You will gather that I am utterly unable to comprehend the most frequent comment

people have made about Against the Day: that it is impossible to read, that its size is
just too imposing, that forcing yourself to go through it is a chore, etc. etc. To the
contrary: for me, reading it was an extraordinary pleasure, an epicurean delight.
Pynchon’s supple and sinuous prose is something I have to savor, reading slowly and
carefully, letting my mind wander in the labyrinths of clauses and associations, in the
twists and turns and continual modulations of tone, from the crassly comic, to the
urgent, to the elegiac. There may well be other writers who are more profound than
Pynchon; but there no other living writer of the English language whose sentences I
enjoy anywhere near as much as I do Pynchon’s.

1085 pages? I was only sorry that the book had to come to an end, when the lives of the
characters, and the flows of History in which they found themselves immersed, clearly
were able to continue…

Against the Day is set mostly in the two decades 1893-1913; that is to say, from the great
Chicago World’s Fair, up until just before the outbreak of the First World War. In
geographical extent, during these years, it covers most of the northern hemisphere: the
US, Europe, and Asia. Pynchon passes over the War itself in just a few pages, and the
novel ends with a sort of post-War coda, in Hollywood and Paris at the start of the
Roaring Twenties.

If the book has an overarching theme, it is that of people trying to live their own lives,
despite being overwhelmed by the forces of History. The two decades in which most of
the novel takes place are a time of ferment and imagination and invention, but also a
time when everything is hurtling towards disaster. The characters are dancing on the
deck of the Titanic, even though they do not realize it. (The Titanic disaster is itself
absent from the pages of the book, unless I missed it somehow, which is always possible
with a text as encyclopedic as Pynchon’s).

The novel is filled with politics: capital versus labor in the mines of Colorado; the
Mexican Revolution; Anarchist agitations and bombings of all sorts; the jockeyings of
the European Powers for influence and control in the Balkans, and in “inner Asia.”
There are also ongoing quests of a more esoteric sort: searches for mystical cities hidden
beneath desert sands; passages through the “hollow earth”; speculations on the secret
cause, and hidden significance, of the Tunguska Event of 1908; psychedelic journeys of
the Tarahumara; crackpot inventions of time machines, and of devices for exploring
additional dimensions.

Most of the characters — the American ones, especially — just want to be left alone to
live their own lives. But this (very American) desire is constantly being thwarted by the
depredations of Capital, and the machinations of the Great Powers. And so, most of the
characters also have ethico-political committments and allegiances: they are mostly
Anarchists, sworn enemies of State and Capital (if sometimes a bit lackadaisical in their
actual commitment to the cause). The politics of the novel are perhaps best summarized
in an essay one of the characters, a teen-ager and high school student, writes on the
subject of “What It Means to Be an American”: “it means to do what they tell you and
take what they give you and don’t go on strike or their soldiers will shoot you down”
(page 1076).

This being Pynchon, the novel is also highly concerned with science and technology: we
get some bits about Nikolai Tesla, and a lot of talk about the mathematics, of the time,
particularly quaternions and vectors, the legacy of Riemann, and the new sorts of
mathematics that are associated with the Theory of Special Relativity (the novel mostly
precedes any consideration of the Theory of General Relativity, which Einstein
published in 1915, or of quantum mechanics, whose major principles were only worked
out in the 1920s).

These mathematical and scientific developments are related, on the one hand to war,
and the technologies behind the machinations of the Great Powers — there’s a good deal
here about the transition from balloons to airplanes — and on the other hand to the
possibilities of Escape from the horrors of war and political repression, and, more
generally, History.

The way that Pynchon so casually passes over, or through, World War I in a few distant
and allusive pages is itself expressive and meaningful: the war’s horrors simply defy
representation, cannot be narrated in this otherwise amazingly capacious volume.
Almost at the end of the novel, in Paris in 1920 or so, one of the characters remarks that
“We’re in Hell, you know… The world came to an end in 1914. Like the mindless dead,
who don’t know they’re dead, we are as little aware as they of having been in Hell ever
since that terrible August” (page 1077). And arguably, we still are, to this day.

The daytime is the realm of History with all its horrors — which is one reason why the
novel is entitled Against the Day: a retreat into the hoped-for safety and shelter of the
nighttime, but also the quest for another sort of illumination, one that is not bound to
the imperialism of the Day. (Hence all the talk of time travel, and vectors, and additional
spacetime dimensions). The epigraph of the novel (attributed to Thelonius Monk) is
quite beautiful: “it’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light.” Stephen Dedalus called
history a nightmare from which he was trying to awaken; for Pynchon, the daylight
world is itself a waking nightmare, from which his characters are always trying to
escape, through an alternate sort of illumination which is also a kind of blissful sleep.
(And which none of the characters ever finds, though the book does end with a kind of
respite; the War is over — or, it is not yet apparent that an even worse one is a mere two
decades ago — and the characters are paired together and reunited in a sort of
reconciliation that is characteristic of comedy as a genre. Even though, really, nothing is
resolved. Pynchon did something similar with the ending of Vineland).
But let me get back to the prose, to the sentences of Against the Day. For all its
historical and geographical and scientific and pseudo-scientific detail, the novel is
largely an affective text. What really makes it work is the beautiful expression of various
affective registers, and the ways that these registers continually shift and modulate. I
love the way the novel works itself out moment by moment, with all its impressions of
landscape and of memory and desire. At one moment we are reading about the subtle
distinctions of light in Venice, at another about the ambivalent emotions animating the
vaguely s&m, and overtly bisexual, menage a trois in which certain of the characters
have become involved, at still another moment about the perils of drowning in a river of
mayonnaise. As a reader of the novel, I cannot avoid the modernist tendency of trying to
fit it all together, trying to discover some grand plan, finding a schematics that draws all
the metaphors and all the situations into one overarching structure or system. But I also
feel the need to resist this tendency; I love the novel most of all for its sensitivity to
microclimates of feeling and desire, to the various sorts of yearning, nostalgia,
satisfaction (sometimes, rarely), envy, imagination, and lust that it bathes me in
moment to moment.

I do not agree with the tendency of so many readers to fetishize Gravity’s Rainbow as

Pynchon’s one great book, and to ignore, or dismiss as uninteresting and second-rate, all
three of the novels he has written and published since. To my mind, Mason & Dixon,
and now Against the Day, both of which are longer than Gravity’s Rainbow, are both
every bit as wonderful — and indeed as timely, or as untimely — as that earlier book —
even if they do not overtly display all those kewl proto-cyberpunk dynamics.