earlier works, but also (strangely enough) easier to follow than the last part of 'Gravity's Rainbow' or even some of the disjointed flashbacks of 'V.'

The plot itself, like any Pynchon novel, is secondary to the themes of the novel, the mood that is created, the sheer weirdness of a Pynchonian world. It involves the murder of a Colorado anarchist, a group of 5 boys traveling the world in a balloon conducting secret missions, academic competition in early 20th century Germany, time travelers from the future, and the evil plans of a corporate tycoon. Sideplots and tangents include a journey inside a hollow earth, an attempted murder using mayonnaise, the search for a mythical central Asian city, and a group of magicians touring Europe. The sacred hotshots of history are side by side with the profane, as Franz Ferdinand drinks himself silly at the Chicago World Fair of 1893, and David Hilbert teaches a group of young mathematicians who spend their free time doing drugs and engaging in duels over women and mathematical proofs. Pynchon flawlessly combines the elements of humor, love, drama and fear to create an unforgettable narrative that almost, but not quite fits together into something rational.

Yet this very rationality is what Pynchon is out to mock and satirize, using everything from the technology present at the World's Fair to mathematical debates of the time. Much like the V-2 rockets of 'Gravity's Rainbow' and the eponymous V of 'V.', light exists as an extended metaphor in 'Against the Day.' The book begins with a quote by Thelonious Monk: "It's always night, or we wouldn't need light" and spends the next 1000+ pages exploring the effects of this light-bringing technology that began at the turn of the last century. Dynamite, quaternion mathematics, photography, a strange rock known as 'Iceland spar' the refracts light into bilocutions--all are part of Pynchon's strange way of commenting on our own dependence on technology and, even more so, logic and rationality. Scientists and academics go throughout the book searching for proof of a 'fourth dimension' of Ćther, something beyond the three dimensions we live in, some unworldly dimension to put our faith into. Unsurprisingly, this fourth dimension goes undiscovered. This desperation for some sort of scientific rationality to put our faith into and our failure to find it is the main theme of the book, and perhaps Pynchon's works as a whole.

The book is long, unwieldy, and at times it is hard to see how everything fits together. Many reviewers have expressed their unhappiness in the book's length and numerous plot tangents. In the end, however, this is what makes Pynchon Pynchon. Is there any other way for the author to express the complexity and bizarrities of the modern world? The convoluted plotlines are what gives the author is famed originality.

In the end, while not for everyone, the book will reward the patient and those willing to wade through scores of characters and plot points to become one of the first great novels to comment on life in the 21st century by using the characters from the beginning of the 20th.