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    Review of:
    Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: Penguin, 2006.

  1. With Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon has given us his sixth novel in the forty-three years since V. was published in 1963. With that auspicious beginning (V. won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best first novel of 1963), Pynchon set a high bar for his fiction, one he raised with his next two novels The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). The latter remains, arguably, Pynchon's masterpiece, and if he were ever to give an interview, I think he would concede it has been a tough act to follow. In 1984 he collected his early short fiction in Slow Learner (including an Introduction in which he reveals some aspects of his early writing process), but it wasn't until 1990 that his fourth novel Vineland was published. Because of its focus on the topical issues of the 1980s, most critics thought Vineland reflected Pynchon's concern with the direction America was heading during the Reagan presidency, and therefore not the novel that had been occupying him since 1973. With Mason & Dixon (1997), Pynchon regained his stride and produced a text that, for some critics, gives Gravity's Rainbow a run for the label "Pynchon's masterpiece." Having now read Against the Day twice, I would put it in the running with Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon--time will tell where it places.

  2. We need to recall Pynchon's publishing history for any assessment of Against the Day because in this new novel Pynchon is particularly aware of his earlier texts. We have come to expect so-called "Pynchonesque" features in his work, such as thematic concerns with paranoia, the role of technology in controlling human lives, and more importantly, the role of governments and corporations (the line between them becoming ever thinner) in guiding those technologies for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. We expect wacky character names (Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, Dr. Coombs de Bottle, Alonzo Meatman, for instance) and organizations with wacky acronyms (T.W.I.T., I.G.L.O.O., and L.A.H.D.I.D.A., for instance). We expect the text to display a general encyclopedic quality, and it is worth noting that on the day of publication, there was already up and running a Wiki site (ThomasPynchon.com, managed by Tim Ware) to begin cataloging and annotating Pynchon's deep research for this novel.

  3. Likewise, we expect healthy doses of scientific information (mainly mathematics and physics this time) woven into the text to function at both literal and figurative levels in the plot. Against the Day focuses on issues of time and space, and its narrative time overlaps with the emergence of Einstein's theories of relativity. In this way the novel concentrates our attention on the new ontologies of the planet that emerged at the turn of the century--a reflection that probably occupied Pynchon during his composition of the text as our own turn of the century passed. Lastly, we expect a "plot" that is loose at best and certainly multiple in focus, and a "plot" that will not be limited to the elucidation of the moral and social evolution of individual characters as one finds in classic "big" novels such as Tolstoy's. That said, Against the Day is in many ways a character-driven novel.

  4. For many readers, patient re-reading is also required to grasp Pynchon's style in Against the Day. Pynchon's styles have always caused readers initial difficulty. Pynchon has from V. onwards demonstrated a proclivity for dialogic interplay among his narrative voices. Some critics have proposed that there is never a single narrator in a Pynchon novel, while others delight in his devotion to parody and pastiche both as a means of character revelation and as stylistic pyrotechnics. Although it is fair to say that Pynchon's approach to style is not every reader's cup of tea, a Pynchon novel always challenges and unsettles our habitual strategies of reading; the reader must be ready for quick changes and narrator impersonations throughout the text. Some early reviewers of Against the Day apparently had problems negotiating Pynchon's various shifts of voice, and some were quick to criticize the changes of level that make the text appear uneven. Pynchon's style in Against the Day can at times soar, while at other times he seems to have a tin ear, but first-time readers of Gravity's Rainbow often have the same experience of his style. In some respects, the knock against the style of Against the Day may be that it is too accessible. That seeming accessibility, however, can be deceptive, masking an implicit critique of how the various narrative styles that Pynchon parodies have aided the powerful in maintaining a culture of containment as opposed to the culture of anarchy that Against the Day celebrates and questions in turn.

  5. Because the scope of Against the Day is so broad, the reader follows the main characters over many years and sees the evolutions of their personalities. As in Mason & Dixon, this novel's chronology forces the characters to undergo changes as the world itself changes. In Pynchon's first three novels, the primary chronologies were limited to roughly a single year--as befitted their satiric evocation of the quest plot motif. In Mason & Dixon the chronology is expanded because the historical facts of the protagonists' project to draw the Mason-Dixon line necessitates following them over a period of many years. In Against the Day, Pynchon is not bound by the "real lives" of his key characters, so he has space to develop each one in relation to the conditions of their experiences. It is a fair criticism, especially from readers whose tastes tend toward realism, that with a broad cast of major characters (and with all the other "stuff" he typically crams into his texts) Pynchon still falls short of developing his characters as fully as they deserve. Nevertheless, the patient re-reader of Against the Day will discern that his characters this time are much more nuanced and in many ways more human than some of their predecessors.

