PYNCHON THROWS DOWN THE GAUNTLET

[Dave Monroe]

PYNCHON THROWS DOWN THE GAUNTLET
Peripatetic text won't be for everyone, but has
rewards for those who brave its wildernesses
- Reviewed by David Hellman
Sunday, December 10, 2006

Against the Day

By Thomas Pynchon

PENGUIN PRESS; 1,085 Pages; $35

Thomas Pynchon's new behemoth of a book, "Against the
Day," is likely to have readers responding in one of
two ways; either they will think it is one of the
greatest novels ever written, or they will see it as a
vainglorious head trip from an author notorious for
being difficult to read. The truth of the matter
actually lies somewhere in between. "Against the Day"
is probably the most brilliant book most people will
never read. The reason it will probably fail to garner
much of an audience is that at almost 1,100 pages it
is, to put it bluntly, the novel as literary
whirlwind, cryptically dense and unrelenting in its
demands on the reader. Depending on what kind of
reader you are, that could be either a good or a bad
thing.

"Against the Day" probably would have been better
titled "Remains of 'The Day,' " because it is easy to
imagine someday, in the near future, copies stacked
like cordwood in the remainder piles at your local
bookseller. But the charm and power of Pynchon are
exactly his ability to debunk and confound our
expectations as readers. The disadvantage to this is
that it tends to leave the average reader lost in the
wasteland. For that quirky minority of Pynchonian
savants and other ocular masochists, this is truly the
extreme sport of reading. For the rest of the reading
public, it would probably be best to take the author's
own advice, included in the book's press release: "Let
the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck."

But what exactly is this ungainly Goliath about? The
novel takes place between 1893 and through the course
of World War I, with a brief postwar epilogue. The
narrative twists, turns, digresses, regresses,
progresses and then turns back on itself, which makes
it your typical devil-may-care Pynchonian labyrinth.
There are three main narrative thrusts that
increasingly bleed into one another. Two of these make
up the bulk of the story, and the third narrative
strand, which is probably the strangest (a relative
term in the world of Pynchon) and certainly the
shortest, pops up from time to time and acts as
bookends to the beginning and end of the story. These
sections are about the Chums of Chance, an affable
mercenary social club that is equal parts Hardy Boys
and Doc Savage. The Chums are eternally young
aeronauts who travel around the globe in a dirigible
called the Inconvenience. Their adventures offer a
seriocomic perspective and read like Jules Verne on
LSD. The Chums cross paths with many characters in the
book and witness several important events. They visit
Iceland, an eerily apocalyptic New York, and the
mysterious Tunguska event in Siberia, among other
locales. Their presence in the story is important if
not also a somewhat discombobulating sideshow.

The real heart of the novel starts with the story of
Webb Traverse and his family. Traverse is an itinerate
miner in Colorado who has become an expert anarchist
bomber almost as a religious destiny. His intent is
not so much to hurt innocent people as to be a
destructive thorn in the side of any capitalist who
crosses his path. Unfortunately, he crosses paths with
one Scarsdale Vibe, a venomous Daddy Warbucks with his
own sense of religious destiny and a rabid hatred for
socialists and workers of any stripe. Early in the
novel, Vibe has Traverse brutally murdered, which sets
two of Traverse's sons on a long pilgrimage of
revenge. To complicate matters, and things do get very
complicated throughout, Traverse's third son, Kit, is
co-opted by Vibe's offer of an all-expense-paid Yale
education, and Traverse's daughter ends up marrying
one of his murderers. The scenes of the
now-transitioning Old West are sublimely written as
the two avenging brothers crisscross the frontier,
where one of them eventually ends up settling at least
part of the score in Mexico.

Then the novel gets, if one can believe it, even
stranger as Kit, who has discovered Vibe's deed, sets
sail for Europe to study mathematics in Göttingen,
Germany. By very peculiar circumstances Kit is waylaid
in Ostend, Belgium, where he falls in with a group of
offbeat mathematicians who call themselves Quaternion.
At the periphery of this group is the beautiful and
beguiling Yashmeen Halfcourt, who is obsessed with the
Reimann hypothesis and its ever-treacherous
zeta-function.

At this point mathophiles are probably enjoying
themselves, but chances are the rest of the world is
growing glassy-eyed. Not to worry, because after a
restless season in this tomb of number theory, the
novel again gets more interesting -- and again
stranger -- as the great game of imperialism and
political intrigue drags Europe toward the abyss of
general war.

The story now moves to Venice and then to Central
Asia, and then to the flash point of World War I, the
Balkans. It also moves back to Mexico and then to
London and many spots in between. There is also a
never-ending search for the mystical kingdom of
Shambhala. In the process there are shootouts,
assignations, chases and harrowing treks across and
even under empty deserts and frozen mountains. There
are visitors from the past and time machines and a
variety of exotic cataclysmic weapons. There are also
copious amounts of a variety of drugs, including a
couple of very interesting experiences with a
peyote-like substance called hikuli, and much sexual
activity, including a multitude of spontaneous
erections and feverish, almost incestuous and
orgiastic couplings throughout, and especially in the
second half of the book.

Pynchon operates in a coded world from which springs
many motifs. There are above all ghosts and dreams,
which act almost as secondary characters. There is an
abiding sense of physical and spiritual bifurcation
and dislocation, which displays itself in the forms of
invisibility, flight, parallel universes and fourth
dimensions. There is also the ever-present crux of
control and paranoia that can be found in most of
Pynchon's work. Pynchon's world is a place of chance,
serendipity and constant coincidence.

Strangely enough, despite all the noxious flimflam,
the glacial pacing and the self-indulgent and
seemingly never-ending prattle, there is actually a
remarkably accomplished and worthwhile novel buried in
here. Pynchon has a real reverence for exacting
descriptions of time and place. He also has a slyly
giddy and slapstick sense of humor, which also
certainly helps the process of digesting this feast.
All of these qualities make for a rewarding though
admittedly demanding reading experience. But, sadly,
he also has a distinct disadvantage when it comes to
his characters, which tend to come off as a chorus of
one. In the end, many characters are simply
transparent marionettes to this grand puppet master.
There are standout exceptions, such as Cyprian
Latewood, a bisexual Brit hustler and reluctant spy,
whose emotional metamorphosis is quite convincing, and
Dahlia Rideout, a frisky and free-spirited redhead
with a passion for the limelight and Venetian life.

Pynchon has a great sense of the relation of the past
to the present and all the parallels implied in this
novel, including terrorism, weapons of mass
destruction and arrogant pseudo-democracies that are
in reality just engines of capitalism powered by human
fodder. Pynchon also has an almost frightening level
of erudition that, when tested, usually turns out to
be correct (though one could argue that he jumps the
gun a bit on the ukulele's global popularity). With
all that is here, all that buzzes and perpetually
shifts in this narrative, one could be blinded by the
incandescence, for which there are many literal
examples in the text. But as Pynchon suggests, maybe
it is that opposite -- the dark, that which is hidden
-- that really has the answers. Which leaves the
reader with a choice: Either enter the light of this
book, and seek those dark corners where the answers
may await, or run for the hills and take cover. It is
your choice and your decision.

David Hellman is an associate librarian and the
collection development coordinator at San Francisco
State University.

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http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/12/10/RVGFPMO15S1.DTLs


 
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