ATD review

[Paul Di Filippo]

Ouch!  That's gotta sting!

http://www.weeklydig.com/arts/articles/against_the_day



Against the Day

Critic finally finishes Pynchon’s latest doorstop
	 	by Luke O'Neil
	 	Issue 9.1
	 	Wed, January 03, 2007

There’s nothing particularly great about this would-be Great American 
Novel, save perhaps its size (1,085 pages). In fact, Against the Day 
barely even qualifies as a novel. Its sprawling “narrative,” cast of 
hundreds and loosely intersecting series of coincidences read more like 
an encyclopedia of obfuscation techniques—riddled with lectures on 
history, physics and hordes of horrifyingly offensive and/or flatly 
lifeless characters. The only thing more stunning than the obvious 
ambition with which this “big idea” book was written is the degree to 
which it misses its mark, and the utter dearth of ideas, big or 
otherwise, that the reader will take from it.



To call reading this book a waste of time is almost an insult to 
activities like picking your toes and staring at the wall. It covers so 
much temporal ground (the novel begins around the events of the Chicago 
World Fair in 1893 and ends after World War I), with a few diversions 
into time travel, geographical space (nearly every continent, as well 
as some supernatural ones), and so many fictional, historic and 
fictionalized-historic characters that it’s nearly impossible to piece 
together any sort of consistent plot, much less a theme.




The wide focus wouldn’t be a problem if each shift didn’t bring with it 
such a stark contrast in style and tone. At once the book is an Old 
Western revenge tale, a boy’s comic book adventure, a dystopian 
science-fiction parable, a ghostly tale of horror, a pulpy detective 
story, an apocalyptic nightmare, a contemporary political allegory, a 
mathematics and science tract, and everything in between, all 
interjected with a randy grandfather’s idea of sexy double entendres. 
Just awful. Some passages shine, but there is so much stuff larded in 
between that it’s almost impossible to keep track or, ultimately, to 
care. When it takes 600 pages for a main character to show up, you 
start to get the feeling you’ve been had.




Making matters even worse is Pynchon’s trademark reliance on character 
names that seem so willfully obscure they succeed only in taking you 
out of the story. The more ridiculous, punning and awkwardly metaphoric 
examples include Merle Rideout, Professor Heino Vanderjuice, Fleetwood 
Vibe, Dodge Flannelette, Dr. Templeton Blope, Hastings Throyle, 
Nicholas Nookshaft, Wren Provenance, Booth Virbling, Miss Oomie 
Vamplet, Gideon Candlebrow, Captain Q. Zane Toadflax, Yashmeen 
Halfcourt, Cyprian Latewood, Chick Counterfly, Linday Noseworth and 
Darby Suckling. Each one worse than the last.




Everything else aside, it’s the Chums of Chance—boy adventurers who 
travel the world by hot air balloon—who serve as the absolute nadir of 
the book, and perhaps all books everywhere, ever written, in history. 
If it’s hard to care about most of the stony, emotionless caricatures 
elsewhere, it’s the insufferable affectations of this airborne Boy 
Scout brigade and their hammy 1920s-newsies-style jargon that bring 
every chapter they coincidentally float into to a crashing, 
catastrophic halt. You’ll want them to die. I’m not exaggerating.




That said, there are still moments of sheer genius at work here. This 
is Pynchon, after all. One could certainly piece together an 
interesting short novel or three from the disjointed parts. The closest 
thing resembling a plot comes in the story of the murdered anarchist 
bomber Webb Traverse and his vengeful sons. Pynchon wrings some genuine 
emotion out of Reef Traverse’s dutiful descent into the hellish town of 
Jeshimon to retrieve his father’s body. It’s an absolutely beautiful, 
chilling set piece. A nightmare come to life. The description of the 
tortuous cemetery town’s governor (your guess who he resembles) is one 
of a few instances of virtuosic writing:




“ … Something wrong in his appearance, something pre-human in the face, 
the sloping forehead and the clean-shaven upper lip, which for any 
reason, or none, would start back into a simian grin which was 
suppressed immediately, producing a kind of dangerous smirk that often 
lingered for hours, and which, when combined with his glistening stare, 
was enough to unnerve the boldest of desperadoes. Though he believed 
the power that God had allowed to find its way to him required a 
confident swagger, his gait was neither earned nor, despite years of 
practice, authentic, having progressed in fact little beyond an apelike 
trudge.”




Passages like that, and the description of an unearthed ancient spirit 
sowing destruction upon a city, work well as political commentary, and 
as examples of the type of effortless brilliance one might expect from 
an author of Pynchon’s stature. But they are too few and far between, 
lost amidst the clutter of a thousand-plus pages of fits and starts, 
bold ideas and immature diversions. The novel that tries to be 
everything ends up being not much of anything at all.

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