Roller coaster in the dark

[Dave Monroe]

Roller coaster in the dark

Denis Scheck maintains that in spite of what his
American critics say, Thomas Pynchon's "Against the
Day" is a masterpiece


"Against the Day" is a unique book, in the sense of
being utterly original. At its best moments
emotionally electrifying and intellectually brilliant,
moving but never sentimental, sometimes terribly sad,
sometimes side-splittingly funny, and to the very last
page as unforeseeable as a roller coaster ride in the
dark.

It is no coincidence that the plot is so
unpredictable. Like the famous "Oxen of the Sun"
chapter in "Ulysses", where James Joyce retells the
history and evolution of the English language from its
beginnings to the present day of 1906 Dublin,
Pynchon’s new novel also includes a literary
development sped up to whizz past the reader's eye.
Among other things, "Against the Day" is a potted
history of genre literature – science fiction and
fantasy, adventure, horror, western and detective
novels. Pynchon imitates and caricatures the great
masters of these genres – Jules Verne, H.P. Lovecraft,
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack Williamson, Isaac Asimov,
Robert A. Heinlein, Zane Grey – outbids and overtrumps
them in fantastic invention and masterfully subverts
every sensible expectation of a historical novel whose
story largely takes place between the Chicago World’s
Fair of 1893 and the outbreak of the First World War
in 1914.

Anyone who has read the first American reviews of
"Against the Day" would probably be expecting
something else. For New York Times book critic Michiko
Kakutani (who Philip Roth ridiculed ten years ago in
"Sabbath’s Theater" for her often moralising
misjudgements), the new Pynchon is "a bloated jigsaw
puzzle of a story, pretentious without being
provocative, 
 complicated without being rewardingly
complex." Louis Menand opens his slating in the The
New Yorker with the question: "What was he thinking?"
And Adam Kirsch's hatchet job in the New York Sun
massacres not just the novel ("stuffed to bursting
with oddities"), but the author himself too: "Thomas
Pynchon is no longer the novelist we need."

The odd thing is that the earlier a verdict on the new
Pynchon was published, the harsher and worse-tempered
it was. And the earlier it was published, the greater
the pressure of time on the reviewer, who received the
proofs from Penguin just a fortnight before the book
officially came out on November 20, 2006.

With 1,085 close-printed pages, hundreds of
characters, a plot that even the most experienced
reader could not predict (and which sets off on
page-length wanderings through seldom-visited realms
of knowledge such as quaternions as an extension of
complex numbers or the optical properties of the
calcite known as Iceland spar) the book certainly has
the potential to provoke ill temper in the hectic life
of a literature critic. In the meantime, eight weeks
have passed since publication, the dinners and family
rituals of the holiday season have been digested
(Pynchon readers might remember from "Mason & Dixon"
how the atmosphere of the Christmas season promotes
all kinds of storytelling) and the smoke begins to
clear from the American clashes over "Against the
Day." To reveal much of interest.

The first American reviews of the new Pynchon spoke
with an astonishingly aggressive anti-intellectualism
and a tangible weariness with literature that
experiments with language itself and ventures to try
out more complex forms than we are familiar with from
the annual crop of late works by the likes of Philip
Roth and John Updike. More generally, the American
zeitgeist currently seems to have little time for any
kind of innovation in literature – if it ever did.
"The Corrections," Jonathan Franzen’s spectacular
family novel, and also one of the most commercially
successful novels of recent years, is – in comparison
with the work of the likes of William Gaddis, Don
DeLillo or our Thomas Pynchon – one thing above all
else: absolutely conventionally narrated.

Franzen himself has described his fall from faith in
American postmodernism and its patron saints like
William Gaddis ("Mr. Difficult," Franzen calls him) in
a remarkably lucid essay. In their reviews, Pynchon’s
adversaries are now copying that conversion: one fall
for all.

Certainly, "Against the Day" has the spirit of the
quasi-Olympic challenge of pushing literary
superlatives to the very limits of the possible. Or to
put it a tad less pompously: the puerile game of "who
can piss highest on the wall." James Joyce's "Ulysses"
breathed that spirit, as did Arno Schmidt's "Zettels
Traum" (Zettel's Dream) – as well as countless
epigonous works that became a torment to their
overstretched authors and readers.

Three things save Pynchon's "Against the Day" from
that fate. Firstly the political commitment of the
novel, which can be read as a swan song for anarchism
as a political alternative, and as an astonishingly
coolly told story about terrorism. Pynchon has never
written more up-to-the-minute than here. I for one can
think of no literary response to the terror attacks of
September 11, 2001 more convincing than Pynchon's
poetically penetrating description of New York taken
by a mountain spirit run amok. On page 1,076 a boy is
asked to write an essay on "What It Means To Be An
American." The student, who personally experienced the
defeat of the Colorado miners' strike, answers with a
single sentence: "It means doing what you're told,
taking what you're offered and not striking so that
you don't get shot by its soldiers." Not an easy
insight for an American.

Secondly, Thomas Pynchon has, in his own way, actually
written a family novel in "Against the Day." Even if
the plot leads in great leaps to the interior of Asia,
to Mexico and Albania, London, Paris and Venice, to a
madhouse in Göttingen, to the winged dragons of the
Swiss Alps and to a ship sailing under, yes really,
under the desert, ultimately Pynchon tells us the
story of the four children of the American anarchist
Webb Traverse, the dynamiting Wild West "Kieselguhr
Kid" who takes from the rich to give to the poor – and
in the process gets into the sights of arch-capitalist
Scarsdale Vibe, who has him killed by two paid
assassins. Never since the "Count of Monte Christo"
has a story of vengeance been told so gleefully.

Thirdly – and this unfortunately gets a bit forgotten
among all the fuss about how dreadfully demanding he
is of his readers – Pynchon's perhaps greatest
strength is his humour. Certainly, not everyone will
slap their thighs over quaternionists as "the Jews of
mathematics," and a German-speaking reader may be a
little disappointed in the passages set in Göttingen,
in the "Land of Lederhosen," as Pynchon calls it. But
the likes of Pugnax the Henry-James-reading dog,
communicating ball lightning and a repeating tornado
called Thorvald, as well as the magnificently silly
songs, carry the reader through the drier passages.

But the most spectacular party piece of all in this
novel whose groaning feast brings to mind a
fantastical curiosity cabinet is Thomas Pynchon's
tribute to the technological adventure literature of
the turn of the twentieth century: the "Chums of
Chance," five aeronauts on board the "Inconvenience".
Pynchon grants them perhaps the loveliest happy end in
modern literature. "They fly toward grace," is the
last sentence of the novel. A flight no reader should
miss.

*

This article originally appeared in German in Der
Tagesspiegel on January 11, 2007.

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1158.html

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/archiv/11.01.2007/3013820.asp

Yeah, I know, Otto's posted this before, just to read
it into the record here, is all ...



 
____________________________________________________________________________________
Don't pick lemons.
See all the new 2007 cars at Yahoo! Autos.
http://autos.yahoo.com/new_cars.html