American’s Don’t ‘Get’ Against the Day?
tags:
Thomas Pynchon
Denis Scheck writes in Der Tagesspiegel (“Roller Coaster in the Dark” as translated at SightandSound.com 1/25):
The first American reviews of the new Pynchon spoke with an astonishingly aggressive anti-intellectualism and a tangible weariness with literature that experiments with language itself and ventures to try out more complex forms than we are familiar with from the annual crop of late works by the likes of Philip Roth and John Updike. More generally, the American zeitgeist currently seems to have little time for any kind of innovation in literature – if it ever did. “The Corrections,” Jonathan Franzen’s spectacular family novel, and also one of the most commercially successful novels of recent years, is – in comparison with the work of the likes of William Gaddis, Don DeLillo or our Thomas Pynchon – one thing above all else: absolutely conventionally narrated. (bold from original)
The point is arguable, but I didn’t realize “The Corrections” (published when, six years ago?) was representative of the current “American zeitgeist,“ eh, but what do I know. Well, I do know this: if there’s anything more critically lax than gross generalizations, it’s facilely making them across national borders.
Scheck says earlier, by way of explanation for the bad reviews:
”The odd thing is that the earlier a verdict on the new Pynchon was published, the harsher and worse-tempered it was. And the earlier it was published, the greater the pressure of time on the reviewer, who received the proofs from Penguin just a fortnight before the book officially came out on November 20, 2006.“
This is factually incorrect, as several reports from the National Book Critics Circle showing galleys being circulated in early to mid-October, making Scheck’s diatribe even less convincing.
But what about the book? Scheck loves Against the Day. He says it is ”...emotionally electrifying and intellectually brilliant, moving but never sentimental, sometimes terribly sad, sometimes side-splittingly funny, and to the very last page as unforeseeable as a roller coaster ride in the dark.“
Although Scheck’s not convincing in his assertions, he’s not too far off either. Against the Day is those things to a degree (well, funny, though never “side-splitting funny,” but I’ll give him that - there’s no accounting for taste, after all), but it’s not emotionally electrifying and it’s not - as he seems to think the Americans fear - all that richly complex. It’s complex alright, but nothing as gratifying as The Recognitions or arcanely fun as My. Pynchon’s own Gravity’s Rainbow. And while I’m not one to say what is and isn’t ”intellectually brilliant,“ I’d venture that that description has something more to do with challenging ideas than referential playfulness, the latter trumping here.
Indeed, my disappointment with Against the Day is exactly that it isn’t as complexly interesting as Pynchon’s past work. To my mind the only ”roller coaster“ ride is the technically adept yet sprawlingly flat parts that Pynchon has pieced together between occasionally inspired passages. That certain something that I can’t quite describe is my impression that Pynchon’s writing here is great in a way that should be studied, but it’s missing any singingly beautiful “experiments with language” that would be memorized by fans for years to come. Scheck provides no examples to the contrary.
What I can put my finger on is a sense of nostalgia. Reading Against the Day reminds me of that old 1960’s t.v. western “The Wild Wild West” (you know it? with James T. West and Artemus Gordon) about which it’s been said ”Was it a Western? Was it a spy thriller? Perhaps it was a SciFi fantasy show...“ Rings familiar, yes? Where I do agree with Scheck is in the idea that ”Against the Day is a potted history of genre literature - science fiction and fantasy, adventure, horror, western and detective novels.” That seems clear, but perhaps a source of tension in my own reading, feeling as though the homage is lost on me being only a casual drifter into those lands.
Luis Menand, who is anything but anti-intellectul yet listed among those whom Scheck is critical, wrote in The New Yorker ”The rest of the novel is shapeless, just yards and yards of Pynchonian wallpaper: fantastic invention, arcane reference, virtuosic prose. Elaborately imagined characters and incidents, from a man who may or may not be transformed into a jelly doughnut to a city beneath the desert and a near-death experience in a mayonnaise factory, pop up and disappear after a few pages, so many raisins in the enormous loaf.“ Endearing passages all, but to what end?
I’ve seen alternate claims about this book, with some spouting its brilliance while others decrying it primarily for the reasons Mr. Menand mentions, with consensus on the side of Menand. But, such wide range of opinions are probably a testament to Against the Day. Perhaps like the ultimate reputation of our poltical leaders, history will be the judge; students in the not too distant future of a hundred years from now (time is speeding up, isn’t it?) might get a kick out of the competing reviews the way we can now read about Moby Dick (contemporaneously characterized as merely “an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter of fact."). They’ll laugh at those ignorant American reviewers who didn’t get it and say to themselves ”boy, that German guy really got it right.“ Right?
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leave a comment Soundtrack to Pynchon’s “Against the Day”: Glass’s Plutonian Ode with Allen Ginsberg
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Thomas Pynchon
“What new element before us unborn in nature? Is there a new thing under the sun? ” - Allen Ginsberg “Plutonian Ode” I had originally posted this at my own site, but thought I’d throw it in here. Seeing as there wasn’t much discussion on…
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Part One of the Apocalyptic “Against the Day” or Who are the Chums of Chance?
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Thomas Pynchon
“But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God” (Romans 2:5) My reading of part 1, “The Light Over the Ranges,” and early part 2, “Iceland Spar,” keeps coming…
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3 commentsThoughts on Against the Day Part One
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Thomas Pynchon
I’ve only read Crying of Lot 49, so this is my first foray deeper into the Pynchon forest and it’s taking me a while to find a path. He keeps taking me off course, introducing new characters and ideas on almost every page it seems.…
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Thoughts on “Against the Day”
tags:
Thomas Pynchon
I had to work up some nerve to crack the spine of Against the Day, and I’ve had to do it again to get myself to commit my thoughts about it to keyboard. This is another big, raggedy Pynchon opus—the biggest and raggediest. 1085 pages,…
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Pynchon Workshopping “Against the Day”
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Thomas Pynchon
Big thanks to Max for parsing part 1 so effectively. He does a great job as a reader of Pynchon. But as a currently-enrolled MFA student, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if Pynchon tried to bring this to workshop.... Tom Pynchon: OK,…
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