Longish review of AtD

[Mark Kohut]

That longing, that desire......not quite nostalgia....since Against the Day is a kind
  or Remembrance of Things Lost.......Rememberance of Things That Might have Been....

Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
  > Back to the Future: On Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day William Logan

> http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2007/summer/logan-pynchon-ag
ainst-the-day/

I like it. Logan identifies our guy's characteristic weaknesses, with
examples numerous and well-chosen enough to carry considerable weight. And
he's dead right about our indulgence:

"Pynchon makes a halfhearted attempt to tie up a few loose ends... The true
Pynchon fanatic would never be worried by this... This gives Pynchon a
license for picaresque most authors would kill for-his vices have been
transmuted into virtues, a better bargain than that offered by the
philosopher's stone."


That said, I would have given much more space and weight to a countervailing
strength running through all the books:

"There's a longing at the heart of Against the Day, a tortured desire to
redeem and amend-the theme is taken up as vengeance but played out as
nostalgia."

If history is "stuff that happened back then," this is one author's
crotchet. If history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, it is
something we desperately need. 




       
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