Word: pynchon
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...late 1960s I encountered Pynchon's first novel, V. Duly enchanted, I swore that eventually I would decipher every one of his enigmas. That Pynchon himself was one of them, that he never gave interviews or permitted his photograph to be published, only made him more irresistible. To this day his only public "appearances" have been two guest spots on The Simpsons. Both times he was wearing a bag over his head...
Nearly four decades and many rereadings later, I know better than to suppose that anyone fully penetrates Pynchon's intentions, not in V., not in his short masterpiece The Crying of Lot 49 and certainly not in his mammoth new book, Against the Day (Penguin Press; 1,085 pages). Of course this makes me not just a Pynchon reader but practically a Pynchon character, another of his comically put-upon quest figures who journey into mysteries that engulf them. Even that is part of Pynchon's grand scheme, which is to make the experience of reading his work a demonstration...
...Against the Day weighs just 3 oz. less than my toaster. But my toaster doesn't offer the tantalizing music of Pynchon's voice, with its shifts from comic shtick to heartbroken threnody, its mordant Faulkneresque interludes, its gusts of lyric melancholy blown in by way of F. Scott Fitzgerald, its ecstatic perorations from Jack Kerouac. And my toaster will never lay before me a vision of a world in which technology is stripping away all the ancient, vital magic while shepherding mankind to the brink of destruction. On the other hand, my toaster makes toast, and nothing quite...
...frequent stretches where a new plot seems to start every paragraph or two. The book opens with the Chums of Chance, a quarrelsome brotherhood of operatives that pops up throughout the novel, circumnavigating the globe in a giant dirigible, on missions ordered by mysterious higher authorities. But soon enough, Pynchon pursues new story lines involving Webb Traverse, an anarchist bomber in Colorado; his three sons Reef, Frank and Kit; and the various women in their lives. When Webb dies at the hands of gunslingers in the pay of Scarsdale Vibe, a ruthless mogul, his sons pledge to avenge his murder...
This is a Pynchon novel, so of course they can. In Göttingen, Kit will be dazzled by Yashmeen Halfcourt, a beautiful mathematician with mystical leanings. Yashmeen, meanwhile, is caught up in the theoretical wars between vector analysts and the champions of Quaternions, each with their visions of which was more real--time or space. This last controversy is somehow central to Pynchon's preoccupations with time travel, alternate realities and a whole spectrum of options for escaping a world headed into the calamities of World War I and beyond. Lacking a degree in advanced math, I'm still hard...