Pynchon in Newsweek

[Tim Strzechowski]

Pynchon on the Installment Plan
Reading a Thomas Pynchon novel can feel like a life’s work—so this reviewer 
decided to respond in kind: herewith part one of a serial review of ‘Against 
the Day.’
By Malcolm Jones | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Nov 17, 2006
Here’s my problem: I’ve now read more than 400 pages of the new Thomas 
Pynchon novel, “Against the Day,” and I’m not even half through. Normally I 
wouldn’t complain, and I certainly wouldn’t look for sympathy. Long novels 
come with the territory when you’re a book reviewer, and in the end, it 
balances out, because you read your share of short novels, too. Besides, no 
one’s going to give you a lick of sympathy when you get paid to read for a 
living, even if the book is in Urdu.

OK, that’s not really my problem. The real hitch here is how to review this 
1,085-page behemoth. I’ve already made enough notes on this sucker to write 
my own book, because this story has enough plotlines for two or three 
novels, and so many characters that I’ve actually begun constructing family 
trees. If I wait until I’m finished to write a review, I’m afraid it’s going 
to wind up sounding like the old Woody Allen joke about taking a 
speed-reading course: “I read ‘War and Peace.’ It was about Russia.” To give 
you a review with sufficient detail to convey a sense of the story—and 
because I really, really hate throwing away good research—I’ve decided that 
the only way I can do justice to “Against the Day” is to review it in 
installments. If novelists can write serially, why not reviewers? Just think 
of me as a sort of sherpa guide.

Pynchon kicks his novel off with a big set piece at the Chicago Exposition 
of 1893 and focuses initially on a hardy band of boys called the Chums of 
Chance, who travel the globe in a hydrogen skyship named the Inconvenience. 
Their further exploits, we are told, are detailed elsewhere in a series of 
dime novels with titles such as “The Chums of Chance in Old Mexico” and “The 
Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit” (that’s the one set in Washington, 
D.C.). Whenever the Chums appear throughout the narrative, Pynchon resorts 
to an orotund language reminiscent of the turn of the last century: “Miles, 
with his marginal gifts of coordination, and Chick, with a want of alacrity 
fully as perceptible, took their stations at the control-panels of the 
apparatus, as Darby Suckling, meantime, went scrambling up the ratlines and 
shrouds of the giant ellipsoidal envelope from which the gondola depended …” 
and so on. The boys have touched down in Chicago for an aeronauts’ 
convention. The World Exposition across town is just the icing on their 
cake. After a few pages of fun at the fair, we get the idea: the boys embody 
the childlike air of innocence that attended the fair, when the whole 
country could still get behind the idea that technology bred progress. But 
this is Pynchon, so you know that this Edisonian let-there-be-light fandango 
will go through some weird spin cycle pretty darn quick. [...]



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robert Mahnke" <robert_mahnke at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2008 8:55 AM
Subject: Pynchon in Newsweek


>
> Google tells me that this has something to do with Pynchon, but I can't 
> get the page to load this morning:
>
> http://www.newsweek.com/id/44686
>
> Maybe one of you will have better luck....
>