Against the Day

Against the Day is an epic historical novel by Thomas Pynchon, published on November 21, 2006. The narrative takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the time immediately following World War I and features more than a hundred characters spread across the United States, Europe, Mexico, Central Asia, Africa and "one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all," according to the book jacket blurb written by Pynchon. Like its predecessors, Against the Day is an example of historiographic metafiction or metahistorical romance. At 1,085 pages, it is the longest of Pynchon's novels to date.
Besides appearing within the book itself, the novel's title apparently refers to a verse in the Bible (2 Peter 3:7) reading "the heavens and the earth ... [are] reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men." Another possibility is from Job: "Hast thou entered into the treasure of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail, which I have reserved against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war?" (38:22-23).
William Faulkner, whose diction frequently echoes the King James Bible, liked the phrase, and many reviewers have traced it to a speech of Faulkner's against racism. Perhaps as relevant is a passage in Absalom, Absalom! in which Sutpen, a Faustus character of the sort that Pynchon deploys everywhere, seeks "a wife who not only would consolidate the hiding but could would and did breed him two children to fend and shield both in themselves and in their progeny the brittle bones and tired flesh of an old man against the day when the Creditor would run him to earth for the last time and he couldn't get away." The Creditor there is Mephistopheles, to whom Faustus/Sutpen would owe his soul. (The passage in Gravity's Rainbow about the "black indomitable oven" with which the witch-like Blicero, another Faustus character, is left once the Hansel-and-Gretel-like children have departed, alludes to another passage in Absalom, Absalom!.)
Nonliterary sources for the title may also exist: Contre-jour (literally "against (the) day"), a term in photography referring to backlighting. There are also two uses of the phrase "against the day" in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, and four appearances in William Gaddis's J R.
As Pynchon researched and wrote the book, a variety of rumors about it circulated over the years. One of the most salient reports came from the former German minister of culture, and before that, the publisher of Henry Holt and Company, Michael Naumann, who said he assisted Pynchon in researching "a Russian mathematician [who] studied for David Hilbert in Göttingen", and that the new novel would trace the life and loves of mathematician and academic Sofia Kovalevskaya. Kovalevskaya briefly appears in the book, but Pynchon may have partly modeled the major character Yashmeen Halfcourt after her.
In mid-July 2006, a plot-synopsis signed by Pynchon himself appeared on Amazon.com's page for the novel, only to vanish a few days later. Readers who had noticed the synopsis re-posted it. This disappearance provoked speculation on blogs and the PYNCHON-L mailing list about publicity stunts and viral marketing schemes. Shortly thereafter, Slate published a brief article revealing that the blurb's early appearance was a mistake on the part of the publisher, Penguin Press. Associated Press indicated the title of the previously anonymous novel.
Pynchon's synopsis states that the novel's action takes place "between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the years just after World War I". "With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, 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." Pynchon promises "cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi and Groucho Marx", as well as "stupid songs" and "strange sexual practices".
The novel's setting
Like several of Pynchon's earlier works, Against the Day includes both mathematicians and drug users. "As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them."
The synopsis concludes:
The published jacket-flap of the book featured an edited-down version of this text, omitting the last three sentences, references to specific authorship (as well as misspelling Nikola Tesla's first name as "Nikolai"; Pynchon had previously spelled it correctly).
Nearly all reviewers of the book mention the byzantine nature of the plot. Louis Menand in The New Yorker gives a simple description:
As to the multitude of plot dead-ends, pauses and confusing episodes that return to continue much later in the narrative, Menand writes:
Critic Louis Menand sees an organizing theme of the book as
Menand states that this theme also appeared in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon and that it ties in with a concern present in nearly all of Pynchon's books:
Steven Moore, in a book review in The Washington Post, writes:
Jazz (or, as Pynchon refers to it in one variant spelling of the novel's time period, "Jass") provides a non-hierarchical model of organization that the author relates to politics about a third of the way through the novel, according to Leith, who quotes from the passage, in which 'Dope' Breedlove, an Irish revolutionist at a Jazz-bar, makes the point. Breedlove characterises the Irish Land League as "the closest the world has ever come to a perfect Anarchist organization".
In a Bloomberg News review, Craig Seligman identifies three overarching themes in the novel: doubling, light and war.
"Pynchon makes much of a variety of calcite called Iceland spar, valued for its optical quality of double refraction; in Pynchonland, a magician can use it to split one person into two, who then wander off to lead their own lives", Seligman writes.
Sam Leith identifies the same theme:
Although the novel directly portrays the First Balkan War (1912–1913) and the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), it dispatches World War I after a few pages. But during most of the book the Great War "looms as an approaching catastrophe", according to Seligman. This theme might form part of what Menand describes above as the struggle between power-pursuers and power-transcenders.
Light becomes a "preoccupation [...] to which everything, finally, returns", according to reviewer Sam Leith.
Light appears as a religious symbol or element and as a scientific phenomenon, as Peter Keouge, in his Boston Phoenix review points out:
In his Bloomberg News review, Craig Seligman portrays the book as "overstuffed with wonders" often related to light, including a luminous Mexican beetle and the Tunguska Event of 1908 that leaves the native reindeer soaring and "stimulated by the accompanying radiation into an epidermal luminescence at the red end of the spectrum, particularly around the nasal area" (reminiscent of the luminescence of a certain fictional reindeer). "[T]he novel is full of images of light, like those beetles and those noses (and the title)", Seligman reports.
Reviewer Tom Leclair notes light in various flashy appearances:
Scott McLemee sees connections between light, space-time and politics:
It remains unclear whether Pynchon himself regards such escape or transcendence as really possible.
The book received generally positive reviews from critics. On Metacritic, the book received an average score of 68 out of 100, based on 25 critic reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". In the January/February 2007 issue of Bookmarks, the book was rated four out of five. The magazine's critical summary reads: "The Seattle Times sums up critical reaction to Against the Day best: "Like Bruegel’s painting ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,’ this is a portrait of mankind’s attempt to transcend our mortality—or at least push up against its very edge".
Some reviewers complain that Pynchon's characters have little emotional depth and therefore don't excite the sympathy of the reader. For example, Laura Miller in Salon.com:
New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani writes of the characterizations: "[B]ecause these people are so flimsily delineated, their efforts to connect feel merely sentimental and contrived."
In some of the reviews to his previous works, Pynchon had been called a cold, lapidary writer. Poet L. E. Sissman, from The New Yorker, instead praised and defended him, saying
As a complement to Miller's criticism about tragedy, Adam Kirsch sees comedy as undercut as well, although parody remains: