Light Reading (SPOILER ALERT?)

[Dave Monroe]

Light reading

Thomas Pynchon’s up Against the Day
By: PETER KEOUGH
11/14/2006 11:29:17 AM

Maybe writers should avoid the light, whether
describing its effect or analyzing its nature, and
instead leave it to experts like painters and
physicists to worry about. On the other hand, as the
Bible points out, it was the Word that turned on the
light in the first place, and perhaps that’s why
Thomas Pynchon has written a Bible-length book on that
and many other subjects. Undaunted in the past by the
big questions that bug a guy, he here takes on, in
addition to the elusive quality of light (or perhaps
these are all just variations on the same), time
travel, multiple universes, the death struggle between
anarchism and capitalism, the dance of order and
chaos.

Heavy going? Not for the Chums of Chance, the quintet
of aeronautical adventurers navigating the airship
Inconvenience through the trouble spots of world
history, some real, all fanciful, from the Chicago
World Fair of 1893 to the aftermath of World War I.
Among the book’s dozen or so narrative threads the
Chums come off as the most lighthearted, the most
representative perhaps of the medium of fiction
itself, detached and secure in their own
fictitiousness but also, like angels or gods,
occasionally interceding in the events of the world.

They hover over more earthbound characters, most of
whom have family issues — being orphaned, abandoned,
estranged. Some compensate for this with metaphysical
obsessions about identity, being, space, time, and,
inevitably, light. Others fill the void with political
activism that runs mostly to the left of Bakunin.

The latter include Webb Traverse, dedicated dynamiter
of scabs and plutocrats in defense of union miners in
Colorado in the 1890s. He leaves an anarchist legacy
unevenly distributed among his three sons. Frank takes
up the bombing craft, sort of. Reef flirts with it
while roving as a gambler. Kit betrays it by taking up
an invitation from his father’s nemesis the capitalist
Scarsdale Vibe to study mathematics at Yale and
Göttingen.

Here is where some familiarity with pre-Einsteinian
theories of light (the discredited concept of Æther is
vindicated) and mathematical controversies around the
turn of the last century pays off. Kit, for example is
a Vectorist. He will later get cozy with Yashmeen,
herself an exotic orphan. She’s a Quarternionist (cf.
William Rowan Hamilton’s formula i² = j² = k² = ijk =
-1, which somehow, I suspect, relates to the structure
of the book, each term in the equation applicable to
each of the novel’s five sections) obsessed with the
Zeta function of G.F.B. Riemann. In addition, she has
ties to the True Worshippers of the Ineffable
Tertactys (T.W.I.T.), a covert London group fighting
the powers of darkness through Pythagorean beliefs and
the tarot.

The paranoid systems, as is Pynchon’s wont, multiply
and overlap, mostly with delightful absurdity,
sometimes with numbing (for the uninitiated such as
myself) opacity, as in this meditation from Yashmeen:
“Though the members of a Hermitian may be complex, the
eigenvalues are real. The ζ–function zeroes which
lie along the Real part = 1/2, are symmetrical about
the real axis, and so . . . ” Pynchon adds, “And the
idea itself would evolve into the celebrated
Hilbert-Pólya Conjecture.”

Well, imagine that. Having flunked Introductory
Calculus in college, I will venture instead that
Pynchon is kind of the anti-Beckett. Whereas Beckett’s
works grew inexorably shorter as he confronted the
intransigence of meaninglessness, Pynchon’s
proliferate with Joycean abandon. The day his
characters dread, whether nihilist bomb throwers or
the Chums of Chance, is the day he stops writing.

Against the Day | By Thomas Pynchon | Viking | 1104
pages | $35

http://www.thephoenix.com/article_ektid27434.aspx


 
____________________________________________________________________________________
Sponsored Link

Mortgage rates near 39yr lows. 
$510k for $1,698/mo. Calculate new payment! 
www.LowerMyBills.com/lre