Two Encyclopedias, Fat and Thin

[Dave Monroe]

Two Encyclopedias, Fat and Thin
Ditching Pynchon for James Brown

By TOM NISSLEY
KYLE T. WEBSTER

Against the Day
by Thomas Pynchon
(Penguin Press) $35

Live at the Apollo
by Douglas Wolk
(33 1/3) $9.95
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One (apparently diligent) reviewer of Thomas Pynchon's
new 1085-page novel wrote that "the only people who
will actually finish Against the Day are diligent book
reviewers." Not every book reviewer is diligent,
though. I haven't finished Against the Day, although I
said at some point that I would review it for this
paper. One day I opened my book bag and with one hand
hauled out my copy of Against the Day, a giant slab of
pages that I could never set down on a table without
imagining the creaking strain of delicatessen scales
underneath. With the other, I fished out a tiny book I
had been carrying around for weeks and already knew to
be delicious.

Irresponsibly, undiligently, I opened the tiny book
instead, finished it that afternoon, and my bookmark
in the Pynchon hasn't moved since.

It is stupid to be constantly talking about the size
of Against the Day. It's a way of avoiding the book
itself and its vast, intricate, and rare knowledge,
and I'm a little ashamed to be doing it. But it's also
stupid to ignore what it's like to read a book of that
scale, especially one that doesn't draw you heedlessly
in but rather fends you off at every turn with new
characters, unexplained situations, and veiled
references. Its vastness and your stamina become part
of the story. But its encyclopedic size is part of the
appeal: It carries the promise of complete knowledge,
of a system solved and fully explained (although every
Pynchon fan knows that promise will be frustrated and
even mocked).

But not every encyclopedia needs to be large. There's
a line of books that carries a different promise of
complete knowledge, complete not because the books are
so vast, but because they limit themselves to a topic
so small you can imagine fully comprehending it. In
Continuum's 33 1/3 series, each little book shares its
name with its subject, a single long-playing record.
They are like trading cards, these books, and they've
always made my mouth water. I started with ones about
my favorite records, which didn't quite live up to
their promise, but the last one I bought was Douglas
Wolk's book about a record I had never heard: James
Brown's Live at the Apollo. I got the CD, too. I guess
I wanted an education, since most of what I knew of
James Brown came from Eddie Murphy.

That was the tiny book in my bag, and it is indeed an
encyclopedia, the best kind: as intensely compressed
as the 31-minute recording it describes, drawing on a
store of arcane and vital information to describe the
wide network of lives, riffs, and records that came
together on one night in Harlem when Brown turned from
a chitlin-circuit favorite to a national star. Wolk
can trace layer upon layer of R&B imitation and
re-creation, following a guitar lick or a shard of
lyric or a personal style or an entire song as they
get taken up by copycat hits and resurrections, and
tracking the shadowed paths of people before and after
they were drawn into the James Brown spotlight. And
his George Trow–style format—with short, headlined
sections—perfectly matches the abrupt yelps and tempo
shifts of the record itself and the relentlessly tight
hit-making of the star of the show. (By comparison,
Peter Guralnick's chapter on Brown in his classic
Sweet Soul Music feels too linear to fully capture
such a strange record and such a bizarrely compelling
performer.)

Wolk's only misstep is to bring in the Cuban Missile
Crisis, which peaked the week of the Apollo show, to
add a rainbow of gravity to his story. You don't need
to think you might be blown up the next day to lose
your shit at a James Brown show. As his greatest
follower in pint-sized megalomaniac funk once sang,
"We're all gonna die." Who needs Khrushchev when you
have King Records headman Syd Nathan? And who needs
the threat of nuclear obliteration when you've "Lost
Someone," when you're "Bewildered," when you're
shouting on your knees, "I'll Go Crazy"?

There's no point in telling an artist how to run his
game, but what if, instead of releasing a white
monolith that daunts even his fans, Pynchon put out
ten 100-page books from the same material? (How I'd
love to see the Chums of Chance storyline captured in
a single little book.) The vast mystery of their
intersection could remain, but can you imagine how
eagerly readers would snap up the pieces of the
puzzle? It would be a hit! They'd be lined up around
the block, like the mourners last month waiting to see
the body of James Brown, dead at the Apollo.

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