Irish Times Review

[David Morris]

I think this review is fairly accurate (though I've not yet finished
it - still I'm far enough along to have a feel for its overall tone).
I'd agree that despite AtD's length and scope, it is "less than epic,"
mainly because it never seems to get serious - even when describing
horrible events its tone remains off-handedly comic.  This is part of
what IMHO makes AtD inferior to GR, which has some truly chilling
scenes (just don't ask me which ones right now). But I don't agree
that AtD is "devoid of either coherence or cohesion."  The story line
is easy enough to follow.  The only things that are sometimes
incomprehensible are the science metaphors, but If I don't get them
all the time, they're easy enough to let pass and continue on enjoying
the writing.

David Morris

On 1/19/07, Peter Fellows-McCully <pfm at aspeon.com> wrote:
> Less than epic
>
> Eileen Battersby
>
> Everything, including several kitchen sinks, contribute to the immense, if less than epic cartoon that amounts to Thomas Pynchon's latest meandering free-for-all, his first in a decade.
> [...]
> Pynchon may or may not regard himself as a seer, but his sense of humour has tended to come to his rescue, and that of his readers. And at no time has he ever needed his comic vision and lightness of touch - his prose, as ever, tap-dances along - as much as he does here in an indulgently crazed plot as loosely constructed as a house made of plastic straws.
> [...]
> This is a book about terror and terrorism and about living on the run. It is also concerned with some vague notion of multiple quest. Most of all though, the one abiding sensation that ricochets through the pages is that Pynchon is having fun. He clearly enjoyed writing what is the definitive shaggy dog story - never has the defining logic of Sterne's majestic Tristram Shandy, an influence so evident in Pynchon's entertaining historical romp Mason & Dixon (1997), appeared so lucid as when experiencing the undisciplined insanity of Against the Day.
>
> Pynchon has characteristically littered the text with in-jokes and cross references. In fact, those in-jokes and the cross references, as well as the historical asides and goofball digressions, serve as life rafts for the reader grimly paddling along through a novel that is more than twice the length of Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land, which says so much more. All the while the superior shadow of Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's demented post-modernist classic, published in 1973, hovers. It is this earlier novel, never mind what appears to be the serious absence of inspired editing, that presents the main difficulty facing Against the Day.
> [...]
>
> ON AND ON races an admittedly good-natured narrative devoid of either coherence or cohesion, giving the impression that Pynchon - who was born in 1937, served in the US forces, and decided to become invisible, thus securing mythic status - allowed his imagination to simply fly. For all the energy and obvious overview, it is a disappointing performance.
> [..]
>Read Against the Day as a likeable if completely daft post-modernist text.
>
> Consider it as a study of invisibility in an age of terror, one of the characters calls for a "cloak of invisibility" - Harry Potter already has one - by a writer whose cult status has been consolidated by invisibility.
>
> Ultimately this post-hippy salute to all things offbeat is about the random.
>
> " . . . due to feelings of mental ambivalence which were just beginning at that time to be understood, it had one day occurred to Ewball, after an absence measurable in years, to drop in on his family in Denver . . . " Such is the slap-happy, devil-may-care improvisational energy Pynchon brings to a hurrah guaranteed to leave the reader wondering "now what exactly was that all about?"
>
> Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
>
> Against the Day By Thomas Pynchon Cape, 1086pp. £25
>
>
>
>