Against the Day

Editor's Pick for November 21, 2006

Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal -- Library Journal, 11/21/2006

Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). Nov. 2006. c.1085p. ISBN 1-59420-120-2 [ISBN 978-1-59420-120-2]. $35. F

Descending in balloons on the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the do-gooding young Chums of Chance (part of a worldwide brigade) get help from White City Investigations' Lew Basnight. Lew is soon off battling anarchists in the American West, where bad guys Deuce and Sloat do in Webb Traverse, whose daughter marries Deuce and whose son is escaping this accursedness at Yale. Meanwhile, the Chums float through the center of the earth to the Arctic, where they are alarmed to discover a scion of the robber Barron–ish Vibe family excavating a dangerous artifact. And that's just a minuscule part of the action in this grand Wellsian fantasia from the author of Gravity's Rainbow, whose skewed look at history is a powerful act of imagination, bending the rules (with quartz translucence figuring in somehow) to reveal "worlds which are set to the side." Written in packed, densely detailed prose too dryly smart and ironic to be called Baroque, the narrative has its longueurs, and different readers will likely take to different story lines (this reader was partial to the balloonists). But pick up another book for a break, and it will seem relentlessly ordinary. Brilliant if sometimes exasperating, Pynchon's latest is highly recommended for any library that takes its fiction seriously, with the warning that it does not yield easy pleasures and should not be read on deadline. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 8/06.]