Kylog

I’m nearing the end of this monumental tome (20 pages left!) and I’m collecting my thoughts. Actually, truth be told, my thoughts were largely collected several hundred pages ago, which is not to the book’s credit. I’m a Pynchon fan, having read everything but Mason and Dixon over the last 15 years, and I eagerly anticipated this book. So, while I’m still blown away by the talent, I’m afraid that this is not his best work.

The maximalist prose is still there, and the classic TP themes are there: the paranoid interpretation, the galloping across history, the ludic sense of humor, the constant interplay of light and illumination, the hard left anti-corporate stance, all of which I love. But …. mmm, where do I start. First, frankly, the man needed an editor here: the book too often feels like an indulgence, an overflowing accretion of ideas. Of course Pynchon has never been the sculptor who produces a chiseled David, but here he’s the sculptor who just kept throwing more and more clay on the figure until it bloats past any point. Someone save this man!

What’s ironic to me too is that of all TP’s books, this is the most overflowing and yet oddly the most linear. For all the time travel talk and the sprawling across 3 decades of turn-of-the-century history, everything pretty much happens in order, it’s clear what year we are in at any given point in the book, and by-god things might even happen for a reason! Quite ironic given his continuing digs at the “Christian linear sense of time,” the toying with bilocation (etc) all the time, and whatnot. So for once his narrative structure is out of line (in it’s linearity) with his narrative topoi — which, when coupled with the book’s sheer unrelenting length, makes this reader end up saying: “Huh?”

One intriguing thing, though, about TP’s reluctant seduction by the muse of linear narrative is that he plays very successfully with some classic authorial voices. For example, he starts with the Chums of Chance narratives, which are straight out of Horatio Alger or other Boy’s Life serial chronicles (side note: why does he abandon the CoC? they were such a great sidebar commentary on the major lines of narrative!). Or again, I just finished reading the bit at the end of Part 4, where he dons the Chandlerian ethos for the hard-boiled detective in Southern California between the wars. Magnificent! It really is impressive how he can take such a classic voice and adopt it and make it his own.

I just got it! This is TP’s covers album! Hee hee. Almost.

Reading further into Against the Day, we get Pynchon’s amalgam of 1893 history: Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria 20 years away from assassination, visits Chicago and gets drunk in the poorer district, while the fictional Professor vanderJuice chats about his friend Freddie Turner and the decline of the West. Pynch is having fun with history as always.

He also whips off some lovely prose:

But if the Frontier was gone now, did that mean Lew was about to be disconnected, too, from himself? sent off into exile, into some silence beyond silence as retribution for a remote and ancient vice always just about to be remembered, half stunned, in a half dream like a surgeon’s knot taken swiftly in the tissue of time and pulled snug, delivered into the control of potent operative who did not wish him well? (54)

They began to imagine, jointly and severally, some rescuer entering the crew spaces, moving among them, weighing, choosing, a creature of fantasy to bring them back each to his innocence, to lead him out of his unreliable body and his unique loss of courage, so many years in the making …. (55)

Presently, as the Inconvenience began to acquire its own sources of internal power, there would be other global streamings to be taken into account — electromagnetic lines of force, Aether-storm warnings, movements of population and capital. Not the ballooning profession as the boys had learned it. (55)

The closing paragraph of this section has some great stuff:

Later, after closing day, as the autumn deepened over the corrupted prairie, … the abandoned structures of the fair would come to house the jobless and hungry … hell-raisers hired for the run of the Fair, now, their market value having vanished returned to the consolations of drink …. All moving in closer to the fires of Fair debris, once the substance of wonder, as the temperature headed down. (56)

Ah, just starting to read Pynchon’s latest, enjoyable as always. The opening is some “aeronauts” piloting a balloon toward the Chicago world fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition, in 1893. The style is a Pynchonian twist on a late 19th serial novelist a la Horatio Alger. Evidently we are reading the latest in a series of tales of the Chums of Chance, as the narrator frequently reminds us of their past adventures like The Chums of Chance in Krakatoa, etc. He has fun with a set of various post-Civil War characters, including the bumpkin crew of the airship Inconvenience and the stiffly formal Kentucky gentleman St Cosmo, captain of the ship.

Typical Pynchon, though, with kookiness and references pointing in many directions, viz. the dog Pugnax, who is reading Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, about a failed terrorist. I\’m going to throw one other reference in though, and invoke Henry Adams from his Education: