Against the Day

Lest there be any doubt, or lest I forget in the course of this post to proclaim it, Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon is the finest piece of literature I have ever read. It is the novel I would give my left nut to write, had I any illusions left about my ability to sustain a train of thought long enough to craft something resembling a novel (and, of course, provided that someone might be interested in trading a severed testicle for literary talent and opportunity).

I just finished it yesterday. It was one of those book finishings where you just sit there staring off into space, unable to believe that it's over, still trying to wring the last bit of meaning from it as it stews in your brain. I was on the train, of course, and some pre-teen boys were obnoxiously bumping me as they played pre-teen grabass, but I just sat there. I read the last page three times. I started reading again from the beginning and decided that yes, I would be able to derive more meaning from a second reading, but that I wasn't willing to devote another 5 months to the book. Another time, to be sure. Mason & Dixon was worth the re-read, I'm sure this one will be, too.

Once I was able to close the book, I felt bereft. I've had my mp3 player loaded with the same music pretty much since I started the book. Now all I could think of as Sleater-Kinney's Words and Guitar came on was all the hours I've spent wallowing luxuroisly in this novel. I felt like I was sending a kid (albeit a kid covered in coffee stains that I thrashed within an inch of its life) off to college. What the hell was I going to read now?

Throughout my reading of this book, there were moments where it seemed too improbable for Pynchon to have written what he wrote without knowing that I'd read it when I read it. I mean, I read an article about how the Vikings used Iceland Spar to navigate in conditions of low visibility, then I get on the train and he starts in on Iceland Spar. I get off work cursing my job and read a particularly damning diatribe about corporate slavery. Over and over and over again, the book assaulted me with these coincidences, making my head reel, making me wonder if anyone else in the world would pick up this book and read the same words on the page, or whether Pynchon has mastered some occult technique of injecting the reader's life into the novel (of course he has, and he teases the reader with it throughout the storyline by discussing time travel, psychics, tarot, and more obscure mysticisms, all of which are dependent on the recipients of the "mysteries" projecting their own perceptions onto the symbols presented to them).

Futile as I know it to be to urge a readership countable on one hand to read a novel exceeding 1100 pages in length, with only the promise of a confusing and difficult read with some smoke and mirrors included, I feel I must. Read this book. It is truly great.