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snurriSo, contrary to Mr. Champion's claims, I too have finished Against the Day. The problem is, as with most of Pynchon's stuff, I don't really know what to say about it other than "I liked it. You should read it." It may be my favorite of Pynchon's books (though I have to confess, red-faced, that I still haven't read Gravity's Rainbow), but that distinction often seems to belong to the last Pynchon I read. (Vineland being the sole exception.) What was most seductive about AtD was the sense of possibility; light, and the refraction of same, is one of the recurring themes of the book, and seems to transfer to reality itself--it is not at all clear that the many, many globe-trotting characters of this book are all existing in the same reality at any given point in the narrative. The math talk rather lost me, I must confess, but luckily the mathematicians in the book, like the anarchists, the engineers, the assassins and the libertines, are all deliciously mad and prone to stumbling into situations where it seems that only the page itself lies between the reader and some great universal truth. These moments of great profundity occur either in spite of or because of Pynchon's refusal to eschew vulgarity, in every sense; bad puns, suspect science, pulp adventure and nose-wrinkling sexual practices abound. Yet the book is deeply funny and deeply fun. The book opens by introducing the Chums of Chance, a squad of zeppelin-bound boy adventurers, and while the tone becomes progressively less innocent, that dime-novel feel never disappears entirely. Real-life events like the Chicago World's Fair, the collapse of St. Mark's Campanile, and the Tunguska Event seem to anchor the narrative in this reality, or something like it; by the end it appears that the characters have emerged from a youth filled with possibilities into a world of grown-up regrets. But the final lines suggest that one can still rise above all that--perhaps into imagination itself?--and float away into a sky of possibilities.
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Date: 2007-04-05 06:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2007-04-05 08:41 pm (UTC)But I like him. AND COMIC BOOKS TOO.
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Date: 2007-04-06 06:40 pm (UTC)I think Gravity's Rainbow would make a really great comic book.
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Date: 2007-04-06 07:15 pm (UTC)I haven't read Summer Blonde myself. I'll keep an eye out for it.
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Date: 2007-04-09 04:34 pm (UTC)maybe when it comes out in paperback.
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Date: 2007-04-09 05:30 pm (UTC)That's gonna be a big paperback :-)
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Date: 2007-04-09 05:33 pm (UTC)but the hardcover is just too damn heavy to hold while reading, doncha think?
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Date: 2007-04-09 05:51 pm (UTC)Infinite Jest is one of those get-to-when books for me. "When" being a nebulous place in the future.