Against the Day

Starred review from October 30, 2006
Knotty, paunchy, nutty, raunchy, Pynchon's first novel since Mason & Dixon
(1997) reads like half a dozen books duking it out for his, and the reader's, attention. Most of them shine with a surreal incandescence, but even Pynchon fans may find their fealty tested now and again. Yet just when his recurring themes threaten to become tics, this perennial Nobel bridesmaid engineers another never-before-seen phrase, or effect, and all but the most churlish resistance collapses.
It all begins in 1893, with an intrepid crew of young balloonists whose storybook adventures will bookend, interrupt and sometimes even be read by, scores of at least somewhat more realistic characters over the next 30 years. Chief among these figures are Colorado anarchist Webb Traverse and his children: Kit, a Yale- and Göttingen-educated mathematician; Frank, an engineer who joins the Mexican revolution; Reef, a cardsharp turned outlaw bomber who lands in a perversely tender ménage à trois; and daughter Lake, another Pynchon heroine with a weakness for the absolute wrong man.
Psychological truth keeps pace with phantasmagorical invention throughout. In a Belgian interlude recalling Pynchon's incomparable Gravity's Rainbow
, a refugee from the future conjures a horrific vision of the trench warfare to come: "League on league of filth, corpses by the uncounted thousands." This, scant pages after Kit nearly drowns in mayonnaise at the Regional Mayonnaise Works in West Flanders. Behind it all, linking these tonally divergent subplots and the book's cavalcade of characters, is a shared premonition of the blood-drenched doomsday just about to break above their heads.
Ever sympathetic to the weak over the strong, the comradely over the combine (and ever wary of false dichotomies), Pynchon's own aesthetic sometimes works against him. Despite himself, he'll reach for the portentous dream sequence, the exquisitely stage-managed weather, some perhaps not entirely digested historical research, the "invisible," the "unmappable"—when just as often it's the overlooked detail, the "scrawl of scarlet creeper on a bone-white wall," a bed partner's "full rangy nakedness and glow" that leaves a reader gutshot with wonder.
Now pushing 70, Pynchon remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below and sex from all sides. His new book will be bought and unread by the easily discouraged, read and reread by the cult of the difficult. True, beneath the book's jacket lurks the clamor of several novels clawing to get out. But that rushing you hear is the sound of the world, every banana peel and dynamite stick of it, trying to crowd its way in, and succeeding.

Starred review from November 15, 2006
Descending in balloons on the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the do-gooding young Chums of Chance (part of a worldwide brigade) get help from White City Investigations' Lew Basnight. Lew is soon off battling anarchists in the American West, where bad guys Deuce and Sloat do in Webb Traverse, whose daughter marries Deuce and whose son is escaping this accursedness at Yale. Meanwhile, the Chums float through the center of the earth to the Arctic, where they are alarmed to discover a scion of the robber Barron-ish Vibe family excavating a dangerous artifact. And that's just a minuscule part of the action in this grand Wellsian fantasia from the author of "Gravity's Rainbow", whose skewed look at history is a powerful act of imagination, bending the rules (with quartz translucence figuring in somehow) to reveal "worlds which are set to the side." Written in packed, densely detailed prose too dryly smart and ironic to be called Baroque, the narrative has its longueurs, and different readers will likely take to different story lines (this reader was partial to the balloonists). But pick up another book for a break, and it will seem relentlessly ordinary. Brilliant if sometimes exasperating, Pynchon's latest is highly recommended for any library that takes its fiction seriously, with the warning that it does not yield easy pleasures and should not be read on deadline. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 8/06.]Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2006
Nearly a decade after " Mason & Dixon" (1997), Pynchon delivers a novel that matches his most influential work, " Gravity's Rainbow" (1973), in complexity, humor, and insight, and surpasses it in emotional valence. Approaching 70 and as famous for his avoidance of the public eye as for his Niagaras of prose, Pynchon remains profoundly fascinated by light, time, and technology. The improbable action begins onboard a hydrogen skyship, the " Inconvenience, "manned by the Chums of Chance, a fabled do-gooder aeronautics club on its way to Chicago for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Aside from some Jules Verne-like voyages beneath the earth's surface, the bickering Chums provide an aerial view of the carnivalesque proceedings as this many-voiced saga modulates in tone from cliffhanger jocularity to metaphysical speculation, lyricism, and devilish satire. As Pynchon whirls his way through such milestones as the invention of dynamite, harnessing of electricity, evolution of photography and movies, development of diabolical weapons, and the bloody turmoil in the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire leading up to World War I, his motley characters circle the globe on quests for enlightenment, profit, revenge, romance, and sanctuary. Cartoonish figures vamp and menace, but Pynchon has also created genuinely dimensional and affecting characters, including marvelously tough and witty women, from saloon girls to a magician's assistant, a mathematician, and an anthropologist. By orchestrating fantastic, dramatic, and all-too-real goings-on in the Wild West, the Bowery, London, Gottingen, Venice, Mexico, Bukhara, Albania, and Tuva, Pynchon illuminates the human endeavor in all its longing, violence, hubris, and grace. A capacious, gritty, and tender epic.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)