A Gas-Guzzling, Tailfin-Sporting Masterpiece

I thought I’d be done last week. Last week, I thought … But it takes a while to read a novel that’s roughly as thick as the Manhattan telephone directory. All right, yes, just the residential directory. So I’m merely looking for a little recognition here. There a problem with that? I put my time in. I read those 1,085 pages. I took notes. Notes, hell, I wrote down 50 or 60 quotes, I recorded place names, ship names (it seemed important there for a while), saloon names, drew diagrams and faithfully noted the names of several dozen characters, including two who turned out to be the same person (Renfrew/Werfner). I’ve even done family trees on the Vibes and the Traverses, who are sort of the Hatfields and McCoys of “Against the Day,” Thomas Pynchon’s sixth and longest (did I tell you? 1,085 pages) novel.

As always when one reviews something of an impressive intricacy and sophistication, not to mention great length, it’s tempting to match the language of the review to the outsize nature of the book under scrutiny. Very few reviewers are going to read a novel this enormous and then say merely that it was OK. They’ve invested a lot of time, so they’re going to call it magisterial, or they’re going to damn it as a disaster. And then they’re going to equivocate. They’re going to hedge and weasel, because after all, there’s always that outside chance that they’re just dead wrong. Because every reviewer has the haunting feeling—or should—that he or she might have reviewed James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and failed to notice that every chapter was based on a corresponding chapter in the Odyssey.

And with a writer like Pynchon, whose frame—or is it frames?—of reference include (just in this one novel) everything from boy’s fiction of the 1890s to Balkan history before World War I to fairly complicated mathematics, who knows what you might miss. This is one of the few novels you’ll ever read that includes mathematical formulas intrinsic to the plot—well, I think they are; you could fool me with seventh-grade algebra.

Reviewing Thomas Pychon Part 1: Pynchon on the Installment Plan Part 2: American Lit’s All-Night DJ Part 3: A Gas-Guzzling, Tailfin-Sporting Masterpiece

Complicating things, Pynchon’s not merely eccentric and erudite, he’s a sneaky game player. (And he inspires bizarre acts in others: the illustrations at the top of this review are excerpted from graphic artist Zak Smith’s “Gravity’s Rainbow Illustrated,” for which Smith created over 750 drawings, paintings and photos, each inspired by a page of Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.”) He tosses in little things just to see if we’re paying attention? Just to amuse himself? Dunno. But he made me laugh with a minor character named Al Mar-Faud, who speaks just enough English to say he’s going out hunting “gwouse.” And he made me wonder just how far he’ll go to perpetrate a literary prank. On the basis of the Marty Robbins reference, I’d say pretty darn far. Yeah, white-sport-coat-pink-carnation Marty Robbins. More precisely, “Gunfighter Ballads” Marty Robbins, because that’s where, in the song “El Paso,” you’ll hear all about Rosa’s Cantina and the doomed cowboy who’s gunned down at the end right after he sings, “Off to my right I see five mounted cowboys/ Off to my left ride a dozen or more.” Which will help you (at least for a paragraph or two) when “Against the Day”'s action shifts briefly to El Paso, and a character complains that the Law & Order League has been making complaints, “but not so much since ‘em seventeen mounted cowboys started runnin their patrol.” Now that’s math I can do. The point, though, is that while I’m catching one reference, I feel like I’m missing three more.