Against the Day

2 ratings since posting on Saturday, December 16, 2006
Against the Day
in SF Bay Area
(submitted by Adrian )

Overall Rating

*****

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Manko
Manko
online 44
*****
expectation is the enemy of experience
I'm painfully near the end of Pynchon's latest epic, and I find myself awash in that sweet sadness I got as I first approached the last pages of Spanbauer's novels, Delany's, a few others...it's the aching feeling that these characters are going to go one way and I'm going to go the other, and while I'll be able to go back and reread them like a pensive aging bachelor perusing old photographs of lost loves, their lives will never unfold in the same flow of time as mine for the first time ever again.

Thing is, Pynchon writes books of fiction, but not really novels. He tells stories, but like your best uncle did, not like a serious storyteller's sposta. His whole style seems like something a pothead Eng. Lit. major might have fantasized in some more verbally florid version of the diner scene where Seinfeld and whatsisname contemplate doing a TV show about nothing: what if somebody wrote "novels" about characters whose biggest problem is that they're painfully aware life isn't a story, even though theirs technically is? If there's a climax in a Pynchon book, it's the reader's, not the characters', and one can't help thinking it's pretty likely the characters either reached their own climaxes long after you put down the book or perhaps had 'em inappropriately early and then patiently waited while you went on with the book in search of your own...or, more tragically still, they may well be the kinds of characters who never climax at all.

Pynchon's characters are, this time around, both more eloquent in their eloquent moments and more humbly simply human...there are times when I'm just floored by his courage skill at transcribing the fumbling inexact improper grammar of authentic dialogue, and there are times when I'm struck breathless by how his characters manage to express the inexpressible despite the limitations of words. Words are not his characters' friends, and indeed even Pynchon seems to find them dizzying and distracting, preferring to use them to describe in maddening detail something that just passed by outside the window while inside someone whose life you've been watching unfold like a character in a soap opera in a foreign language that comes on on no predictable schedule is confronting his or her lifelong nemesis, lost love, whatever.

When I first picked up the book and started to read, my beloved asked me about it, and I read her a bit. She laughed when I was done and said something like, "Oh, so he thinks like you do." Ayup, that's about the size of it. So reading Pynchon is, for me, like catching up with an old friend, or staying awhile with a beloved relative, etc. His world is full of bizarre characters (as is my life) and all the peculiar permutations on sex and drugs and love and loss and songs breaking out of nowhere and nothing making much sense that, to me, are what IRLia is made of.

What it's NOT made of is plot. The only people I know whose lives have real plot arcs are either dully miserable (since they're living after their climaxes) or miserably dull (as they climb toward them). When I teach my students about fiction and plot arcs, I draw them on the blackboard as those trapped in my profession like a joke who's lost its punchline have done since time best forgotten, but in Pynchonland, like in my life, events and lives unfold in at least three dimensions, certainly not two. Sure, you could take a slice of this book and find a pithy revenge drama, or another slice and find a stirring love story, or another slice and find a police story, or another slice and find a Tom Swift boys fantasy, or another and find an insightful political treatise, etc., but wouldn't you rather have the whole feast all together, explore how these characters' lives are in fact all of these at once, and if all too often the part you thought you were eagerly anticipating either doesn't happen at all or happens totally differently than expected or happens just offstage, well, that's how life is, isn't it: you don't buy a stake in outcomes, you only make your tiny choices about how you choose to invest your time and energies and love.

And love. Pynchon's love scenes make me wanna just close the book and embrace it. (So I do. I'm a dork.) Pynchon's characters live with love in so many different ways, love of people they don't really like or respect, love of people they've long since lost and it's better that way, love of people they ought to hate and maybe do but nevertheless love, love of people they just inexplicably must love. I dunno, it works for me, it really really does, the way he's come to write about the human heart.

So but yeah, it's all here, just like it is IRL only it's a huge cast of very human characters coming and going in love and war and zeppelins and paranoia and betrayal and fart jokes and kazoos and eggplant and alchemy and villains and history and everything. Like me and everyone I know, Pynchon's characters don't know how much time they have; their futures are uncertain at best (and at worst grim and ponderous), their pasts are mystifying and annoying and often haunting, like me and everyone I know all they've got is some Now in which to make a decision or two whose karmic manifestations shouldn't be too hard to live with, perhaps even fun and/or beautiful. Karma is the unbreakable law, violation of which is the impossibility that makes everything else possible, and yet because none of us ever gets all the information s/he really needs it's like playing a game of pool on a table so huge you can't see the pockets, you just think there might be one off in that direction closer than in this one, etc. We can't see forward and we can't go back and we can't even pause things in the present, which makes life a very poorly-designed game indeed, a novel written by a drug-damaged poet with severe attentional issues...which means all we can really do is pick our shots, stay low and follow through...and try to enjoy playing with people we enjoy playing with while we can, because the one thing we can be sure of about the future is that, sure as it changes all we hate, it will also change all we love.

I think Pynchon might agree with my thinking that humans are not meant to live in one real world; we're amphibious like frogs, we're designed to live both in objective reality and in any number of dreams, fantasies, computer games, novels, movies, otherworlds. Maybe reading Pynchon then is a bit like playing The Sims; it's a colorful mirror of the dynamics of life itself, and won't give you any Coelho nonsense about how your future destiny is a dream blah blah blah. Pynchon offers no answers but hey, speaking of eternal truth, check out that dog over there across the street, and pour me another of those, turn up the music, and oh yeah, I think I love you. - onlineManko , posted 05/28/07
Adrian
Adrian
offline 142
*****
Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day
Pynchon gets better and better. If you have time for a conspiratorial tale of the turn of the century, set a hundred years back when electricity, the telegraph, and frontier justice as filmed by Sergio Leone arrived with a hint of unease, the West now hammering a stake into the ground by which to begin measuring the earth (and so the better to rob it), you can't bet better than this. - Adrian , posted 12/24/06

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