Inside the Time Machine I

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Review of Books
Volume 54, Number 1 · January 11, 2007

Inside the Time Machine
By Luc Sante
Against the Day
by Thomas Pynchon

Penguin, 1,085 pp., $35.00

Against the Day is a baggy monster of a book,
sphinxlike and intimidating in its white wrappers,
which are decorated with nothing but a seal containing
an unintelligible glyph. It is appreciably longer than
even Pynchon's longest previous books—nearly half
again as big as Gravity's Rainbow (760 pages) or Mason
& Dixon (773). Unlike Gravity's Rainbow, it does not
have an easily describable subject, or one to which
the average literary consumer is already attuned.
Unlike Mason & Dixon it is not borne along by a couple
of strong and affecting main characters. Its subject
is slippery, mercurial, multifaceted, hard to explain,
and nowhere near fashionable territory. Six or seven
of its major characters are strong and affecting, but
there are dozens of others here, and the story has so
many branches and extensions, trunk lines and
switchbacks and yards and sidings that characters
regularly drop out for a few hundred pages at a
stretch. It isn't always easy to remember who they are
when they reappear.

Pynchon's novels always have their own peculiar rhythm
and logic, setting the reader in terrain that is
continually shifting and thus requires an athletic
suppleness of attention and mood. Digression is the
constant, not the exception. Sequences that seem to
follow the traditional order of novelistic development
tend to fade into extended prose poems, which turn
into pages of abstruse speculation, which then, just
as the reader's eyes begin to glow with a semblance of
comprehension, tumble into slapstick, sometimes
involving song-and-dance routines. Ideas powerful
enough to drive whole books are prodigally thrown
away, while the most gratuitous passing notions are
taken up and pursued to the point of exhaustion. Some
sequential and organizational decisions may have been
made with the use of dice, or yarrow stalks, or tea
leaves. Very occasionally, Homer nods.

All of these characteristics, which have figured in
Pynchon's work since the beginning, are in Against the
Day taken to unprecedented lengths. The overall
impression is of a vast piece of architecture,
something with wings and turrets and redoubts and
flying buttresses, that has been entirely constructed
by hand and without blueprints. It may appear titanic
and overwhelming from a distance, but close up it is
oddly homespun, friendly, accommodating, and free of
such oppressions as symmetry and hierarchy.

Like one of those blockbusters that used to clog the
best-seller lists a few decades ago, Against the Day
is a multigenerational saga, unfolding over nearly
thirty years, spanning the globe from the Rockies to
the Himalayas and from pole to pole. Its action is
framed, more or less, by the adventures of the Chums
of Chance, a crew of permanently youthful balloonists,
something like the Rover Boys, who dart around the
world on missions that are serially recorded in
numbered volumes (The Chums of Chance at Krakatoa, The
Chums of Chance Search for Atlantis). At the 1893
Chicago World's Fair, where the book starts, they
encounter Merle Rideout, a photographer and sometime
alchemist, whose wife has left him to care for their
precocious young daughter, Dahlia, known as Dally. The
story then follows Merle and Dally to Colorado, where
they in turn meet Webb Traverse, a mine foreman who
pursues a secret career as the Kielselguhr Kid,
anarchist dynamiter of power lines and railroad
bridges.

Most of those utilities are owned by a sinister
plutocrat, Scarsdale Vibe, who, jealous of J.P.
Morgan's relationship with Thomas Edison and
frustrated by the insistence of the brilliant
Serb-American scientist Nikola Tesla on inventing
technologies that cannot readily be exploited for
capital gain, has decided to finance the education of
Webb's youngest son, Kit, who seems promising.
Eventually he also hires a couple of rounders to kill
Webb and they do so. Although Webb's daughter takes up
with one of the killers, his other two sons, Frank and
Reef, swear vengeance. The remainder of the novel
follows the exceedingly tortuous paths of Dally
Rideout and the three Traverse boys, with occasional
visits from the Chums of Chance.

That's about as much of a synopsis as can be
undertaken in a reasonably short space—a more detailed
account could reach book length on its own. There are
a few other major characters, whose trajectories are
even harder to summarize: Yashmeen Halfcourt, a
Russian orphan who grows up to become a mathematician,
a femme fatale, and eventually a Traverse matriarch
—although that isn't the half of it; Cyprian Latewood,
whose appearances make up an entire bildungsroman, as
he progresses from student to spy to bumboy to flâneur
to adventure hero to anchorite; and the perennial
outsider Lew Basnight, who shows up just about
everywhere, from page 36 to page 1,061, in the process
enacting the history of the romantic detective from
the dime novel to Black Mask by way of S.S. Van Dine,
Edgar Wallace, and John Buchan. These are all fully
inhabited characters, emotionally involving even as
the places and incidents and jokes and allusions carom
around them. There are also dozens of secondary
figures who leave indelible footprints on the page.

