In U.S. letters, Thomas Pynchon has become something of a brand name.  Like Disney, McDonald’s, Nike, or Madonna, Pynchon has imitators, but no real competitors, because he offers consumers something that no one else can.  That something is, of course, “Thomas Pynchon”—whatever it is that we want that to mean.  

Every review that I have seen of Pynchon’s amazing, frustrating, exhilarating, poignant, disappointing, exciting, and hilarious new novel, Against the Day, has aspired either to praise or bury the new behemoth (1,085 pages) based on the sheer volume of Pynchon-ness that it provides.  Everyone describes it the same way, by reciting a list of outlandish and fantastically diverse items and situations that (Can you believe it?!) are all contained within this single, capacious tome.  Personally, I don’t feel the need to write such a list, as the Against the Day book jacket copy is willing to do so for me, i.e.: “The sizable cast [of Against the Day] includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocent and decadents, mad scientists, shamans, psychics and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns,” declares the book jacket, as though to ensure us that we will get our money’s worth.

Critical reactions to Against the Day, positive as well as negative, go on like that for sentence after sentence.  Granted, it is hard to imagine how one could avoid it: like the author’s other novels, Against the Day packs in so much information, so many characters, themes, subplots, intrigues, motifs, dream sequences, set pieces, interludes, sex scenes, and, at the very end, a single daring cliffhanger almost worthy of primetime network TV—see, now look at what I go and do. 

For habitués of the author, everything is here: funny names, the occasional song (though not as many as usual), extensive displays of scientific and historical knowledge, graphic BDSM sex scenes.  The way that the plot unfolds is one of the things about Against the Day that is new, and therefore which the novel’s avowedly brand-specific critical reception (in the NY Times, the headline was “A Pynchonesque Turn by Pynchon”) is missing out on.  He has written two other novels to rival this one in terms of hugeness, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Mason & Dixon (1997).  Both of those take time to prepare their readers before they launch them into the narrative aether (a central Against the Day theme) of their central storylines.  Lengthy sections set in London and South Africa, respectively, introduce the novels’ major characters and themes and give readers a chance to get used to Pynchon’s epic descriptions and delirious, sometimes seemingly endless sentences.

By contrast, Against the Day launches immediately into a collision of complicated international storylines, all of which require at least some familiarity with history, science, mathematics, philosophy, and assorted esoterica not even attributable to any particular academic discipline.  In 1893, an evil East Coast plutocrat, Scarsdale Vibe, is exploiting the gold miners of Colorado.  Erstwhile union organizer Webb Traverse goes full-on Anarchist, adopting the secret identity of “The Kieselguhr Kid” in order to bomb Vibe and his cronies into submission.  Vibe orders Traverse killed, and then tries to buy the compliance of the Traverse family members, most notably son Kit; Vibe packs Kit off on an all-expenses-paid trip to Yale College.  His brothers Frank and Reef go to miners’ college and become Webb’s dynamite-wielding successor, respectively, while sister Lake marries one of Webb’s assassins.

The story of the Traverse family becomes one of the dominant threads in Pynchon’s enormous plot, to such an extent that issues involving labor and the freedom of workers to unionize take center stage throughout, recalling Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland.  As the story keeps developing, however, new themes pile up at an alarming speed: Yale gets Kit acquainted with one Nicola Tesla, who is testing a huge wireless electromagnetic transmission tower on nearby Long Island Sound.  Vibe, meanwhile, has learned that Tesla is developing a free, non-profit, wireless transmission system that will be available to the whole world; so, Vibe pays Prof. Heino Vanderjuice to develop an “anti-signal” that will use the mass of the entire world to neutralize the signal of Tesla’s transmission.  J.P. Morgan is also involved the scheme, yet he appears to provide funding to both Tesla and Vanderjuice.  Vanderjuice is a longtime friend of a group of boys called the Chums of Chance, who pilot a Hydrogen dirigible around the world solving crimes, saving the innocent, and, unwittingly, assisting Detective Lew Basnight and his employers at White City Investigations (WCI) in union-busting activities against the backdrop of 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Let’s skip ahead a mere three hundred pages.  By now Iceland spar, a form of calcite that can provide access to alternate dimensions and enable time travel, has emerged as a key McGuffin; it seems that the Chums of Chance have found it, but we don’t know what they’ve done with it, or whether they recognized it when, in fact, they found it.  Kit has moved to Göttingen, Germany, to study mathematics and Reef is now in hiding, disguised as a decadent millionaire named Thrapton Cheesely III.  It turns out that union-busting detective Lew Basnight is clairvoyant; he is working in London for a group called the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tertactys (T.W.I.T.), which is dedicated to the teachings of the Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras.  Pythagorean doctrine is, of course, discussed at extreme length.  Against the Day launches headlong into narrative knots tied every bit as tight as they appear above, and infinitely more so, leaping from one set of characters and conflicts to the next seemingly at random, until finally a pattern and a rhythm can emerge. 

Yet when they do, Day, like its predecessors, rewards readers’ perseverance by unveiling a story of genuine emotional depth.  I would never say that any of the slapstick comedy, elegant and horrific scenes of destruction, raucous sex, and, of course, the funny names,  should be overlooked; in fact, they unfold in Against the Day with the same joy and feeling of constant discovery that they do in earlier Pynchon. And yet, as before, it is only when the emotional and thematic centers of the novel become clear that Day really comes alive. 

It is important to remember that the main characters of Against the Day are predominantly young, none over thirty, and their discoveries of work, love, responsibility, and loss all mirror the efforts of organized society to come to grips with technological advances at the turn of the twentieth century.  What keeps the chaos and spectacle of the enormous narrative moving is a story about young adults struggling to stake their ground and become parents between the fault lines of war, failing governments, and economic and environmental disaster, a theme whose relevance for readers of today could not possibly be more obvious.

This is not to say that Day deserves to be 1,085 pages long, or that it is really as strong as its predecessors.  The truth is that you can’t spell Against the Day without “again,” and the element of surprise is lacking this time.  But for anyone who is interested in literature of high style as well as deeply felt substance, Against the Day is far more than just publishing-industry hype.