a main thread four or five subplots down the road. Keeping all of the plot devices and character names straight will certainly in the next year or two result in one or more of those imposing “Guide To” books that are often thicker than the novel.
The Chums of Chance are the device tying all of the plot threads together, as they fly in their dirigible from one place to the next. In the book they are like a cross between Tom Swift and The Hardy Boys. A running gag throughout the book is when they and others refer to many previously published adventures of theirs. Are they real or are they themselves an enfleshed story within a story? As they seem to age in context
I think it is safe to assume that Pynchon intends us to take them for real. Of course, the question of what is real is a central one not only to this novel but to this author’s entire Works.
Beginning in the 1893 World’s Fair we encounter both technology and terrorism in their first Modern Day manifestations. The Chums of Chance lead us at first in a light-hearted manner into the Fair where we meet a main character (and I am deliberately refraining from using character names in this review so as to strip off a bit of decor to better see the walls) wh
o is an investigator looking into anarchists who may be threatening the Fair. Throughout the book the newly-empowered anarchists and their new love affair with The Equalizer -- Pynchon’s nickname for the invention of Dynamite -- is a key point. But terrorism is not just the bailiwick of the anarchist but it is found throughout Society and throughout the macrocosm as well. Perhaps the many universes that are discovered within Against the Day are even founded on Anarchy?
o is an investigator looking into anarchists who may be threatening the Fair. Throughout the book the newly-empowered anarchists and their new love affair with The Equalizer -- Pynchon’s nickname for the invention of Dynamite -- is a key point. But terrorism is not just the bailiwick of the anarchist but it is found throughout Society and throughout the macrocosm as well. Perhaps the many universes that are discovered within Against the Day are even founded on Anarchy?One character becomes an actual quick-draw dynamiter with fuses so short he can throw and beat to the clutch a fast hand-gun shootist. Here’s a good time to make a point about Pynchon: His novels are often comic in nature. Yes, they can be amongst the most challenging to read and that often masks the humor that should be recognized and enjoyed. I know for me, reading Gravity’s Rainbow, that advice was pivotal to understanding and is, I think, as pivotal here.
Remember scientist NikolaTesla? He seems to be in vogue these days what with his appearance in the book and movie THE PRESTIGE and now with his part in this book. Did you ever wonder why Tesla’s wireless power devices never quite worked? Join Pynchon in a rip-roaring conspiracy theory that, you know what? even makes a sort of sense.
OK, there are trillions of plots. There is a wonderful riff on spiritualism and Madame Blavatsky and on Crowley’s The Golden Dawn. Central to the book itself is a unique look at the idea of other dimensions, of Earths that exist side by side, available each to the right sort of travel. here are maps that are projections of the Earth as an imaginary surface. There are natural disasters of outstanding magnitude. So much more, but what is the book about?
Gravity’s Rainbow was the deconstruction of the actual form of a novel. Anyone who has read that book to the final climactic page, to where the screaming across the sky screams across the book and into the reader’s own perception has had her preconceptions of what makes a novel shattered. Mason and Dixon was about borders between lands, between peopl’s and between beliefs.
Against the Day to us seems to be about choices that Technology presents us with. There is Night and that there is Day but that Day is not analogous in itself to the Light of Wisdom but may simply be Knowledge. Perhaps one of the many messages of Against The Day is that one must understand forces in Society before aligning oneself with them. Certainly a message for all Societies today and, in that, we believe this is Pynchon’s most topical work
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AGAINST THE DAY by Thomas Pynchon is published by The Penguin Press. $35.00 Hardcover.
