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January 1, 2007

Pynchon's Against the Day

While Thomas Pynchon's new novel Against the Day is attracting wildly differing reviews, Michael Wood in the current London Review of Books comes closest to my feeling for Pynchon's math-filled, Python-esque, infinitely digressive, and lovely creation:

Much of this book seems to me as compelling as anything Pynchon has ever written: ambitious but low-key, amiable even in its anger, more like V than like any of his other novels; but there were also stretches when I was just humming along, waiting not for something to happen but the next troubling or luminous idea, the next sudden expression of stray emotion. Like the thought that crosses the mind of a man being tortured to death: ‘It didn’t look like these two were fixing to ask him any questions, because neither spared him any pain that he could tell, pain and information usually being convertible, like gold and dollars, practically at a fixed rate.’ Like the following evocation of a grandmother’s feelings as she watches the sea on which her grandson’s ship has departed:

She looked to every horizon, taking her time, saving south for last. Not a wisp of smoke, not the last, wind-muted cry of a steam siren, only the goodbye letter waiting this morning on her work-table, held now like a crushed handkerchief in her pocket, in which he had given her his heart – but which she could not open again and read for fear that through some terrible magic she had never learned to undo, it might have become, after all, a blank sheet.

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