Another failure to read AtD

[Ya Sam]

from

http://blogs.timesunion.com/books/?p=84


"By now all the initial hoopla surrounding Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the 
Day” has died down, with the reviews coming in mostly mixed. So I feel I can 
finally confess that even though I was among those to receive an advanced 
readers copy, complete with my name and the name of the Times Union 
imprinted in thick magic marker, I gave up around Page 199.

Giving up is not something that gives me pride, but when I realized that I 
didn’t know who I was reading about or, really, what was going on, and was 
searching my house for a really big piece of paper to map out the family 
trees of the book’s characters, I realized that the book had escaped me.

I’ve enjoyed reading Pynchon before, including Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying 
of Lot 49 and, especially, Mason and Dixon, but I don’t consider myself a 
huge fan of his work. I even gave up on Vineland.

Basically, the book wasn’t leading me anywhere — just showing me some rather 
clever and mildly humorous scenes, and connecting them with long expositions 
that spanned who knows how much time (I’m sure someone out there is busily 
trying to figure that out).


I think Dostoyevsky once wrote (maybe in “The Idiot”?) about a “leading 
idea” in fiction, and it seemed that was lacking in “Against the Day.” I 
couldn’t even begin to trust the novel and its narrators (well, maybe, the 
narrator of the Chums of Chance sections) because I wasn’t convinced there 
was a clear direction the novel was taking me. Not-knowingness, of course, 
is something readers always deal with as they learn more and more about the 
characters, places and events as they read. But they can often at least 
glimpse or have an expectation of where the novel is heading within the 
first fifth of a book.

Part of the problem could be how rapidly the novel moves from one scene to 
the next, not allowing breathing room for scenes or characters to develop 
fully. I mean, I had to keep rereading the opening Chums of Chance part to 
keep straight the characters.

Part of my giving up also has to do with the letter included with the review 
copy, written by Pynchon that said:

If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor 
adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of 
fiction.
Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

Supposedly, Pynchon himself wrote this promo stuff, and that “beware” and 
the “Good luck” were at once silly and off-putting; his words were an 
unnecessary challenge, and a bit redundant once I started reading and 
watched as an overabudance of characters crammed the pages and entire 
periods of time got washed away in overgeneralized prose." ...

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