  6. When we put Against the Day in the context of Pynchon's other novels, we see vectors (a metaphor drawn from the mathematical matrix of the text) that clearly connect it to the earlier novels. The most obvious is arguably the major plot line in the saga of the Traverse family and their response to Webb Traverse's murder. At the end of Vineland, Webb's grandson (Reef's son) Jesse is the patriarch of the Traverse-Becker family that gathers for its annual reunion, thus making him the father of Sasha, grandfather of Frenesi, and great-grandfather of Prairie. The genealogical connections track not only family DNA, but the transformation of Webb's anarchistic spirit through generations of decline to Frenesi's role as a government snitch. In the larger story of America that Pynchon's oeuvre presents, Against the Day redirects our attention to Vineland and to the commentary each Pynchon novel makes about the forks in the road America did not take and to our collective complicity in those decisions.

  7. There are, of course, more mundane vectors that readers of Pynchon will acknowledge with a smile, at least. The newest entry in the sea-faring family of Bodine (O.I.C. [oh! I see] Bodine) makes a cameo appearance when Kit Traverse, one of Webb's sons, finds himself on an ocean liner that transforms into a battleship, but both ships continue on separate voyages. At another point in the text Reef is told he can "leave a message with Gennaro"--namesake of a complete nonentity, the colorless administrator left standing at the close of "The Courier's Tragedy" in The Crying of Lot 49. Near the end of the text, La Jarretière from V. makes a cameo appearance--almost a decade after her "death" (must we revise our reading of the scene in V. to say "stage death"?):

    They came to see blood. We used the...raspberry syrup. My own life was getting complicated...death and rebirth as someone else seemed, just the ticket. They needed a succès de scandale, and I didn't mind. A young beauty destroyed before her time, something the eternally-adolescent male mind could tickle itself with. (1066)

    As he did in Slow Learner, Pynchon may be commenting on his own "adolescent male mind" at the time he wrote V., and maybe on his own thinking at the time that his novel needed a "succès de scandale." The women of Against the Day are as complexly drawn as the male characters, and a far cry from the "tits 'n' ass" female characters of Pynchon's early texts. Although there are still some elements of objectification at play here, characters such as Dally Rideout, Estrella ("Stray") Briggs, Yashmeen Halfcourt, and Wren Provenance are among the strongest and most independent women Pynchon has yet written.

  8. Although it is fun to spot such connections back to earlier texts, in the cases of V. and The Crying of Lot 49 it is equally intriguing to consider the characters not reappearing. Since Against the Day overlaps in historical period (1893-1922) and geographical locale (Europe and the Mediterranean) with most of the historical chapters in V., one would almost expect the lady V. to make an appearance at least at one of the many moments of anarchistic activity and political destabilization. If she does, it is in disguise, maybe as Lady Quethlock, guardian to Jacintha Drulov, about whom Cyprian Latewood observes "certain nuances of touching, intentions to touch, withholdings of touch, as well as publicly inflicted torments of a refinement he recognized, suggested strongly that he was in the presence of a Lady Spy and her apprentice" (822). Likewise, when a Foreign Office operative is identified as "old Sidney," the reader is tempted to think that Sidney Stencil is making an appearance, but we find out about 30 pages later that it is apparently "Sidney Reilly"--the real "Ace of Spies," whose life story, along with the fiction of John Buchan, may have served as model for the European espionage agents in Against the Day.

  9. In a novel so devoted to anarchist activities, the reader might also expect to encounter the Tristero, the underground postal system from The Crying of Lot 49. If it is here, it too is undercover, operating on some of the mail that finds its recipients even at times when the normal channels seem to be down. The spat between Ewball Oust and his stamp-collecting father may also suggest the Tristero's presence in Against the Day:

    It seemed that young Ewball had been using postage stamps from the 1901 Pan-American Issue, commemorating the Exposition of that name in Buffalo, New York, where the anarchist Czolgosz had assassinated President McKinley. These stamps bore engraved vignettes of the latest in modern transportation, trains, boats, and so forth, and by mistake, some of the one-cent, two-cent, and four-cent denominations had been printed with these center designs upside down. One thousand Fast Lake Navigation, 158 Fast Express, and 206 Automobile inverts had been sold before the errors were caught, and before stamp-collector demand had driven their prices quite through the roof[.] Ewball, sensitive to the Anarchistic symbolism, had bought up and hoarded as many as he could find to mail his letters with. (978)

    These "center inverted" stamps ("inverse rarities" to recall one of the readings of Pierce Inverarity's name) turn out to be real (the four-cent invert is even considered by some philatelists to have been made deliberately rather than by mistake).

