Thomas Pynchon’s time may have come and gone. It’s been 33 years since his novel Gravity’s Rainbow won the National Book Award. Even then, many more people started it than finished.

Writing a thousand page novel every ten years or so, may not the best strategy for cultivating an audience. He can also lose readers with his allusive, elliptical style, his long discursions into obscure scientific topics, his juvenile sense of humor, his penchant for bizarre conspiracy theories, and the sheer mass of his novels, which can make the beginning hard to remember by the end. He’s a writer for readers who want to be challenged.

There must be well over 100 characters and dozens of subplots in Against the Day, many of them quickly abandoned, a few narrative threads tie the book together. The Chums of Chance storyline fondly parodies boys’ literature from early in the last century. Think Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, with maybe a touch of Horatio Algier. The Chums are balloonists, sent on mysterious missions around the world. Pynchon delights in gradually debauching their innocence.

Another recurring story is that of Webb Traverse and his children, which begins as a western pastiche. Webb, radicalized by the labor politics of Colorado mining in the late 19th Century, evolves into an anarchist bomber. When he’s assassinated by the mine owners, his three boys, Reef, Frank, and Kit, recognize revenge as their duty, while Webb’s daughter, Lake, runs off with the killer.

Other story lines involve disputes among mathematicians, spies, scientists, psychics, and metaphysicians, mostly having to do with access to other dimensions, other times, and the apocalyptic threat of invasion from them.

Probably the ideal way to read Pynchon would be next to a high speed connection to Google. His range of allusions and references is dazzling, encompassing, for instance, higher math, geology, metaphysics, several languages, history, and religion. Incredibly, Icelandic spar, whose doubly refracting powers, he suggests, may provide access to other dimensions, turns out to be a real substance.


Tracking down all these allusions tho, would easily double the time it takes to read the book, which is already substantial. Best of luck to whomever checks out Express copy (two week loan, dollar a day fine after that). I couldn’t skim, couldn’t listen to music when reading it. Averaged about 30 pages an hour. Loved it.


It seems to be about his usual things. The downtrodden laborers here are an
easy cognate for the preterite of his early works. He’s clearly on the side of music, joy, drugs, ecstatic experience, and against the machinery that makes our lives drudgery. He doesn’t so much show us this as tell us through his characters, which is maybe a flaw in his conception, a weak narrative strategy.

His early works, especially, dwelt on the laws of thermodynamics, and it’s disconcerting, having invested many hours of reading, to realize that the Second Law may be the organizing principle of the novel—entropy will increase; organization breaks down. If the damn thing ultimately makes no sense, that may well be the point. --John

From ICPL Staff Picks Blog