Anyone still wondering what Thomas Pychon’s sixth novel and seventh book, “Against the Day,” was all about after finishing it wasn’t paying attention as he or she navigated the various subplots, which at times threaten to become full-blown novels of their own.
Perhaps that is, in part, a message in and of itself: As a nation that prides itself on being a successful democratic society, America has been asleep at the wheel for more than a century. It’s a point Gore Vidal made lucidly in “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.” In that short, sharp, shock of a book, Vidal says that ever since the war against Mexico in the mid-1800s, America has been a nation run by the imperialist desires of the upper-class and power hungry, a point that is driven home in a more round-about, and rambling fashion in Pynchon’s 1,000-plus page new opus.
As for plot, “Against the Day,” which spans a period running from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, just after World War I, owes more to the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens and H.G. Wells, or even the adventure or pulp-fiction novels of the early 1900s (such as Doc Savage, or Patrick O’Brian’s novels), than to any political tract.
The book opens with the crew of the skyship, or zeppelin, Inconvenience, descending toward the grounds of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Captained by the stodgy and gruff Randolph St. Cosmo, the crew of the good ship Inconvenience includes well-worn characters, like young Darby Suckling, a wide-eye innocent; Chick Counterfly, an insensitive and relatively new mate aboard the ship; Miles Blundell, a clumsy but deft handyman and mechanic; and Merle Rideout. In addition, there is a well-read sky-dog named Pugnax (that’s right, dogs that can read).
All are part of the Chums of Chance, one of many aeronautics clubs. In the world according to Pynchon, the skies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are filled with flying machines, and not just air balloons and zeppelins. As the author notes early on in the novel:
“There were streamers, electrics, Maxim whirling machines, ships powered by guncotton reciprocators and naphtha engines, and electrical lifting-screws of strange hyperboloidal design.”
At the fair, the crew and readers will run into characters like Penny Black, captain of the airship Tzigane; Lew Basnight, an amnesiac detective; and Professor Heino Vanderjuice. It is the latter who will get involved in a plot that will affect the lives of not only the crew of the Inconvenience, but also the lives of everyone on Earth.
They are cornered by none other than Scarsdale Vibe, a mogul so rich he shoots a woman for threatening him and doesn’t even break his stride. Seems Vibe has heard about the plans of one Nikolai Tesla, who plans to create a “World-System,” which will free electrical power that can be tapped into world-wide. Such an invention, says Vibe, would be “the most terrible weapon the world has ever seen, designed to destroy not armies or materiel, but the very nature of exchange, our economy’s long struggle to evolve up out of the fish-market anarchy of all battling all to the rational systems of control whose blessings we enjoy at present.”
The plans hatched by Vibe and the professor result in a far-traveling adventure for the Chums of Chance and a host of other characters, taking the reader from Chicago to the Artic, New York City, London, Vienna, Siberia, the Balkans, Mexico and France.
Along the way there are run-ins with terrorist types, religious zealots and even a group of hostile gnomes at the Earth’s core. And for readers, there will be pages of sub-plots, back-story, cameos and digressions.
There are even more characters who take over the central plot-points, such as Webb Traverse, a Colorado anarchist and bomber and his four children, especially Kit and Lake, who end up interacting with Scarsdale Vibe and his descendants. Some of it adds up to nothing more than wild and weird entertainment, but for those willing to hang on through the wild, beautiful, mountainous terrain of Pynchon’s prose, wondrous visions and insight are forthcoming.
Pynchon uses lots of fantastical inventions, creatures and names, and he once again makes use of nonsensical song lyrics (which actually make hilarious sense, especially given the popularity of reality show tripe like “American Idol”). And, yes, the author has written the entire novel in the style of old, pulp fiction adventure novels (he even breaks narrative to direct readers to old adventures like “The Chums of Chance in The Bowels of the Earth,” or “The Chums of Chance Search for Atlantis”).
Although the author has claimed otherwise in pre-publicity material, “Against the Day” is a winsome satire of both America and much of the world today. It’s a backhand against over-reaching corporate greed and capitalism, government chicanery and malfeasance and religious groups both false and ignorant. Coming straight to the point, late in the novel, one character says, “I like to lose myself in reveries of when the land was free, before it got hijacked by capitalist Christer Republicans for their long-term evil purposes.”
“Against the Day” – funny, wise, poetic and always over-the-top – offers the reader both a way to lose him or herself in a tale of escape and a way to take a hard look anew at the world around us. A satisfying result to what is arguably Pynchon’s most complicated, mind-bending and frustrating-yet-satisfying novel since “Gravity’s Rainbow.”
Dorman T. Shindler is a freelance writer from Kansas City.
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Against The Day
By Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Press, 1,085 pages, $35
