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Against the Day

4.06 of 5 stars 4.06 · rating details · 2,935 ratings · 459 reviews

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...more 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

About the Author:
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland and, most recently, Mason and Dixon. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

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Hardcover, 1085 pages

Published November 21st 2006 by Penguin Press HC, The (first published 2006)

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Feb 08, 2012 Shan Jago rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day" (Against the Day pg 805)

It was in Banff while reading Against the Day that I fell into a doze and found myself on a cloud-sodden airship with none...more "As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day" (Against the Day pg 805)

It was in Banff while reading Against the Day that I fell into a doze and found myself on a cloud-sodden airship with none other than Captain Beefheart himself. He kept insisting I take the controls since he was so very preoccupied with heaving warheads over the railings which, without having time to fall, instantly morphed into belled flowers and bright-hued butterflies. I watched it all go down through my grimy goggles and tried my best to guide the ship against heavy winds while the Magic Band replenished the Captains supply of rainbow bombs. “What’s he trying to do?” I asked a deck hand whose top hat somehow also happened to be the sails of the vessel. He leaned over the railing and pointed down into the sky where I could now see a monstrous white trout with winged fins gliding below us.

I woke up with Pynchon on my face.

(Umm, wait. Sorry. I couldn’t remember if I was writing a review of Against the Day, Moby Dick, or Trout Mask Replica…)

Captain Beefheart (stick with me, I promise this is leading somewhere) lives on an entirely different plane of aesthetic existence than most. Sure ‘nuff and yes he does. I’ve always thought of him, not as a musician, but as an extremely entertaining cartoon character. He’s the only musical artist, no matter how bizarre (maybe with the exception of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins) that I feel this way towards. Despite the inflection of menace that saturates some of his vocalizing listening to his music is more like watching Starday morning cartoons with a bowl of the Count (that typo wasn’t intentional, but I’m leaving it anyway. It has a nice ring, and I think the Captain would approve). It’s almost as if there isn’t a real person involved in the entertainment; only the fictional creature represented. I mean, who the fuck is Don Van Vliet anyway?

I also feel this way about Thomas Pynchon. Most writers I can at least fathom some sort of personal image of through their works (even someone as reclusive as J. D. Salinger) whereas Pynchon seems almost totally unimaginable. In fact, it’s been suggested by some that Pynchon’s novels were actually Salinger writing under a pseudonym. Or that perhaps he’s like Homer or the architects of Tlön ; a multitude of artists, tradesmen, scientists and whatnot creating a universe. In other words, Pynchon is an enigma, and most of his novels work like puzzles. Against the Day isn’t really any different, though along with Mason & Dixon it is one of his most accessible. I almost think of it as a blending of Gravity’s Rainbow and M&D, which may possibly make it the ultimate piece of Pynchonalia in my mind. The most interesting thing about the novel (aside from the airships – did I mention there’s airships?) is how he uses light refraction imagery and metaphor as a wonderful device to mirror his metahistorical fable with contemporary modern issues. On an altogether different note, and I know it’s a silly (really silly) thought, but I almost wish Against the Day had been his final novel (don't get me started on Inherent Vice). The reason I say this is simply that the concluding paragraph (you'll have to read it to find out what it is ) is just so wonderful, bright, and beautiful that it would be fine if the end of the world as we knew it arrived and those were Pynchon’s last statements (and then his epitaph could read – His creative output reached its peak during the initial stages of the Apocalypse – ) and whoever was left around could use them for inspiration. Because in those last moments, Pynchon finally gives us Hope.
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Mar 01, 2008 oriana rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-2007, read-2008, phenomenal

Update the second, March 08
Well, well, well [she says, much subdued, pensive; not at all her normal, boistrous, effusive self].

Here we are, March 1, 2008, and I have just closed the cover of Against the Day.

I suppose it's hard to even talk about a tome like this, a thing of this range and scope and breadth. I'd really like to use all the superlatives I can, and then invent new words to describe Pynchon and what he does, because he really is like nothing else ever. In fact, I've been saying that...more

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Mar 15, 2010 tim rated it 5 of 5 stars

Against the Day, for me, is pure reading bliss. Pynchon effortlessly conjures up magic and grace, stretching them through a full spectrum of absurdly strange situations. His characters often lack depth, but he more than makes up for that in many other ways, not least of all with the shear beauty of his prose.

Of the thousand-and-one topics within this book, my favorite themes dwell on light, time, parallel universes, and dimensional transcendence. Anarchy may be the most prevalent thread found th...more Against the Day, for me, is pure reading bliss. Pynchon effortlessly conjures up magic and grace, stretching them through a full spectrum of absurdly strange situations. His characters often lack depth, but he more than makes up for that in many other ways, not least of all with the shear beauty of his prose.

Of the thousand-and-one topics within this book, my favorite themes dwell on light, time, parallel universes, and dimensional transcendence. Anarchy may be the most prevalent thread found throughout, but an equally prominent theme, if only slightly less obvious, is the search for Shambhala—both the mythological kingdom said to be hidden somewhere in Inner Asia, as well as the invisible spiritual equivalent located within the Self.

There are stories, like maps that agree...too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking…. It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.

Regarding light, one character sums up Pynchon’s curiosity with it when he says: I want to reach inside light and find its heart, touch its soul, take some in my hands whatever it turns out to be, and bring it back. One distinctly memorable scene involves an encounter with a tree in Mexico full of giant luminous beetles all flashing on and off together in unison. While watching these magnificent creatures, the observer somehow realizes (I won’t pretend I can convey the same magic Pynchon does, so you will just have to take this at face value) one of the illuminated beetles is his soul, and that the other beetles of light on the tree are the souls of everyone he has ever known. All together these synchronized strobing souls make up one complete radiant soul in the same way that light is indivisible.

Light is living tissue. As the brain is the outward and visible expression of the Mind.

Pynchon has even more fun exploring the nature of time. For what mission have I here, in this perilous segment of space-time, if not somehow to transcend it? Most of the book takes place in the years leading up to WWI. Using the knowledge of the day, Pynchon bombards the reader in mathematical theories on vectors and quaternions in an attempt to push the boundaries of three-dimensional space. All this leads up to his attacks on the so-called ‘forth dimension.’ Even wondering if we can look at the ‘forth dimension’ as if it were time, when it is really something of its own, and ‘Time’ is only our best imperfect approximation.

