Volume 54, Number 1 · January 11, 2007
Inside the Time Machine
By Luc Sante
Against the Day
by Thomas Pynchon
Penguin, 1,085 pp., $35.00
Against the Day is a baggy monster of a book, sphinxlike and intimidating in its white wrappers, which are decorated with nothing but a seal containing an unintelligible glyph. It is appreciably longer than even Pynchon's longest previous books—nearly half again as big as Gravity's Rainbow (760 pages) or Mason & Dixon (773). Unlike Gravity's Rainbow, it does not have an easily describable subject, or one to which the average literary consumer is already attuned. Unlike Mason & Dixon it is not borne along by a couple of strong and affecting main characters. Its subject is slippery, mercurial, multifaceted, hard to explain, and nowhere near fashionable territory. Six or seven of its major characters are strong and affecting, but there are dozens of others here, and the story has so many branches and extensions, trunk lines and switchbacks and yards and sidings that characters regularly drop out for a few hundred pages at a stretch. It isn't always easy to remember who they are when they reappear.
Review, 4523 words
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