Against the Day and William Vollmann’s Brutal Book About Climate Change

[Mark Kohut]

 Reading this review, and reading the first few pages of Vollman's work,
reminds me of the Trespassers in *Against the Day.*

>From the future-- "a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies,
terminal poverty— the end ..." They are presented as out of an unspecified
apocalyptic future in the book, a tautological explication, I know, and
which I vaguely associated with a nuclear holocaust, an On the Beach future
or whatever, Pynchon's great ambiguity of various possibilities all
applying but, now, more fully full of the great presentation of the natural
world in AtD, I see it as the climate changed end times future per Vollman.


Your milage may vary even with a fuel shortage.

For me, taking a writer like Vollman seriously, as we do, deflates my
"balloon-boy faith", my congenital optimism, my belief in art-of-the
possible pragmatic just-in-time change as so often in history, that climate
change apocalypse will be averted as nukes were in the Cuban Missile Crisis
that something will be done to change it all.

But all this post can point to is Pynchon's genius in encompassing it all
up to and including "balloon-boy faith".

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/568309/?__twitter_impression=true


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