When dissecting and reassembling time, Pynchon seems to place a keen interest in manipulating it for the reader’s benefit and joy. Pynchon is something of a mystic and trickster. Whatever the number of n dimensions it inhabited, an observer would need one extra, n + 1, to see and connect the end points to make a single resultant. Pynchon must somehow reside in, or frequently visit an extra dimension from the norm. How else is he able to bring back to consensus reality seemingly endless accounts from other realms, parallel universes, and multiple dimensions, all while transporting the reader along with him into those very same worlds?(less)

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Ali I'm thinking it was a mistake for me to read Pynchon's most difficult, least accessible novel first. Because of all I went through with it, even thoug...more
Feb 06, 2012 04:14pm

tim Gravity's Rainbow really is quite a traumatic and nerve-wracking ordeal. The aftermath left me reeling in disoriented paranoia for weeks. I had only p...more
Feb 07, 2012 11:52am

Mar 23, 2013 Rob rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sf, pomo-fiction, modern-lit, fantasy

(Update, 3/23/13: finally plodded my way to the end of this thing. Review still stands.)

First things first: I haven't finished Against The Day yet. I'm on page 752, which is more than 300 pages from the end. But 752 of this book's pages, with their tiny print and their relatively homogeneous content, are enough to solidify one's judgment several times over. It's possible that the ending will cause me to reconsider some of what I'm about to say, but given what I've seen so far, I doubt it.

I want...more

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Feb 21, 2008 tENTATIVELY, cONVENIENCE rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: the children of dictators everywhere

Shelves: literature

If you've been hoping that a major new novel wd come out that presents anarchists as heros, then this be it! &, after 5 or 6 wks of reading its 1,085pp off & on I FINALLY FINISHED IT TONIGHT. Now reading it isn't even remotely close to accomplishing something like getting Mumia Abu-Jamal out of jail, but it still feels like an accomplishment anyway. If Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons" (1861) was the 1st novel w/ an anarchistic protaganist (the main character, Rudin, was drawn partly from th...more If you've been hoping that a major new novel wd come out that presents anarchists as heros, then this be it! &, after 5 or 6 wks of reading its 1,085pp off & on I FINALLY FINISHED IT TONIGHT. Now reading it isn't even remotely close to accomplishing something like getting Mumia Abu-Jamal out of jail, but it still feels like an accomplishment anyway. If Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons" (1861) was the 1st novel w/ an anarchistic protaganist (the main character, Rudin, was drawn partly from the young Bakunin who Turgenev was friends w/), then we've already had a healthy history of 157 yrs of novels w/ at least somewhat positively presented anarchist characters.

These might include: Isabel Meredith (Helen & Olivia Rossetti)'s 1903 "A Girl Among the Anarchists", Frank Harris' 1909 "The Bomb" (about the Haymarket Martyrs), &, more recently, G. A. Matiasz's 1994 "End Time - Notes on the Apocalypse". I'd even be tempted to toss in Mario Vargas Llosa's 1981 "The War of the End of the World" but I can also easily imagine a case being made to vehemently deny that one!

Pynchon's, however, is even more epic than the Vargas Llosa, & definitely written from a pro-anarchist perspective. For me, reading it was sometimes uncanny. The 1st bk I read of his was "The Crying of Lot 49" - I probably read it sometime in the mid 1970s. I liked it, but I wasn't as enthralled by it as I might've been lead to believe I wd be by whoever might've recommended it. Then, in 1979, I was co-running an anonymous phone project called "TESTES-3" & a reporter named Franz Lidz wrote about it & compared it to the Tristero in Pynchon's novel.

15 yrs later, I was living in Berlin & reading Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" while spending much or most of my time in the whereabouts of the English Tiergarten where much of the novel's action was taking place. That seemed oddly synchronous.

NOW, being an anarchist & having finished writing a math bk (of sorts) several wks ago, I read Pynchon's latest about.. anarchist mathematicians (amongst many other folks too of course) & the synchronicity just kept kicking in right & left. One of the characters is going to a certain part of the world & I'm thinking something like: Hhhmm, I wonder if one of the people there will have the same name as my exgirlfriend from there? &, uh, Lo & Behold!, yes, there she is! One of the many threads running thru it all is ballooning - my 1st job in Pittsburgh was w/ a ballooning company. None of this tells you much about the novel, I'm just trying to explain my own resonance w/ it.

THE NOVEL: Well, of course, reading it requires a substantial investment of time that might be better spent in something more actively engaged w/ the world. Nonetheless, if you're going to read a novel, this wd probably be, IMO, considerably less of a waster of time than reading anything by Stephen King - something that 100s of millions of people do all the time.

The packaging of the bk is decorated w/ reviewer accolades who, for the most part, avoid telling their readership that the bk flagrantly supports anarchist assassinations of the genocidally power-hungry & the lot. That, in itself, interests me. Do they avoid it in order to bypass their more propaganda oriented publication's editorial strategies? To get past the editors? Or is it the editors who impose the restriction? Or do they somehow just not notice & see it as all good fictional fun? Because, while it is an entertaining bk set ca 100 yrs ago, its political message is still as relevant as ever. (less)

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Jun 28, 2007 Jim rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Counterfactualists

Against the Day is a book of terrorists.

Bomb huckers, outlaws and anarchists lurk everywhere and—surprise, surprise—nearly all of them are likable. Against the Day is like a Louis L’Amour novel in reverse but instead of the saga of the Sackett family moving westward, endlessly crossing the frontier, Pynchon’s Traverse’s travel from West to East, hurling themselves against the tide of history and humanity and into the teeth of American enterprise during the time when her fortunes were being made...more Against the Day is a book of terrorists.

Bomb huckers, outlaws and anarchists lurk everywhere and—surprise, surprise—nearly all of them are likable. Against the Day is like a Louis L’Amour novel in reverse but instead of the saga of the Sackett family moving westward, endlessly crossing the frontier, Pynchon’s Traverse’s travel from West to East, hurling themselves against the tide of history and humanity and into the teeth of American enterprise during the time when her fortunes were being made.

These are not basement anarchists building bombs with English dynamite but mavericks employing the very tools used to extract wealth from countless mines with little or no thought to the human cost. Yet in recent reviews by Kirsch and Kakutani, we’re led to believe that the Traverse family’s relationship to violence makes them morally inferior, as if the gears of Capitalism weren’t leaving a trail of corpses in its wake, as if violence was an instrument to be used only as a last resort, as if bombs don’t make sense, as if life wasn’t cheap and getting cheaper by the minute.

