So far 23 votes have been cast. Eight voters think Gravity’s Rainbow sucked; six don’t read fiction; four said “Thomas who?”? The remaining five claimed Powell’s had already mailed their copy.
Now, assuming that Powell’s was meant metaphorically, so that the choice in our poll would be legitimate even if the actual shipper were Amazon, which is what I meant, I think that’s a reasonable sample. Forty-three percent couldn’t care less; nearly thiry-five percent felt sufficiently unrewarded by Gravity’s Rainbow that 1,095 pages of Against the Day looks like a lot to swallow.
I can testify to the heft. Mine arrived in the mail this morning. I look forward to starting it this weekend — it’s too heavy to carry on BART.
In the end, nearly twenty-two percent claimed to have ordered first editions. Most authors would be pretty happy with that figure.
I expect everyone who’s interested has already found the following, and perhaps better (if so, email the editor and we’ll post the results):
- The Pynchon mailing list, which in its digest form only arrives a couple times a day
- The wiki for Against the Day
- Lous Menand’s review of the new novel in The New Yorker
- Thomas R. Pychon: Spermatikos Logos, a good resource
- The excellent work from Pomona
- And of course the obligatory Wikipedia entry on the reclusive author
Then there’s the Guardian review by a lifelong Pynchon fan forced to review a book he had not been allowed to read.
When rumours began to circulate concerning an impending novel from the reclusive American author Thomas Pynchon, I was sceptical. There had been rumours before: they are part and parcel of the parallel universe encountered in Pynchon’s work. But then a news release appeared, apparently written by Pynchon himself. The book would be around 1,000 pages long, appear towards the end of the year, and be called Against the Day. This was a cause for despair. It meant that once more I would begin to inhabit the shadowy, conspiracy-driven theatre of the absurd that seems to be Pynchon’s imagination. It’s a place that constrains and hypnotises the general reader, and exerts an even greater pull on the true fan. My wife and children would lose sight of me for as long as it took to read the book, and afterwards I would be shell-shocked, wide-eyed, and seeing everywhere around me the signs of another world, similar to the one I seem to inhabit, but darker, odder, and altogether funnier.The press release itself is vintage Pynchon. Set in the first two decades of the 20th century, the author says of the book: “With a worldwide disaster looming … it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.” He goes on to admit that “the author is up to his usual business … it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two”, and ends with “let the reader beware. Good luck.”
It will be a challenging book — Pynchon’s novels are nothing if not challenging — and I’ll be first in the queue to buy it, because (in an all-too-Pynchonesque twist) the joint UK and US embargo on reviewing the book meant I was not able to read it prior to commencing this appreciation. Nevertheless, let us begin.
In case the mythical swing voter still exists in the matter of Thomas Pynchon as, in Colbertian terms, a great novelist, or the greatest novelist… If you’re interested in reading Pynchon for the first time, I was glad to see Ian Rankin agree in the Guardian with my view that a fine place to start is Vineland. It’s weird enough to be Pynchon (some purists complained about the conventionality of Mason and Dixon) but the story line is a lot more straightforward than Gravity’s Rainbow.
Many people who have read GR have only succeeded after failing one or more times. I made through the first eighty pages on the third try. At that point it was like I’d survived the crawl through many yards of tight caves at Lascaux to arrive in the hall with the paintings we still admire. The first eighty pages take place during the Blitz in London; those were pretty dark days. Most of the rest of the book takes place in Europe after the war is over; it’s a magical place without laws, where anything can happen. A perfect setting for a master. Much more of a dance of the imagination, and a lot less dark than the beginning.
To all those who haven’t read Pynchon and decide to try him out, I suggest starting with Vineland. It’s magical realism, it’s not supposed to be strictly believable. But it is hilarious, and understandable at a deep spiritual level. To me, at least.