  10. In typical Pynchon fashion, however, the passage resonates with the text's overall theme of anarchism, especially the anarchism stemming from United States economic policy in the 1890s. McKinley was a key player in establishing the gold standard in United States monetary policy of the 1890s, specifically the repeal of the Silver Act in 1893. Much of the trouble in the Colorado mining industry, which helps propel Webb Traverse into his dynamiting ways, was the result of the Repeal and the subsequent devaluing of silver mining interests. Additionally, the Pan-American Exposition, a follow-up to the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago that figures so prominently in the opening section of the novel, was powered by Nikola Tesla's invention of mechanisms for the long distance transmission of alternating current from generators at Niagara Falls. Ironically, the medical facilities at the Fair, where McKinley was taken, did not have electricity, and apparently no one thought to use the newly invented x-ray machine on display at the Fair to look for the assassin's bullet. Of course, in a Pynchon novel, such connected allusions prompt, more often than not, thoughts of nefarious conspiracies to manipulate the transmission of "political" power.

  11. Power and the movement of history has been a pervasive theme in Pynchon's writing. Usually he shrouds the sources of power in many layers of governmental or corporate bureaucracy so that its effects are mainly felt while its origins remain hidden. In Against the Day, Pynchon embodies two main agents of power. The more shadowy of the two is represented by the British Foreign Office and other national entities in the run-up to World War I. The main plot vector here involves Cyprian Latewood (and by intersection also the Yashmeen Halfcourt, Kit Traverse, and Reef Traverse plot vectors), an agent operating in the Balkans in the years leading up to the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, which were precursors to World War I. It is less Pynchon's point to represent actual espionage-like activities than it is to show the human dimension of the individual agent who survives double-crosses by those he should be able to trust. Cyprian's masochistic homosexuality is both an asset and liability in his activities, but the vector of his evolution in the course of the novel from hedonistic desire to a sense of larger, religious human responsibility shows Pynchon's development in Against the Day of more fully rounded characters. Cyprian's experiences of rescuing other agents and later with Yashmeen and Reef in a ménage à trois show a change in Pynchon's conception of the way individuals respond to the political forces exerted on them. Unlike Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow, Cyprian neither runs away from nor becomes a pawn in the game; instead, he comes to an understanding of a higher human mission of responsibility to collective humanity. When he finally opts out of the situation, it is to join a religious order to explore the emerging spiritual dimension of his existence.

  12. The other main agent of power in the book is the robber baron Scarsdale Vibe, whose actions directly influence the Traverse family. In Vibe, Pynchon puts a face on greed and on the utter disregard by those at the top of the capitalist ladder for those barely holding onto its lower rungs. Vibe's holdings are so vast that he plays both sides against the middle; for example, he helps fund Tesla's research into more efficient and less expensive ways of delivering electric power, yet at the same time buys Professor Heino Vanderjuice's research capabilities to find alternatives that will undermine any efficiencies Tesla might produce. Vibe's holdings include many mining interests (we can see mining as an analogue to big oil in our own time), and it is through his companies' suppression of miners that he becomes a target of Webb Traverse's dynamiting of corporate property. As Reverend Moss Gatlin, the radical labor priest, observes early in the text,

    dynamite is both the miner's curse, the outward and audible sign of his enslavement to mineral extraction, and the American working man's equalizer, his agent of deliverance, if he would only dare to use it.... Every time a stick goes off in the service of the owners, a blast convertible at the end of some chain of accountancy to dollar sums no miner ever saw, there will have to be a corresponding entry on the other side of God's ledger, convertible to human freedom no owner is willing to grant.

    Think about it . . . like Original Sin, only with exceptions. Being born into this don't automatically make you innocent. But when you reach a point in your life where you understand who is fucking who--beg pardon, Lord--who's taking it and who's not, that's when you're obliged to choose how much you'll go along with. (87)

    Webb's choice makes him a target of Vibe's hired killers, Deuce Kindred (a miner Webb had mentored) and Sloat Fresno. Vibe tries to balance the ledger by providing for Kit an all-expenses-paid education, first at Yale and later at Göttingen in Germany, until he decides that Kit is more a liability than an insurance policy. Ironically Vibe's children are shown to be incapable of inheriting his corporate empire, and he offers at one point to make Kit his heir.