If most novels are like nature narratives on the Discovery channel, Pynchon’s are like long shots of ants scurrying about in an ant farm; at first their antics seem utterly random, but the more one watches, the deeper the suspicion that the participants in the drama are communicating with one another in meaningful ways. To put it another way, the organizing principle of the modern novel is the family; Pynchon is interested in systems.

Pynchon's novels have been dizzyingly dazzling from the get-go. His first novel V. has all the earmarks of his mature work. His early stories, his self-proclaimed juvenilia, were celebrated for his astonishing maturity to the same degree that his most recent work is being castigated for its outrageous silliness. Embedded in Kirsch’s and Kakutani’s criticisms are their disappointment at Pynchon’s refusal to come around to the fluorescent side of the moon and commit to hyper-realism; Pynchon cultivates such extreme fandom because his readers understand that they have to come him.

The Chums of Chance are simultaneously characters within the novel and characters in a series of boy’s adventure books called The Chums of Chance (the first of literally dozens of doubles at work in the novel). The Chums fly around onboard airships filled with an assortment of impossible gadgetry. But as the years wear on and the Chums become salty old vets in their own right they come to question where their orders are coming from, and why they should carry them out the way they’ve always carried them out when their work seems not to make a bit of difference on the ball of confusion below. Like the Flying Dutchman, they become the stuff of storybook fantasy while the world erupts in total war.

Perhaps in some way Kirsch and Kakutani see their own situation here: assigned a tiresome chore, they carry it out without relish or zeal because the results fail to register an impact on the landscape.

Critics: abandon ship; Pynchon fans: full speed ahead.

(Excerpted from a review that appeared in November 2006 at The Elegant Variation:
[http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2...])

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Feb 09, 2013 Con McVeety rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

One day I’ll get around to writing a review for this, my favorite book I’ve read, I’m part of small group of people, a group of readers that have read all off Thomas Pynchon’s novels, I should be happy that I reached this accomplishment, and I am, but also depressed about the whole thing, “Against The Day” and all of Thomas Pynchon’s work were the ultimate escape from the soul sucking, bleak, horribly lost, greed filled , over sensationalized media era of time we call now, it’s why I read so mu...more

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Jun 05, 2012 K.D. Oliveros rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2010)

Shelves: 1001-non-core, post-modernist, guy-lit, long-read

A bewildering book. Reading this is like standing on a sideline watching the turn of the century. Pynchon is right there beside you and flipping through the scenes showing you how the common people in that era behaved through his eyes. This is definitely not a history book yet there are real-life characters, e.g., Tesla, Kovaleskaya, and even himself (Pynchon), or real world events, e.g., 1893 Chicago World's Fair, World War I, etc. Still, the bulk of the story is fictional and only uses history...more A bewildering book. Reading this is like standing on a sideline watching the turn of the century. Pynchon is right there beside you and flipping through the scenes showing you how the common people in that era behaved through his eyes. This is definitely not a history book yet there are real-life characters, e.g., Tesla, Kovaleskaya, and even himself (Pynchon), or real world events, e.g., 1893 Chicago World's Fair, World War I, etc. Still, the bulk of the story is fictional and only uses history as a backdrop. This book is an example of historiographic metafiction or those postmodernist works that are intensely self-reflective and yet paradoxically also claim to historical events and parsonages. (Source: Wiki).

Of course, I must admit that I did not understand half of what this book was saying. Yet it is enjoyable because it is different. Pynchon is a bully. He wrote this book to show his talent as a writer. He appeared to me as a boastful (yet he has the right to be) novelist who enjoys writing long novels to prove that he is a cut above the rest. I am different! I am better than you! He, for me, is a modern-day James Joyce; who wrote another book that I did not fully understand and yet I found beautiful: Ulysses. Although this book is more ambitious than that: it's scope is wider (for 1893 to the early 1920's) compared to just a day on Dublin streets. Against the Day also uses contemporary English and yet Pynchon, like Joyce, uses textual play, parody and historical re-conceptualization that are shapeless and almost bereft of emotional impact. Like I said, reading this book is like standing on a side street watching the parade of images passing you by. The images can be blurry (because I am not familiar with those that Pynchon was trying to make fun about) or as sharp as a megapixel photo (because of the way he described them). However, at the end of my reading, they all seem to mix with one another and if I think through the possible theme - that main thin thread that passes through or binds the 1,220 pages - it is nothing but a show. There are many characters with names easy to remember: Sloat (my favorite), Deuce, Yasmeen, Miles, Chick, Lindsay, Randolf, Pugnax, Luca, etc. and yet I know that not one of these will linger in my mind like how Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus made an erasable imprint in my brain as fictional characters.

However, what made this unforgettable is the mere fact of reading it. It gave me headache and backache (no book has made my mind swirled as crazy as this) and yet you know that this is brilliancy at its finest. Mediocre novelists definitely don't compare. I mean who among the living writers can compose a beautiful novel with 1,220 pages and small dense prints? Publishers will be wary about the cost of publishing it if there is no guarantee that the book has captured readers. Pynchon has them. This being my 2nd book by him (my first was his thinner book, The Crying of Lot 49) I am happy to say that I will not think twice to someday read his other works like Gravity's Rainbow, V, Vineland and Mason and Dixon. All of them are door-stoppers but sure to be beautiful, well-crafted, first-class door-stoppers. (less)

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Mar 09, 2009 Nate D rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: post-modernism, favorites

Some works are so densely, elaborately planned and plotted that any map to their intricacies would necessarily be longer than the work itself. This, I think, is the justification and promise of post-modern literature, with works reaching further in all directions and via as many tools as possible. Against the Day is one such work: almost any given line or action may upon study be split, like light through a prism, into a full spectrum of significant motifs.

And so Against the Day serves as a refr...more Some works are so densely, elaborately planned and plotted that any map to their intricacies would necessarily be longer than the work itself. This, I think, is the justification and promise of post-modern literature, with works reaching further in all directions and via as many tools as possible. Against the Day is one such work: almost any given line or action may upon study be split, like light through a prism, into a full spectrum of significant motifs.

And so Against the Day serves as a refracted history (beginning in history's common beam, yet bent slightly away) of how the bright promise and "unshaped freedom" of the turn of the century was "rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing floor" of the 20th century's Great Wars. The quoted lines refer to the stockyards of the novel's opening setting and microcosm: Chicago, 1893, with the "White City" of the World's Columbian Exposition running into the stockyards where cattle that once roamed the western plains unfettered were brought to slaughter.

