On AtD: guy named Mariani in Fort Worth Weekly

[Mark Kohut]

Now, just let me say, I haven’t read ‘2666’ yet. But having just finished Thomas Pynchon’s 2006 novel ‘Against the Day,’ I can’t imagine a book out there – including ‘2666’ – that’s more imaginative or epic. Not several novellas strung together but a single novel, ‘Against the Day’ is set in the late 1880s/early 1900s and across lands and continents both real and imagined, and at about 1,100 pages, it’s 200-some pages longer than ‘2666.’ But ‘Against the Day’ made only a couple of end-of-the-year top-10 lists. You can be sure that ‘2666’ won’t just be mentioned in every reputable critic’s top 10 but sit atop it.

Why wasn’t Pynchon’s book as highly praised? Great writing aside, ‘Against the Day’ is not a patchwork of smaller pieces but a single theme wrestled with thoroughly and which required ostensibly as much extensive research as Bolaño’s opus to see through – in case you need ask, Pynchon wasn’t alive during the turn of the late 1880s/early 1900s and, as far as we know, never spent a significant amount of time in Vienna, Gottingen, Shambhala, the Balkans, Colorado during the silver rush, London, Chicago during the World’s Fair, or any of the other far-out times and places that backdrop his novel. (He did, apparently, spend some time in Mexico, where, among other things in ’Against the Day,’ an act of revenge takes place that’s as anticlimactic to the reader as it is to the guy exacting the revenge. And you’re both like, “WTF?! That was convenient. And not messy in any way.”)