  13. Vibe articulates his views in a public address to "Las Animas-Huerfano Delegation of the Industrial Defense Alliance (L.A.H.D.I.D.A.)" just before his death at the hands of his alter-ego Foley Walker:

    So of course we use [labor] . . . we harness and sodomize them, photograph their degradation, send them up onto the high iron and down into mines and sewers and killing floors, we set them beneath inhuman loads, we harvest from them their muscle and eyesight and health, leaving them in our kindness a few miserable years of broken gleanings. Of course we do. Why not? They are good for little else. How likely are they to grow to their full manhood, become educated, engender families, further the culture or the race? We take what we can while we may. . . . We will buy it all up . . . all this country. Money speaks, the land listens, where the Anarchist skulked, where the horse-thief plied his trade, we fishers of Americans will cast our nets of perfect ten-acre mesh, leveled and varmint-proofed, ready to build on. Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping after their miserable communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will come up by the netful [sic] into these hills, clean, industrious, Christian, while we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage money will be paying to build for us. (1000-01)

    Where the "They" of Pynchon's earlier novels remain shadowy, Vibe's "We" is a brightly lit evocation of his and his class's arrogant disdain for the common man. Pynchon's politics have rarely been so clearly displayed as he lays bare a fundamental flaw in the American capitalist myth. Moreover, the repetition of Vibe's attitude in present day land barons and their seemingly endless march of "development" into the last vestiges of the American agricultural and wilderness landscape is unmistakable. In Telluride, Colorado, where a good part of the narrative takes place, the once-active mining town has been replaced by ski resorts and upscale condominiums for wealthy vacationers--who probably know nothing of the bloody labor battles fought there.

  14. Vibe belongs to the long line in Pynchon's fiction of those who abuse the power they have attained, but the response by Webb and, by extension, other anarchist elements in the text is not unproblematic. As Pynchon has shown before, anarchy in the face of entrenched power is usually futile. The desperate act of dynamiting symbols that represent or belong to the oppressive power rarely has the argumentative force to sway those in power to change. In our post-9/11 world in which anarchistic acts have been relabeled "terrorism," the acts of a century ago are prone to be redefined. However, I think Pynchon wants us to reflect on the forces that drive individuals to see anarchism as the only alternative to the oppression they feel, whatever the basis of that oppression: ethnic, economic, religious, racial, or political. In a way, Pynchon is laying bare the historical context of the "terrorism" that confronts the world today--each blast steels the resolve of those in power to stay the course while seeking to eradicate terrorist agents, without ever really addressing the underlying sources of the problem. Lew Basnight, in Against the Day, starts out working as a detective for those who want to crush the anarchist elements, but when he goes undercover and discovers their conditions and the rationales for their actions, he comes to see the justice of their positions. But Lew can't effect any real changes; he can only choose to not play, and eventually to opt out of, the game set up by those in power.

  15. The sweep of Against the Day, however, separates Gatlin's and Vibe's pronouncements and the choices made by Basnight both in narrative time and in by literal pages. The issue boils down late in the novel to Jesse's school essay on "What It Means to Be an American": "It means do what they tell you and take what they give you and don't go on strike or their soldiers will shoot you down" (1076). The irony cuts deep, and it is no wonder that in such a world some are willing to risk all to stand up in the face of power. But the personal is also the political, and so the story of Webb Traverse and Scarsdale Vibe takes on more expansive dimensions as we follow Webb's children and their different responses to their father's murder. In some ways Pynchon is updating the classical Greek theme of revenge; however, contingency rather than Fate ultimately drives poetic justice in the book. All Webb's killers get their just desserts, but only one as the result of a Traverse pulling the trigger--when Frank, Webb's third son, encounters Sloat Fresno by accident.

  16. Deuce Kindred meets his end in California in a section of the novel inspired by Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles detective fiction and by contemporary stories of serial killers like the actual Hillside Strangler. After betraying Webb's friendship by killing him, Deuce falls in love with Lake Traverse (Webb's only daughter, with whom Webb had argued and from whom he separated just before his death). Lake, likewise, falls for Deuce despite (though at times it seems because of) the murder, and they marry. Lake's mother (Mayva) and brothers all disown her, and we expect she will one day take revenge on Deuce herself. She never does, but she is like the furies of Greek Tragedy, stinging Deuce's conscience by her presence--though she never brings the topic up. They are forced to flee Colorado when Vibe's people come to believe Deuce had not actually killed Webb. At one point, we wonder if Deuce will be able to redeem himself; he thinks having a child with Lake will somehow make up for his actions, but they cannot conceive. That Deuce ends up as a California serial killer in police custody is a bit heavy-handed and in terms of conventional revenge plotting less satisfying, but then again his plot line is really Lake's--though her future looks bleak: "Once she thought they had chosen, together, to resist all penance at the hands of others. To reserve to themselves alone what lay ahead, the dark exceptional fate. Instead she was alone" (1057). By disconnecting from her family and the family's mission of revenge, Lake has opted for a tragic existential end. Her brothers, on the other hand, all find varying degrees of happiness in their lives, and overall, Pynchon ends the novel (the ending unrolls over the course of the final 120 pages) on a positive note for those characters who have earned good personal ends, even if the world itself still needs sorting out.