This history is told mainly through the broad social forces of labor, capitalism, and anarchy all bumping against one another, violently or not, across thirty years and hundreds of significant characters. But these motifs blend and overlap with the concurrent history of math and physics, so it is also a book about electricity, about bilocations, about vectors and quaternions and graspings at academic fourth dimensions (and so, briefly, time travel), and, pervasively about light, which so suffuses every corner of the work that I could resist picking its up its language here. But fortunately, despite the complex conceptual wash, and as with V, Pynchon is fairly clear in laying out his palette -- fortunately since this nearly 1100-page supernova is rather more densely interconnected than the thematic dichotomies of V, even as it spews (seemingly?) extraneous material in all directions.

Against the Day is certainly among Pynchon's best (in fact, it would be a reasonable starting point for new readers, if not for sheer length), but it's also Pynchon: digressive, intermittently plotted, and full of references that fly straight by me or will require considerable additional consideration to fit into a relevant spot in the workings. But what makes this novel burn so brightly is that even with this cast of hundreds, the book is largely carried out by believable, memorable characters capable of leading the reader through even the most absurd or divergent mirrored funhouse halls.(less)

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Nate D You're in Vegas now? Indefinitely?

Against the Day is great in fact. An unwieldy outpouring of convolutedly interconnected ideas about science, math, a...more
Feb 25, 2009 08:07am

William Vegas? Yeah, that has to do with employment and business-i.e. guns and gun laws. It looks indefinite. I should be picking up Nevada state drivers lice...more
Feb 25, 2009 11:31am

May 23, 2007 Marcus Mennes rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: those with strong median nerves

At 1085 pages, accommodating hundreds of characters, locales, sub-plots, digressions, etc., "Against The Day" isn't exactly summer beach reading. I bought my copy the day it was released (Nov. 21, 2006) and started reading that day. I'm currently (May 23, 2007) on page 892. This pace doesn't reflect a lack of desire, or even time, but rather a cautious appreciation of this book. I figure writers gamble and devote years of their lives preparing a book, while the reader invests mere hours, or days...more At 1085 pages, accommodating hundreds of characters, locales, sub-plots, digressions, etc., "Against The Day" isn't exactly summer beach reading. I bought my copy the day it was released (Nov. 21, 2006) and started reading that day. I'm currently (May 23, 2007) on page 892. This pace doesn't reflect a lack of desire, or even time, but rather a cautious appreciation of this book. I figure writers gamble and devote years of their lives preparing a book, while the reader invests mere hours, or days digesting it. Given that Pynchon just turned seventy, and given the ten (or more) year spans between his novels, this could well be his last...so I'm milking it.

Pynchon has always been given the rap of being "difficult." True, you'll want to keep a dictionary close at hand, and those who desire a linear plot with fully developed themes and characters will certainly be disappointed by this novel (as goes for any of his other works), yet for the persistent few, his writing is able to elicit a kind of "unhealthy mental excitement."

In a sense, you need to learn how to read Pynchon, and really, the only way to read him is to surrender to his onslaught. It requires a spirit closely related to John Keats' concept of negative capability: "that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason..." In other words, the ability to let go, and read for sensation rather than full comprehension. Once you get into Pynchon's rhythm, style, and are able to crack his codes, there is, on nearly every page a kind of "aha!" moment. He lays little tripwires in the prose, so that upon careful reading, or re-reading, the running jokes and poetic asides have a renewed, and lasting vitality. Whether it is a turn of phrase, a strange metaphor, or a moment of comedic timing that produces a l.o.l. moment of absurdity, I am continually forced to put down the book, and silently marvel at this man's capabilites as a writer. He is a mad genius, a luminary, and I would argue, one of our national treasures.

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Sep 27, 2007 Erin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Pynchon is a historian/mathematician who writes fiction. His novels make up a time line of world history from an American perspective. They are explorations into the myriad causes of how, as a world, we have arrived at where we are. His serpentine plots are portraits of the complexities of the world equation, where the choices of a few powerful men affect billions of human and non-human variables in subtle and sometimes invisible ways.

Against the Day covers the turn of the 20th century--a time o...more Pynchon is a historian/mathematician who writes fiction. His novels make up a time line of world history from an American perspective. They are explorations into the myriad causes of how, as a world, we have arrived at where we are. His serpentine plots are portraits of the complexities of the world equation, where the choices of a few powerful men affect billions of human and non-human variables in subtle and sometimes invisible ways.

Against the Day covers the turn of the 20th century--a time of great upheaval and change that altered the structure and definition of not just America, but the world. Industrial Revolution, imperialism, the immutable religion of capitalism, the creation of an ultra-rich class through blind greed and the heartless exploitation of the desperate lower classes, and the subsequent spawning of perverse ideals that not only falsely justified the sins of the ultra-rich, but made their exploitations seem dutiful and just to power-hungry and warped minds...Social Darwinism, elitism, trickle-down theories, etc.

While this book traverses the globe, much of it is set in Central Asia. In the complicated history of Central Asia lies the epitome of all that is wrong and evil about capitalism and imperialism. Greed and exploitation, murder, and subjugation without any apparent guilt. The belief in ignorant savages and their enlightened saviors. (Check out The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk)

Invisible forces are used consistently as metaphors by Pynchon to describe the quality of the effects of the aggregation of evil in the world. There are obscure clues and symbols that can be found, which seemingly lead you on the path to answers and truths, but which, in fact, lead you into deeper and more confusing labyrinths. Trying to find a solution to a puzzle, the frustration of constant failure creating more confusion and opening up several other murkier paths that are probably dead ends. See The Crying of Lot 49. Meanwhile, the negativity and hopelessness engendered by the powerful throughout history is infused into the common man and, in turn, creates and nurtures an unstoppable behemoth that will destroy the world. Terrorism, backlash, minor skirmishes and revolutions. Also on an individual scale: mental sickness, nihilism, paranoia, demons, self-debasement, misery...

Bleak...but not to worry, because there are always those great songs that are interweaved into every Pynchon book that are rest stops in the larger confusion of the whole. And humor, albeit dark humor, is also a main component. What better tools are there than songs and humor to battle or ignore for a time the complexities of the world? Maybe watching television or drinking or buying useless shit? Probably not reading an 1100 page book about confusion. Oh well.(less)

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Apr 28, 2008 Daniel rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: everybody who feels like they can handle 1085 pages of distilled awesome.

Like all Pynchon novels I've ever read, this one completely defies encapsulation. I can either wave my arms helplessly and mumble "you should just read it" or I can say "this book was about X and Y" and then feel all dirty, like I have to write to the author and formally apologize.

