Not Really a Review: Pynchon's Against the Day

It only took a year and a half, but I finally finished Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. It's brilliant: virtually every one of its 1085 pages contains something wonderful – beauty, insight, wit, surprise, even pathos – which is one reason it took so long to read.  It's also one reason that I sat mildly stunned when I finished the last page and closed the book.  Glad to be done? At one level, yes; I can read something else now (currently it's Philip Roth's Everyman).  But a part of me wished I had another thousand pages to go.

If this were a review, I'd try to find ways to entice you into picking it up: a quick summary (impossible), a look at the characters (too many), a representative passage (I only got blank looks the few times I tried that with some friends).  Indeed, I've tried, several times, to say something meaningful about the book, but to no avail; it's just too damn big.


Let's call it "sublime," in the Kantian sense, and leave it at that.  (If you find this evasion unsatisfactory, you can read the dust jacket's description, which is supposedly a revision of a description from Pynchon himself. It offers a nice taste.)


I don't usually recommend Pynchon unless pressed to do so.  People seem to love him or hate him.  Harold Bloom, that scholar and critic who has written more introductions to critical editions of literary works than I could even read in three lifetimes, lists Pynchon as one of the four most important living American novelists (along with Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth).  And lots of people list Pynchon's 1973 novel, Gravity's Rainbow, as one of the best and/or most important novels of the 20th century.


And then there are those who find him "unreadable," "turgid," "overwritten," and "obscene" – to use words attributed to the Pulitzer Prize's advisory board when they overturned their own fiction jury's unanimous recommendation of Gravity's Rainbow for the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. (No fiction prize was given that year.)


I suppose that invoking the Sublime to describe Against the Day gives away my position: simply stated, Pynchon is my favorite author. However, though Against the Day may be written better than Gravity's Rainbow – he's had 33 years to hone his already peerless skills – Gravity's Rainbow is still my favorite book.  If you twisted my arm, I'd recommend you read GR first (is it optimistic to say "first"?); I find it a more important book, both in the sense of American literary history and of the history that the book evokes and critiques.

So, gentle reader: I believe that reading Pynchon, though difficult, is rewarding and enriching.  But I've been proven wrong, as recently as last semester...  caveat lector...