Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon.

On finishing my read of Against the Day, I believe I have read all of Thomas Pynchon’s published fiction–all his books, anyway: the novels and the Slow Learner collection. This one took two attempts: I halted the first circa 2007 at the midpoint of the novel, and I returned to read the whole thing this year. Straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, I think it is Pynchon’s longest book. It descends from a rarified world of “boys’ adventure” in airships, through anarchist struggle, family revenge, state espionage, sexual compulsion, academic intrigue, and mystical conspiracy, to meditations on light, number, and time.

It is strange that my first attempt at this book was while I was living in Chicago, and my second has been in Colorado. It begins in Chicago at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, and several characters travel from Chicago to Colorado–while Colorado is also the disseminating point for the Traverse family, whose various members trace many of the book’s persistent plot threads. Ultimately, the geography of the book is all-encompassing, featuring London, Venice, Vienna, Mexico, Shambahla, and the Hollow Earth, among other locations. It includes a typically Pynchonian cast of thousands, with names like Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin and Bevis Moistleigh.

The title phrase appears several times in the text, each with a different contextually-driven meaning. In addition to these, I understood it to be an Englishing of contre jour: the technique of giving focus to a backlit subject in photography and painting. This notion relates to inventor-character Merle Rideout’s photographic career with its through-line intersecting both the early and late parts of the novel, and to the physics of light that is centered in many different passages, as well as the sense of opaque futurity in the lead up to the Great War and the subsequent totalitarianisms of the 20th century.

As always, Pynchon is very funny, littering the book with jokes to take the edge off of a palpable anger. Among the many digressive episodes, some exalt genre conventions from less “literary” species of fiction, such as the terrific weird horror passage recounted by the explorer Fleetwood Vibe (138-148). Sex is frequent enough in the early parts of the book, and somewhat surprisingly seems to increase in the later ones. Altered states of consciousness and metaphysical indeterminacy create ambiguities and introduce unreliability into the third-person omniscient narration.

Some quick notes regarding my “completed” and iterative consumption of Pynchon’s works (in no particular order): Having read Inherent Vice I saw the movie during its initial release, and I think Gravity’s Rainbow needs to inspire a grand piece of musical theater. V is at the top of my list of Pynchon to re-read. I have now read Mason & Dixon twice and Against the Day one-and-a-half times–they were each worth it.

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Vineland by Thomas Pynchon.

I guzzled this then-new novel down with fascination and delight in a period of less than forty-eight hours during my senior year as a college student in 1990. (Was there chemical assistance in this herculean reading effort? I suspect that there was.) At the time, it seemed like a thematic sequel to The Crying of Lot 49. It also set up a lot of tropes and themes that I was happy to see Pynchon revisit in his later books.

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon.

Mason & Dixon is the only Pynchon book I’ve read twice: once on my own, and once aloud with my Other Reader. It’s a downright hilarious tome, and only funnier if you’re familiar with the larger Pynchon oeuvre for the coy references that start with the parabolic trajectory in the opening sentence. If the rocket of Gravity’s Rainbow is merely a snowball in this novel, that’s a wonderful thing. Despite the book’s heft, it has a real intimacy, and–in many senses of the word–domestication. The Pynchonian playfulness works itself out on a more human level, and while there are still views of social and cosmic tragedy that strike hard and chill, this weave of historical improbabilities and personal yarns leaves the savvy reader with a flushed and slushy sense of satisfaction. 

Pynchon offers Mason and Dixon as a pair of characters that are almost a diagrammatic odd couple: the mournful encompassing astronomer, and the cheerily square land-surveyor. But for all that, they are never mere allegorical poles. Unlike earlier Pynchon protagonists, who seem to dissolve under the force of the author’s manifold micro-plots, Mason and Dixon actually become more coherent and characterful from start to finish. 

This volume doesn’t even pretend to be anything but fiction within fiction, but I give it more points for capturing the likely weirdness of its place(s) and period than any number of naive or revisionist pictures of the nascent United States. And if the worth of history is to give us a sense of the origin of our own perspectives and values, Pynchon seems to have done real historical work here. All of the crazy anachronisms and supernatural oddities just help the reader maintain the sort of healthy and happy skepticism such enterprises should always have at hand.