Like most of Pynchon's work, Against the Day doesn't have your typical central plot followed by a small group of protagonists. Instead, there are broad themes embodied by a large cast of irregularly-appearing characte...more

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Jul 15, 2012 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: after-joyce, encyclopedic, historical-fiction, thomas-pynchon

Alexander Theroux's review of Against the Day in the Wall Street Journal, November 2006:

"Against the Day -- the phrase seems to allude to the apocalyptic conditional: In the familiar scriptural locution, the day itself was the eventual one of "judgment and perdition of the ungodly men." But let's not make too much of it. There is simply too much going on in this wide-ranging, encyclopedic, nonpareil of a novel to reduce it all to something as small as the apocalypse.

"Against the Day is Mr. Pynch...more

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Jul 30, 2008 Cynthia rated it 5 of 5 stars

It took me a month to finish this book, and when I was done with all 1,085 pages I had expected to feel relieved, even ebullient. Instead, I was kind of sad it was over.
This is a beautiful, moving book, very sad but also very silly.

It's one of the easiest Pynchon books to understand, along with Mason and Dixon, and one of the easiest to get through, in part because it doesn't have large sections that are really really sad and twisted, as is the case with Gravity's Rainbow and V (one of my all-t...more It took me a month to finish this book, and when I was done with all 1,085 pages I had expected to feel relieved, even ebullient. Instead, I was kind of sad it was over.
This is a beautiful, moving book, very sad but also very silly.

It's one of the easiest Pynchon books to understand, along with Mason and Dixon, and one of the easiest to get through, in part because it doesn't have large sections that are really really sad and twisted, as is the case with Gravity's Rainbow and V (one of my all-time favorites). I disagree with the critics who say Pynchon doesn't create characters you can sink your teeth into; I felt that his characters (and there are a LOT of them) are so poignant and sad I don't think I could have made it through this book if I'd they'd been any more fully developed.

Having said all that, it's not exactly like reading Janet Evanovitch. Pynchon is a literary treasure but he doesn't really "write books" like other professional authors. He doesn't really create a plot, which is maybe why his books are so long. He just keeps going until, I guess, either he gets exhausted or his publisher makes him turn it in or, I dunno, his printer breaks down.

It helps to know a few things going into this book. It helps, actually, if you can keep a laptop with WiFi next to you while you read so you look stuff up as you go along. But, some tips that might help (and I"m sure I"ll forget or miss a bunch, so anyone who reads this should feel free to add more in 'comments')

First, Pynchon is easiest to read if you don't come to it with an expectation of a normal story arc and normal plot development. There isn't a beginning middle and end, really, and only one character (Cyprian) has a classic epiphany.
Don't try to find one, or you'll be disappointed. Just read and enjoy every page as it comes to you. Trust me, you'll find yourself getting totally involved in what's happening.

There are so many many characters and they all speak in a kind of distinctive voice, I found it helpful to assign a well-known actor to many of the recurring characters. The Chums of Chance, for example, seem like utter twits until you try reading Darby in a Denis Leary voice and Chick Counterfly in an Owen Wilson voice. For the evil Scarsdale Vibe I used Christopher Walken and for his sidekick Foley Walker I found John Heard (remember him from Big and the Milagro Beanfield Wars?).

Curiously, I could never find actors to fit the supposed three main characters of the book, the three Traverse boys. Somehow they seemed the least coherent of all the characters in this book.

Everyone will tell you this is a wacky travel tale about anarchists and corporate greed. I didn't think so. I think it was basically kind of an existential book; there are all these characters searching desperately for redemption in a world that's completely chaotic and out of control and heartless. In the end the ones who find it, find it in love (yes, can you believe it? In Thomas Pynchon?) and in the trivial details of everyday life. Over and over the most insightful characters repeat that it's love and trivia that are the only refuge from life.

But that doesn't stop all these characters from trying to find redemption in insane areas. Math and science, for example. You always feel like you need a pHd in physics when you read pynchon. But in a way, he makes all the math and science nerds the bad guys; they've gotten too involved in things that are too refined.

There are SOME science things you need to know, though. But before I get into them, i have to go feed my family dinner, an act that is trivial and loving.

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Apr 08, 2008 Steve rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: eggheads, Gnostics, heretics, anarchists, occultists

Recommended to Steve by: Pynchon is among my favorite writers

Shelves: thomas-pynchon

Against the Day is unlike any other book I have ever read, and one that defies review. Thomas Pynchon’s latest epic tips the scales, packed with 1,086 pages of wonderful characters, marvels, and a tapestry of themes. Ostensibly a novel of revenge, AtD is also (among many other things) an extended rumination on various kinds of light, from the mundane to the esoteric. As the title implies, this is no glorification of spiritual Illuminism so much as a cautionary tale about excesses of light set ag...more Against the Day is unlike any other book I have ever read, and one that defies review. Thomas Pynchon’s latest epic tips the scales, packed with 1,086 pages of wonderful characters, marvels, and a tapestry of themes. Ostensibly a novel of revenge, AtD is also (among many other things) an extended rumination on various kinds of light, from the mundane to the esoteric. As the title implies, this is no glorification of spiritual Illuminism so much as a cautionary tale about excesses of light set against the consolations of night.

Taking place in the years prior to World War I, depicted as a sort of historical tipping point here, AtD explores many fascinating themes: Orphism, anarchism, espionage, the elusive nature of freedom, Utopian dreams, Shambala, secret societies, Tarahumara shamanism, peyote visions, doppelgangers, sexual escapades, emergent plutocracy, time travel, the 4th dimension, Icelandic spar, intelligent dogs, Gnostic inversions, Tarot trumps, super-weapons, Lovecraftian monstrosity, Bogomils, hollow Earth theories, Nicolai Tesla, Central Asia, the set of all sets that have themselves as a member, rembetica, fezzes, ukeleles…

The novel begins with the Chicago Exposition of 1893, and some of the best and funniest writing is devoted to this event. Here we first become aware that although this is a book that begins more than a century ago, it sheds a lot of light on our contemporary world and its problems. Much of Against the Day follows the lives of the Traverse family and their acquaintances. Webb Traverse, the patriarch, is an anarchist dynamiter who is done in by hired guns working for the mining company, the owner of which, Scarsdale Vibe, is the novel’s designated vile plutocrat. The task of vengeance falls to Traverse’s three sons, Kit, Reef and Frank. Traverse’s daughter, Lake, marries Deuce Kindred, the man who shot her pa.

