Against the Day: Pynchon's Magnum Opus?

[gary webb]

I haven't re-read obsessively AtD like I have V., Gravity's Rainbow, M&D,
and even Bleeding Edge... but having delved into it over the Holiday, I am
convinced it ranks with his best work and might even surpass it...the size,
scope, and scale may have left many looking for some semblance of order
within the seeming chaos... it has everything the rank and file Pynchon
enthusiast craves, and more.... The novel begins with the 1893 Columbian
Exposition... on page 52-53, it mentions that at this event Fredrick
Jackson Turner has given his speech where the "Frontier Thesis" was put
forward as a means of understanding and articulating America's place in the
world, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Thesis, and at this point in
American History the West had been conquered, exemplified with the cattle
being sent back East to Chicago to be mechanistically slaughtered. The
"Frontier Thesis" is interesting and a nifty thread in AtD, thus far... I
also think that post-AtD, it is an interesting thread in Inherent Vice and
Bleeding Edge... definitely Vineland and M&D as well... Pynchon had a much
darker view in Gravity's Rainbow... Crouchfield the Westwardman...
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