7 Wands Cerridwen Hawk - Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day"

I did get caught up a little in the holiday fracas surrounding this commercial bonanza-bananas culture, getting a whole bunch of stuff for my lovey-dovey. I've been blessed in many ways this year, and I send out gratitude for all that I've received. There's a part of me that feels like I didn't get what I wanted--I did ask for a couple of things that my partner chose to disregard. That's a bit disconcerting. Perhaps I will have to be more specific for my birthday coming up. Some stuff I'm not sure I want, actually--do I really need to get more shirts for work? Whatever.

For the most part, however, my time over the past two weeks was taken up by reading Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. I read a couple of his books twenty-six years ago for an assignment in one of my classes. I did an author study of the man's work, and it was quite amazing to a 17 year-old fellow to read Pynchon. I tried to read Gravity's Rainbow in college, and couldn't stick with it--too many distractions. Like Ulysses, I probably could only have read that book if I had to for a class. I read Vineland when it came out, which really didn't stick with me, and I chose not to pick up Mason & Dixon, even though I've seen it marked down at various book outlets.

Against the Day wasn't as much of a challenge, and I decided to add my name to the queue at the library for this one after reading the Times Book Review's take on this tome. I was heartened that the reviewer described this book as his most accessible one.

Parts of this book are just breathtaking with clarity, and there's a definite affection for all of his characters, even the most Lynchian villian Scarsdale Vibe. I have a couple of quibbles with certain aspects of the book. I found myself skipping over paragraphs of listed details that just couldn't hold my attention. I wasn't really in the mood for those digressions, and truth to tell, I wanted to finish the book within the 2 week checkout period without having to keep the book another day beyond. One review on Amazon said "oh, read it an anecdote at a time." Ha!

(It's a possibility that I may decide I need to read this book again, as another reviewer on Amazon also had done, and had started her review of AtD by saying she was 30 pages into her second read. I have to let the book sift through my consciousness a bit before coming to that conclusion however.)

My other quibble is more major--I found the book structurally didn't have much of a payoff at the end. But that could also be because I booked through the last third of it, reading it all in two days' time. It's more than likely I missed the significance of something earlier on that, had I owned the book or had more leisure in being able to read it, would have noticed and later on gone, "Oh, of course!" It's also possible that it wasn't there too, however, and that the structure indeed is part of the point.

All that being said, I did find Against the Day to be one of the most spiritual novels I've read in a long time. Pynchon is coming at spirituality through scientific exploration. He makes no bones about incorporating the mystical with physics. I described the book as "phystical" or "mysicist" to people. Some of the ideas he explores in the book are things I've arrived at through my own strange odyssey through these days of late-Empire, and in some ways I find myself wondering whether Pynchon isn't throwing this book out there to find his own "homies." It's funny, but Pynchon was mentioned in an astrology column for Pisces that Rob Brezsny wrote up a couple of weeks ago. Brezsny had been mistaken for Thomas Pynchon in a bar, and he used that as a launching pad to ask Pisces which celebrities we wanted to be mistaken for--in an odd way, a rather Pyncho-Shakespearean notion indeed. (Should that be Shakespereo-Pynchonesque?)

For me the most fun part of the book was the Yashmeen-Reef-Cyprian menage. I enjoyed the frank exploration of sexuality and its part in pushing people toward spiritual revelation. The climax of that story I found to be quite moving, but again, due to the speed with which I was reading it and trying to balance it all with the Yuletide festivities surrounding me, I feel I missed something. Still, I identified a great deal with Cyprian's story and his realization of falling out of the relationship with the other two.

The shamanic stuff, and all the language about the other world that's at a 90-degree angle to our own is material that I have seen only wu-wu sites really talk about. The wu-wu and the scientific frequently intersect, however. Some of the smartest people out there are also the most out-there anyway. I'm "out there," though I frequently have doubts about my actual intelligence. There are some things I'm just closed to, and some of those things I'm closed to are truly unfortunate, I realize. I pray for willingness and the willingness to be willing.

In any case, I do think this is a book that should be read by a lot of different kinds of people. It does make a person feel a bit smarter to immerse themselves in this alternative history that is also in its way a history of this moment in time. There's an unspoken Buddhist notion of time in this book--all time is now sort of thing. And in the last 30 pages, a mystical event occurs that throws some light on these odd times we inhabit. I was very grateful to Mr. P for having written this, and I hope to revisit the book sometime in the future.