This is an incredibly sprawling and tempestuous read. Erudite passages collide with goofy gags, spontaneous musical numbers and puns. Woven throughout the pages is a hilarious parody of juvenile adventure novels and pulps featuring a zeppelin crew of boy adventurers, the Chums of Chance, inspired by the likes of Tom Swift and Doc Savage. Theosophy is also lampooned as T.W.I.T., the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys. Then there are the Visitors, who come from the future or possibly another dimension. “They have been crossing here, crossing over, between the worlds, for generations. Our ancestors knew them. Looking back over a thousand years, here is a time when their trespassings onto our shores at last converge, as in a vanishing-point, with those of the first Norse visitors.”

I will admit to my share of bafflement at much of the math, and confusion generated by a multitude of characters that pop in and out of the narrative like prairie dogs. In the beginning, I leaned heavily on the in-progress Pynchon wiki to help decode obscure historical references, foreign phrases and greater context. But in the last few hundred pages, I surrendered to the flow which carried me hither and yon beyond my wildest expectations.

One of the interesting things about finishing this book is rereading reviews of it. It seems that more than a few reviewers didn’t finish reading it and covered their retreats with bluster. One or two actually admit to skimming. Malcolm Jones of Newsweek arguably takes the best approach and serializes his review in an attempt to keep pace with the novel:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15771953/...

Having lived with this book for three months, I can’t imagine reading it on a deadline. It’s accessible even if one doesn’t run all of the references to ground, but I would recommend savoring it and doing a little bit of reference legwork. If it touches on a subject you happen to relish, you will find plenty of delightful in-jokes and references. But even without a compass, you can appreciate this wild and wide-ranging ride, by turns hilarious and horrifying, intimate and cosmic.

For those interested in Pynchon’s meta-fictional innovations, a running theme of doubling is woven through the book, along with the material symbol of doubling, Icelandic spar, which acts as a sort of mystical lens. Toward the end of the novel, the narrative splits off into an alternate fictional “reality,” one in which we discover the destinies of the major characters as they unfold there. Even in this alternate reality, one character makes an escape into yet another reality, where he is informed that he just returned from Shambala. Fans of the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics will find much to enjoy here.

As long as Against the Day is, I didn’t find myself wanting to skim pages or eager for it to be over. I savored the experience to the very last page, enjoying Pynchon’s ability to conjure so much in this play of light and darkness. Ultimately, the experience of reading becomes lysergic, phantasmagorical and transcendental. The novel, like Biblical Leviathan, swallows you whole and spits you out, exhausted but happy to be alive, on some strange beach.
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Apr 11, 2008 Ned rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: people who don't like to read

Shelves: current, favorites

I've taken to typing up large pieces of this book and posting them on random places on the internet. All are duly quoted and attributed, because credit should be given where it is due, as this story deserves a distribution farther, wider and stranger than more than all but just a few have attained. It deserves imaginary distribution, it needs to be read by the people, yes and yes, as well thru lenses kept hidden by governemnts and secret societies the world over. It needs to be read by people of...more

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Aug 08, 2007 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars

The imaginative density of this book is truly a marvel. Every page, every chapter, every sentence is filled with humor, humanity, and wacky literary, historical and philosophical ideas. Like all of Pynchon's fiction, one must simply allow the author's immense creativity to take you wherever he feel like, and in this book it is an awful lot of places. Set in the years before World War I, Against the Day is, as near as I can tell, Pynchon's homage to the 19th century dime novel - featuring all man...more

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Mar 27, 2011 Adam rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: steampunkery, literature-disguised-as-science-fic, literature-fantastique

Pynchon at his most accessible yet lengthy(so long I kept thinking I was being reminded of another novel and realizing it was an earlier section). A million intersecting ideas, characters, and plots wrapped in ribald humor and paranoid speculation, reading sometimes like H.G. Wells meets Cormac McCarthy tied all together with a flair of Dante, Conrad, and Borges. One of Pynchon's best, up there with M&D, G.R. and V.(all initials...I win). Pynchon parodies and pastiches L.A. noir, gothic west...more

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Nov 14, 2007 Paul Jensen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

It took me 11 months to read this epic novel. It's the most demanding book I've ever read. It even inspired a vacation (pilgrimage?) to Colorado & the San Juan mountains. "Against the Day" is exhausting, frustrating, confusing - but I couldn't get it out of my head. Amazing. I'll never forget the experience of reading this book.

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Mar 16, 2013 Matt Tomaso rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, post-modernism, imaginative-fiction, reviewed

Post-modernism is not long for this world, but don't worry, there is another bandwagon on the horizon which you can use to mark yourself as uber-clever and oh-so hip!

If you're looking for a challenging, very long, work of literary art and do not want to be rewarded for your efforts with anything more than whatever interpretation you favor and the satisfaction that you understood many or most of the obscure allusions, Against the Day may be the book for you. Ostensibly, it is a post-modern/steamp...more Post-modernism is not long for this world, but don't worry, there is another bandwagon on the horizon which you can use to mark yourself as uber-clever and oh-so hip!

If you're looking for a challenging, very long, work of literary art and do not want to be rewarded for your efforts with anything more than whatever interpretation you favor and the satisfaction that you understood many or most of the obscure allusions, Against the Day may be the book for you. Ostensibly, it is a post-modern/steampunk/generational epic following the recently fatherless, vengeful, and somewhat insane Traverse family. But there is a lot more going on in this book. Red herrings, segues and tangents which may be allegorically or metaphorically related to one of the four dozen or so plots, abound. My favorite aspect of this book was Pynchon's exceptionally accurate literary stylization for each of the periods he writes about. In Against THE DAY, Pynchon writes authenticity into the novel through eclectic imitation of he popular styles of the THE DAY - the allegory to post-modernism's origin in the practice of high modern architecture will not be lost on graduate students, critical theorists and others with too much time on their hands. Nevertheless, I can not recommend this book to a broad audience. It is simply not that much fun, and requires a whole lot less provocative or productive thought than it does simple diligence, patience and tolerance of the absurd.

If you can make sense of rest of the review, you may be ready for it.