  17. There is, of course, so much more going on in this text's 1,085 pages and seventy chapters and among its nearly 200 characters than I have space for here. There are other plot vectors such as for Merle Rideout, his daughter Dally, Lew Basnight, and Yashmeen Halfcourt. Other vectors focus on places and events like the mythic lost city of Shambhala or the Tunguska event or the hollow earth or political upheavals in Mexico in the first decade of the twentieth century. There are also various violations of conventional reality as in the concept of "bilocation"--the ability to be in two places at once. This is most directly represented in Professor Renfrew and Professor Werfner, one at Cambridge, the other at Göttingen, who appear to be the same person, but each working on scientific projects for the eventual World War I antagonists. Yashmeen also can jump in time and space, which makes her a target for various spy entities who would like to exploit her ability. There is a set of characters known as the "Trespassers," who appear to be from the future and who know what will happen. Lastly there are many fanciful inventions--some prefiguring later inventions in the real world and others prefiguring fictional ones. Overall, however, Against the Day downplays the fantastic in order to attend to the characters.

  18. Framing the novel and helping to connect its parts are the adventures of the Chums of Chance--a group of young balloonists who at first seem to be drawn directly from a series of boy's adventure books. The narrator in their chapters often cites other volumes of their adventures as if we've been following their exploits all along (the subject comes up of whether characters they encounter have or have not read the novels that contain their adventures), and like the characters of such books they never seem to age--at first. With the Chums's plot vector, Pynchon appears to be calling into question the convention of innocence present in adventure tales. The Chums apparently work for the government in some way that is never fully made clear--at least most of their early contracts seem to generate from some hierarchy. As the novel progresses, however, the Chums increasingly come to question whether what they do is right, and whose ends their missions really serve.

  19. All pretense of innocence is finally lost as they fly over Flanders during the war. Miles Blunden, who among the Chums most often displays the clearest insight into the real world, puts the scene in perspective:

    "Those poor innocents," he exclaimed in a stricken whisper, as if some blindness had abruptly healed itself, allowing him at last to see the horror transpiring on the ground. "Back at the beginning of this...they must have been boys, so much like us.... They knew they were standing before a great chasm none could see the to bottom of. But they launched themselves into it anyway. Cheering and laughing. It was their own grand 'Adventure.' They were juvenile heroes of a World-Narrative--unreflective and free, they went on hurling themselves into those depths by tens of thousands until one day they awoke, those who were still alive, and instead of finding themselves posed nobly against some dramatic moral geography, they were down cringing in a mud trench swarming with rats and smelling of shit and death." (1023-24)

    The passage clearly echoes Brigadier Pudding's battlefield trauma at the Ypres Salient in Belgium from Gravity's Rainbow as well as the war poems of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg. The Chums, like the world itself, have fallen from innocence, and they choose now to make their way as independent contractors. Before long they hook up with a set of flying girls: the Sodality of Æthernauts; and where Against the Day opens with the command, "Now single up all lines!" (a passage destined for explication if for nothing else than the evocative Pynchon word "now" important in Gravity's Rainbow) as the bachelor Chums prepare to embark on this text's set of adventures, by the novel's close the Chums and their now pregnant wives "will feel the turn in the wind. They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky. They fly toward grace."

  20. Although the narrative ends literally in the air, it has, unlike Pynchon's previous novels, a more complete sense of an ending. Despite the catalogue of problems encountered in the world of the text, this novel does not end as Gravity's Rainbow did with the disintegration of Tyrone Slothrop and an impending nuclear apocalypse. Nor does it close with the random accidental death of Sidney Stencil as in V., or at a nihilistic auction room like Oedipa Maas awaiting The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon appears to have put some faith in the power of family to find a way through--a faith that first surfaced in Vineland and was reiterated as a sub-theme in Mason & Dixon. We know that the 1920s, when Against the Day ends, was only a prosperous calm before the storm of The Depression and of World War II, but for the characters we have come to care for in this text, the skies have cleared and the wind has freshened.

    21. Department of English
    University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
    pnotesbd@uwec.edu

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