But the size and sprawl of Pynchon's canvas proceed
from an impatience with the limits of the novel form,
and an ambition to hunt bigger game than the mere
symbolic enactment of epochs and ideas through the
collision of a handful of lives. The unstoppable
proliferation of every kind of situation comes in part
from a compulsion to keep himself and the reader
entertained, but it is also wolfsbane nailed up
against the possibility of reductive interpretation.
At the book's heart is a cluster of motifs—ideas,
notions, hunches, feelings, analogies—kept in
constant, shape-shifting motion. The most obvious is
the era itself, from 1893 to the eve of World War I
(with a brief postwar coda): the birth of modern
society and a crucial historical pivot, when things
might have gone some other way. As in Mason & Dixon,
where the eponymous line is seen as a kind of original
sin, there is an urgent wish to go back and somehow
magically throw the switch and send the engine of
history down a different track. As in V., there is a
great deal of speculation about the permeability of
time and space. As in Gravity's Rainbow, there is a
preoccupation with the machinery of war and the
momentum toward apocalypse. And as in Vineland, there
is a flickering-candle, optimism-of-the-will belief in
resistance against the forces of power and money and
death. Each of these makes the book's title resonate
in a different key.

Here as in his other books, Pynchon is writing a sort
of parahistorical fiction, extrapolating from the
known the way science fiction writers do with science.
He can evoke the texture of the past as vividly as
anyone, as in this evocation of the Midwest:

    ...The extravagantly kept promises of island
girls, found riding the electric trolley-lines that
linked each cozy city to each, or serenely dealing
cards in the riverside saloons, slinging hash in
cafeterias you walked downstairs into out of redbrick
streets, gazing through doorscreens in Cedar Rapids,
girls at fences in front of long fields in yellow
light, Lizas and Christinas, girls of the plains and
of profusely-flowered seasons that may never quite
have been, cooking for threshers far into and
sometimes all through the nights of harvest, watching
the streetcars come and go, dreaming of cavalry boys
ridden off down the pikes, sipping the local brain
tonic, tending steaming washtubs full of corn ears at
the street corners with radiant eyes ever on the move,
out in the yard in Ottumwa beating a rug, waiting in
the mosquito-thick evenings of downstate Illinois,
waiting by the fencepost where the bluebirds were
nesting for a footloose brother to come back home
after all, looking out a window in Albert Lea as the
trains went choiring by.

But for the most part the book's action unrolls in a
kind of parallel realm where, while certain aspects of
1905 or 1914 match what we know or think we know,
other matters are subject to whimsical revision. Since
this is where satire traditionally lives, it sets up
some good jokes, such as when Pynchon has Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, visiting the World's Fair, slip away
to the South Side of Chicago so he can practice the
dozens (a ritualized insult match) on flummoxed
locals:

    Something about...your...wait... deine Mutti, as
you would say, your...your mama, she plays third base
for the Chicago White Stockings, nicht wahr?...a quite
unappealing woman, indeed she is so fat, that to get
from her tits to her ass, one has to take the "El"!
Tried once to get into the Exposition, they say, no,
no, lady, this is the World's Fair, not the World's
Ugly!

Anyway, anachronism is slightly off the point, since
it seems that time may possess elastic properties.
This is a point of furious debate between the
Quater-nionists and the Vectorists, two rival groups
of mathematicians who actually existed, although
perhaps not quite as the outlandish sects described
here. (Quaternions, first described by Sir William
Hamilton in 1843, were, according to Wikipedia, "a
non-commutative extension of complex numbers," which
allowed for four dimensions: the three of space plus
the one of time. The concept has apparently been
mothballed, and vectors have won the day.) Here the
Quaternionists are "the Jews of mathematics," the
"anarchists," "defining the axes of space as imaginary
and leaving Time to be the realterm," as opposed to
the Vectorist "Bolsheviks," who could not "allow space
to be compromised by impossible numbers, earthly space
they had fought over uncounted generations to
penetrate, to occupy, to defend."

To BE CONT'D ...

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19771

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