Swirling multilinear cacophany of what may be loosely termed "interwoven plots", highlighted by adverbial and adjectival laundry lists so epic that the reader frequently loses track of the subject they describe. Despite the abundance of description, the only pictures painted by Pynchon are formless and ideational and the book's geography has no context most of the time. Despite the near-constant reference to real-world and vaguely-imagined geographies, very little of Against the Day takes place "on the ground", and very little description is available to set the stage for any of the action. The weave is very loose indeed. The characters, however, are generally as well-defined as pulp novel stereotypes, and just as hollow. Some of the characters are memorable, but not many. Pynchon's women tend to be either beautiful and sexual or essentially ignored, and only a couple of them warrant a great deal of attention (from Pynchon, and from his audience) Men tend to be either exemplary ethnic gender stereotypes, drug-addicted gender-ambiguous paranoids crawling off of one of William Burroughs' discarded pages, or mere predictable plot devices. Both sexes qualify as plot devices - postmodern or not! Unapologetically opaque ones at that. The book's politics are hopelessly mixed up with metaphysics, alchemy and various other absurdities. Anarchism and other extreme forms are about as profoundly thought-out as "well, it's something to do". And certainly less respect is allowed to its opponents (though Pynchon clearly understands capitalism much more profoundly). Against the Day flies its Airship, "The Inconvenience" high above any terrain inhabited by mere moderns, freely defying the laws of physics, history, geography, economic probability, common sense, and even the conventions of post-modern pastiche. Vast and deep style, less traditional substance. Style supplants substance, and highly reflexive, equivocal and artistically ambiguous critical irony abounds. (less)

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Feb 18, 2013 Karmologyclinic rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: postmodern, ebook

I pledge into writing a review for this book. (I DID IT! continue reading)
------
Meanwhile...

(Story so far...
I started reading this mid-summer 2008. Read half of it mostly during vacations when I had nothing else to do but read. Then I returned from vacations, shit happened, I stopped reading altogether and book was on pause. Time passes by, I am able to concentrate on reading again but every time I try to continue, the book is just too cumbersome to read on bed before I sleep (I own the hardcove...more

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Oct 05, 2011 Markus rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Aether. It pervades all as an invisible canvas allowing light, sound, heat, gravity, matter to predictably and sometimes unpredictably race through it,infinitely . This is the canvas Thomas Pynchon has chosen to construct a vast novel employing 100's of characters in roughly 20 pre WWI years. Given that we now know the Aether theory has been displaced by the time space continuum, it all kinda makes sense.

Oh its whacky, don't get me wrong. Plenty of drug use, strange sexual practices and terr...more The Aether. It pervades all as an invisible canvas allowing light, sound, heat, gravity, matter to predictably and sometimes unpredictably race through it,infinitely . This is the canvas Thomas Pynchon has chosen to construct a vast novel employing 100's of characters in roughly 20 pre WWI years. Given that we now know the Aether theory has been displaced by the time space continuum, it all kinda makes sense.

Oh its whacky, don't get me wrong. Plenty of drug use, strange sexual practices and terrorism fill in the details of what basically is a revenge plot. However, calling this book a revenge novel is like calling Bolano's 2666 a detective story. Amid the havoc are moments where Pynchon reminds us that he is a great writer, as Uber-observant:

"Up here the view of the sea continued as gray as ever, the wind no colder than usual, perhaps a minimum austerity of growth, all in shades of white, buff, and gray, pale grasses, failing by the visible margin to be green, bending to the wind together, a million stalks all held to the same exact angle, which no scientific instrument would measure. "

and then immediately turning tender:

"She looked to every horizon, taking her time, saving south for last. Not a wisp of smoke, not the last, wind muted cry of a steam siren, only the good-bye letter waiting this morning on her work-table, held now like a crushed handkerchief in her pocket, in which he had given her his heart-but which she could not open again and read for fear that through some terrible magic she had never learned to undo, it might have become after all, a blank sheet."

It doesn't even matter who "she" is. One of a hundred. And maybe its where the book loses its intensity and gets diluted. It is basically impossible to keep track of the characters and tangential plot twists. Yeah, often the characters break out into song and yeah there's some cheesy dialogue but there's also this describing a character on mescalin:

"Frank wanders...enchanted with everything, stalls selling mangoes and star fruit, agave fermenting in terra-cotta bowls, ristras of dark purple chilies strung to dry,...death's-heads and skeletons of raw sugar which children come running up to buy with obsidian coins bearing likenesses of notable Halucinati, and run off crunching the sweet splintery bones which dim light in here passes through as amber..."

As Frank wanders, so does the reader- and plenty. Beginning with the World's Fair in Chicago with the airship boys- The Chums of Chance, and ranging over the American West, spice markets in the Middle East, central European dance halls and all the Aether that exists in between. Its an expansive tome but rewarding nonetheless (even if it takes you all summer).

I could go on about the metaphorical use of optics, light, and elemental chemistry and mention cameo appearances by Nicola Tesla, but you get the idea. Its Pynchon so hopefully you know what you're getting into. But on second thought, you still won't ever really know, and that's why this is the guy.

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Dec 09, 2009 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: peerless-fantastic-deserted-island

When did I start this, April? Yes, it took me 5 months to make it through this epic novel while reading 20 pages at most a day. And no, as usual, I didn't understand every thing I read. Accepting this very fact, the general lack of complete understanding about what I'm reading, is the first step in making it through any Pynchon novel. Rather than being confused and frustrated I let the words cascade into my brain and realize that no one does it quite like Pynchon. With that said every Pynchon no...more

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Jul 10, 2008 Lee rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Lee by: it recommended itself

Shelves: fiction

I really enjoyed this book, actually more than any of his others. I won't say it's "better" because I've never taken the time to try to understand the complexities that people like so much about Gravity's Rainbow. Maybe Against the Day is just easier. But I don't think so. The tone is lighter, even though it's about the the end of the world, in a sense - the collapse of the old world order in the runup to the first world war, which Pynchon paints as the moment when the window of revolutionary po...more

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May 14, 2008 Nikki marked it as to-read

Shelves: own

Up until last July, I worked at the best used bookstore in Manhattan (don't take my word for it, check out Cometbus #50). One week before moving half way across the country, I saw Against The Day on the shelf. At my store. For $7.00. Which would have been $4.90 with my employee discount. First edition, beautiful dust-jacket, never been cracked.
Up until that moment I had completely forgotten that Pynchon had written a new book, but I had to have it. So I ran behind the register and stashed it on...more

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May 01, 2008 Eddie Watkins rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This might very well end up being my favorite Pynchon novel. But I don't know, since if I were to become a one-author-reading hermit all of Pynchon's novels would be there with me, as they are the hands-down most rereadable novels I've ever read (with Nabokov a close second).

I would place this next to Gravity's Rainbow as his two most ambitious novels, but there's something about Against the Day that I like better. In many ways it's like reading a massive young-adult novel, there's just such a s...more

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May 28, 2008 Gus Sanchez rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Phew! I started reading this on March 18th, and finished it yesterday afternoon, all the while concentrating on no other books except this one. And I'm glad I did.

