A truckload full of Pynchonite

Here's my keeping track of this landmark reading experience I'm currently embarked on in dedicating a whole lot of my time to that new novel by Thomas R. Pynchon, “Against The Day” - and enjoying it, in fact. As I've promised previously, I shall try my best in getting together something that may not exactly fit to the word “review” but will give you perhaps some idea what this massive volume is about, if it actually lives up to expectations and what to me seems most deserving of further attention in it. The result will be as much a review-in-progress as taking on ATD is in itself a process, first and foremost, something transitory and tentative by the very nature of his writing, and just as much so as such an approach is respectful of my own limited capacity in terms of “understanding”. Which is fair enough.

Now, this comes as I've finished through with the books first part, “The Light Over the Ranges” and will therefore give nothing more than a first, and not necessarily correct, juggling into place of some of the works prevalent accords as they present themselves by way of this introductory first part.

Setting out to read any big Pynchon, and certainly this one, requires some truly giantific mind-set to begin with. Don't let yourself be scared off by the well known truism that any Pynchon is difficult to read. Sure it is, but dictionary at hand and one eye on the extremely useful Pynchon Wiki (which is another friendly link to proto-ymagon and you'll get there here) will help you along - and open up the manifold riches of this novel's delicately woven texture for you.

We start out with being introduced to the “Chums of Chance”, the semi-fictional crew of the airship “The Inconvenience” at the site of the Chicago World Fair in 1893. Commander Randolph St. Cosmo, Lindsey Noseworth, Miles Blundell, Chick Counterfly and Darby Suckling, plus the erudite, sentient dog Pugnax, whom you might take for an offspring of that legendary LED from “Mason & Dixon”, enter the White City for providing surveillance services to the terror-threatened exhibition, as well as taking us (and some additional passengers) from here on up into the text. In the course of their perambulations about the fair on their ground-leave, we encounter any variety of curious personages and some of the core characters. Among these there is one Merle Rideout, a photographer who single-handedly raised his daughter Dahlia virtually all across the West's (not-so) pastoral landscape, after his wife Erlys ran off with famed magician Zombini the Mysterious. As is detective Lew Basnight, who on the occasion of Austro-Hungarian K&K Crown-Prince Franz-Ferdinand's visit to the exhibition is assigned the task of looking after him and who later, being in the private investigation sector while at the same time gradually growing sympathetic to the anarchists' movement of the day, gets aboard the Chum's airship.
In following the life trail of Merle Rideout over the years up to 1900, we run into Webb Traverse, a hard-working, exploited miner turned anarchist, who carries out bomb-raids on the hated plutocracy's infrastructure and sadly, but typically gets ever more estranged to his own family and kin during the process of living this double-life.
His son Kit however gets taken in as one of Dr.Tesla's boys and thus assigned to one of this Serb electro-magnetician's spectacular high-voltage experiments, the latest of which, and as of yet only rumored about, looms so promising-threateningly large on the day's horizon in aiming at establishing a world-wide system of free power, as to trigger a dubiously funded planetary counter-operation, to be spear-headed by Professor Vanderjuice, whom the Chums happen to know from previous assignments and run into at the before-mentioned World Fair.

Major themes that in ever changing guises run all through ATD's labyrinthine composition of meta-frames, sub- and embedded sub-sub-plots are, of course, the entire range of various gradations of science-magic, the ominous in its often-times all to common manifestations of your everyday capitalist statehood, the ambivalent and prone-to-conflict relationship between mainstream society and its fringes, the marginal, the outcasts and the suspicious, redeeming loner, and, certainly neither last nor least, the never-ending, doubly refracted love-hate condition of power versus terror, order versus anarchy, the known versus the imponderable and paranoia's many doomed agents.

So far two characteristics of ATD strike me as particularly worthy of acknowledgment, namely the excessive, at times exuberant beauty (and also languor) of his writing, which I suspect has further developed and taken on additional layers of refinement since Pynchon's last novel, certainly since “Gravity's Rainbow”. And secondly, and not especially typical of Pynchon, there is some marvelously intense, real character building in here, particularly where he relates Webb's trials and tribulations, his convincingly plain yet endearing life-story.

And on top of this, you'll find plenty of that very special Pynchon brand of writing humor. For nothing more than just one small example thereof, he offers you what in my estimation is surely the best in practical wisdom: “You can't de-roast a turkey, or unmix a failed sauce...” - the best that is, since DeLillo proclaimed that “you can't dig half a hole”!
He is his old hilarious self, he is. And this is only one reason why ATD makes for such an amazing, rewarding if not outright revealing read.

I'll move on from here and shall come back with more, soon.

(pic©The Penguin Press)