Against the Day.

Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon (The Penguin Press, 2006) 1085 pp.; $35.00

IN 1995 THE UNABOMBER, Theodore J. Kaczynski, blackmailed the Washington Post into publishing his madman's manifesto denouncing the industrial era. It's a shame that Kaczynski--masterful mathematician, anarchist, technology abominator--didn't aspire to be a novelist. Instead of blowing people up with mail bombs, he might have written Against the Day.

Pynchon must have been puzzled by some of the reaction to his new book. Along with the inevitable and obligatory idolatry there were some dissents this time. Big-shot reviewers like Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times and Louis Menand in the New Yorker panned Against the Day, the New York Times Book Review failed to name it one of the ten best books of 2006, and the National Book Critics Circle didn't even nominate it for the group's fiction prize. Yes, the esteemed author must have been nonplused by the hostility. After all, the novel's formula is much the same as it was in Pynchon's earlier books, a formula that had been lambent (to borrow a popular word in Against the Day) up to now: overplotted plotlessness, cartoon names, science sorties, surreal shenanigans, and tortuous, torturous syntax. But do the habitual Pynchonesque high finks sabotage the latest novel?

I would say that Against the Day is better than Vineland, which is a debacle, but not as good as Gravity's Rainbow. The latter isn't great, but its technophobia--symbolized by that quintessentially malevolent modern weapon, the V-2 rocket--strikes a nerve, and its scenes of gaudy carnage hold one's attention. The new novel's technophobia--and its other themes--is rather bland.

I imagine that by now most readers interested in Against the Day have a general idea of what it's about. I certainly hope so because like virtually every review that I've read, including the worshipful ones, I find it impossible to summarize its stories. (Copious note-taking has taken this hapless writer only so far.) I can report that the book begins at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, ends in the 1920s, and embraces the whole globe--above it, on it, and beneath it. The Traverse family looms, if not large, then middling-large. Webb Traverse, the clans father, is an anarchist who bombs infrastructure components until important businessmen have him murdered. The novel's romanticizing of anarchism--the principled, scrupulous Webb Traverse is a bomb-thrower who eschews killing--made me uneasy. I wasn't as perturbed by the caricature of evil capitalism, personified in the figure of Scarsdale Vibe; I just didn't find the depiction very meaningful. Webb's three sons seek vengeance for his death more or less ardently and do lots of other things; Webb's daughter shacks up with her father's killers (go figure). There is a horde of other characters, as difficult to keep sorted out as the humdrum Traverses. I particularly dreaded the periodic appearances of the Chums of Chance, daredevil aeronauts whose winsomeness made me wish that a few of the lads would be impaled by a speeding V-2. (Speaking of sex, baroque buggery is big in Against the Day. New York City becomes "the catamite of Hell," raped by "a Figure with supernatural powers." Elsewhere a character wields an electronic device that simultaneously sodomizes his rectum and abdomen: talk about AC-DC.)

To be fair, Pynchon tries hard in this novel to create rounded characters. His failure to do so in the past was attributed to the fact that his characters embodied "the existential emptiness of modern man," prattle prattle. However, it now seems clear that Pynchon lacks complex-character expertise. It isn't easy being Bellow or Cheever. (Bellow and Cheever sometimes couldn't be Bellow and Cheever.) In Against the Day's crowded thousand-plus pages the most vivid individual is a choleric Mexican parrot named Joaquin, who likes calling people pendejo. Joaquin, unfortunately, only occupies a tiny part of the book.

Pynchon's wildly audacious goal in the new book is to show how World War I, which profoundly and horribly changed civilization ("The world came to an end in 1914" a character opines. "Like the mindless dead, who don't know they're dead, we are as little aware as they of having been in Hell ever since that terrible August"), was the result of the previous eras beastly capitalists and rampant technology. As an example of the latter, it is suggested that the Tunguska Event, a still-unexplained colossal explosion in Siberia in 1908, might have been caused by an apparatus built by the inventor Nikola Tesla. (Tesla seems to have finally entered the pop culture pantheon: he also appeared in the recent movie The Prestige. I discussed the film's problematic use of Tesla in the Humanist's January-February 2007 online edition. Pynchon, incidentally, isn't the first to posit a link between the Tunguska explosion and Tesla, Marc J. Seller discusses the issue in his 1998 Tesla biography.)

Pynchon has always been fascinated by entropy, the leaking of energy by closed systems. This book, alas, is a tangible example of the phenomenon, the apocalyptic oozing into the apocalypshtick. Pynchon might be passionately attached to his vision of a world going irrevocably mad, but he doesn't render his perceptions passionately, and he works out his themes only halfheartedly.

The novel's good vibes, opposed to the bad Scarsdale Vibe, are represented by mysticism. Numerous characters and the ruthless intelligence agencies of many nations seek Shambhala, described as:

   An ancient metropolis of the spiritual, some say
   inhabited by the living, others say empty, in ruins,
   buried someplace beneath the desert sands of Inner
   Asia. And of course there are always those who'll
   tell you that the true Shambhala lies within.

I must allow others to judge the significance of these quests, as I am constitutionally unable to respond sympathetically to this aspect of the human adventure. Moreover, Pynchon exacerbated my mysticism-malaise by transforming the blizzard of mathematics he unleashed into a kind of mystic fantasia. For me math has always been profoundly nontranscendent (and nasty). When the math--vectors, quaternions, ad infinitum--becomes infernally esoteric, it's obvious that the author is goofing on the reader. To what end? Possibly the answer lies in Pynchonland's Koan Zone. (Sorry, Pynchonites.)

Pynchon's novels have always contained surreal set pieces; they are integral to his portentous Weltanschauung. I never believed that these set pieces were on a par with the best post-World War II English-language surreal fiction-the sundry-styled spectacle of Ellison's Invisible Man, the elegantly nightmarish Cards of Identity (Nigel Dennis) and The Revelations of Dr. Modesto (Alan Harrington)-but I have thought that they were pretty good (there's even a nifty one in Vineland: the attempted aircraft hijacking). Until now. Against the Day is replete with surreal irruptions--time travel, shape-shifting ships, talking reindeer, photos that show the past and the future, and so on--but they don't resonate. Perhaps it's because they don't emerge plausibly from the narrative; they seemed like forced, ornamental ploys to razzle-dazzle.

I have a hunch that Pynchon's zealous fans don't read many novels, so they're not bothered by his flaws. They cherish their idol because he presents the world as they know it: science, technology, history, politics, high and low culture all mashed together to make a garish gallimaufry. The results might be messy but so is the society the Pynchonites inhabit.

Against the Day does renew a reader's appreciation for E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, which covers--and subverts-much the same historical ground as Pynchon's novel, but is polished, cunning, entertaining, and of a mercifully prudent length.

Howard Schneider is a writer and editor in New York City.