As a Pynchon fan, my expectations were quite high. Reading Pynchon is not for everyone, and it is very demanding. It's also very rewarding. Simply put, Thomas Pynchon will confuse, startle, impress and infuriate you, and sometime make you groan with his penchant for bad puns, but he'll never bore you.

I won't bother you with the details...more

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Dec 03, 2007 Andy rated it 5 of 5 stars

As always with Pynchon the total lack of an ending or conclusion can be a bit frustrating, but at this point I'm over it. As usual, a sprawling, encyclopedia of a novel, with so many intertextual references the head spins (a short initial list would include: H.G. Wells, Artaud, B. Traven, Hemmingway, Kipling, etc etc.). Loosely structure around the adventures of the Traverse family following the murder of their father, a coal-miner and anarchist militant, in the Colorado Labor Wars of the last d...more

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Dec 05, 2007 Tony rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Reading this was the mental equivalent of running the iron man, I'd imagine. I would like to have given it 5 stars, but I'm in a conservative mood and want to reserve 5 for those few books that really blew me away. This was a well-done and exhaustive book, but lacking just enough in a few key elements that I feel okay about just the 4. Definitely worth reading but not life-changing.

I thought there was room to care about the characters more than I did, as they suffered from the movement of the pl...more Reading this was the mental equivalent of running the iron man, I'd imagine. I would like to have given it 5 stars, but I'm in a conservative mood and want to reserve 5 for those few books that really blew me away. This was a well-done and exhaustive book, but lacking just enough in a few key elements that I feel okay about just the 4. Definitely worth reading but not life-changing.

I thought there was room to care about the characters more than I did, as they suffered from the movement of the plot and its manifold expressions of the central thematic concerns of the book. Maybe a sidebar: does Pynchon have an aversion to the word 'love' and, if I may pursue this a bit further, the concepts generally attendant to it?

The arrival and impact of the war itself felt somehow diluted after most of the book had been spent on the time leading up to it, the characters' individual premonitions thereof foreshadowing a far greater and more terrible event than what was shown to eventually come to pass, if one is to rely on the narrative for the correct cues - and knowing the emphases of modern historical education, at least here in America, these might be the only recourse for the reader who never took his or her own independent interest in the time period.

History has buried the tragedies of the first, 'Great' War beneath the rubble of its sequel and more recent progeny, and it would have been more effective to grant it a more profound aspect than what I felt emerged. Without this, it's dangerously close to being the standard blackboard exercise of WWI=onset of mechanized warfare=irretrievable turning point of the history of civilization, more an intellectual understanding than one requiring and invoking further the appropriate quickenings and palpitations of heart, which is to deny this event's place in history as anything more than a foundational moment of worse, starker tragedy still to come.

And I say this because I believe the point Pynchon attempts to make is exactly the opposite - that this was the ultimate moment, an incipient tragedy repeated in every motion and breath to come after it, an international death of not only unprecedented numbers of people, but of ideas, beliefs, and freedoms - an entire world and history that can't be side-stepped in favor of the somewhat more glamorous and morally-straightforward conflicts to come.

I'd also say that I found the book a bit unbalanced - the momentum slows disastrously in later parts, even as the most historically consequential years are compressed into paragraphs and brief chapters; there are greater gaps between the revisitation of different parts of the narrative which can confound the reader not in possession of an encyclopedic capacity for the memory of names and the events transpiring earlier in the book to those characters; and the elements of the fantastic seem often enough at odds with the historically rooted parts of the story, neither of which seem sustained at any consistent rate commensurate with their respective roles.

I'm sure there's at least a bit of purpose in some of these choices - hell, it's Pynchon, there was probably a lot of purpose in nearly all of them - but it's probably too soon after finishing it for me to have properly reflected on them. But first impressions often being the best...

This is a mess, I'll have to clean it up a bit...(less)

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Feb 19, 2008 Darrell rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed

Against The Day is Thomas Pynchon's best book since Gravity's Rainbow. It takes place during the turn of the century in North America, Europe, and Asia with a large cast of characters including magicians, cowboys, miners, an airship crew, industrialists, mad scientists, gamblers, anarchists, secret societies, and spies among others. It's a very enjoyable read, although I did start to find it tedious around page 900, but it quickly became interesting again, and by the end of it, I even found mys...more Against The Day is Thomas Pynchon's best book since Gravity's Rainbow. It takes place during the turn of the century in North America, Europe, and Asia with a large cast of characters including magicians, cowboys, miners, an airship crew, industrialists, mad scientists, gamblers, anarchists, secret societies, and spies among others. It's a very enjoyable read, although I did start to find it tedious around page 900, but it quickly became interesting again, and by the end of it, I even found myself wishing it was just a bit longer.

The heart of the story focuses on the family of Webb Traverse, an anarchist who dynamites railroads in protest of unfair working conditions. When he gets murdered, his sons Reef and Frank decide to avenge his death, which is complicated by the fact that their sister has married one of the hitmen and their younger brother Kit has accepted a college scholarship from the man who paid to have their father killed.

There are numerous detours along the way as the three brothers travel around the world and get swept up in history. We get to know the stories of several other characters whose paths crisscross so much it gets hard to keep track of them all.

Pynchon gives his readers a lot of credit, which is both flattering and frustrating. Those who already know something of history will enjoy the book more than those less well versed. For example, there's a bit at the beginning that is hilarious only if you know who Franz Ferdinand is. Pynchon includes other inside jokes that only make sense to the already initiated, such as a conversation between characters in El Paso that makes sly reference to the Marty Robbins song El Paso City. It would have gone over my head if I hadn't already been familiar with the song. I get the sense my cultural illiteracy caused me to miss out on a lot of other parts of the book.

The book is still enjoyable even if much of it goes over your head. Pynchon doesn't write typical historical fiction. His airship crew, for example, have a talking dog, fly through the center of the earth, come in contact with time travelers, and wind up in a parallel universe. When the rest of the novel gets in danger of becoming too weighty, he always returns to the crew of the Inconvenience to lighten things up a bit. His style of writing is so unique, that it's enjoyable to read even if you don't understand it.

Weighing in at over 1000 pages, Against The Day is certainly a commitment, but one well worth it.(less)

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About Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American writer based in New York City, noted for his dense and complex works of fiction. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon spent two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known today: V. (1963...more

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“Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs--what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?” — 13 people liked it

“Explosion without an objective', declared Miles Blundell, 'is politics in its purest form'.” — 10 people liked it

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