sábado, 21 de novembro de 2009

Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon

From Gregory Schneider, for About.com

While he may not be giving interviews, while he still remains unphotographed, and while his most recent "outings" have been on two episodes of The Simpsons, Thomas Pynchon is back. And his new novel Against the Day (Penguin, $35) is everywhere. But who will read it? Not who will buy it, because it will be bought in truckloads (appropriately so, since you'll need a Dodge Ram just to transport it), and will easily muscle its way into the bestseller lists - in People magazine's holiday shopping guide the novel is grouped with the Squeezebox, The Office Season 2 DVD set, and Sony's PS3, as one of the gifts for "The Man in Your Life." The smartest novel in the room, the tome to warp your coffee-table, the 1,085 page block that gives you reader's wrist, the most fashionable doorstop in recent memory (move over sunstained copy of Infinite Jest), a novel that is being universally praised and panned within the same review; a novel whose relationship with other contemporary novels - even Pynchon's own canon - will remain undefined, will sit almost uncomfortably. So, who will read it?

Perhaps, three quarters into the novel, this is a clue:

"The Chinese remind us that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, yet they keep curiously silent about the step itself, which often must be taken, as now, from inaccessible ground, if not indeed straight down into an unmeasured abyss."

Well, what's it about? The better question is what isn't it about? There's the most gripping thread, a revenge story involving the Traverse family, where the sons Kit, Frank, and Reef, must avenge their father's death at the hands of two mercenaries, hired by the money-maniac Scarsdale Vibe. There's Merle Rideout and his daughter Dally, wandering, making a living, Dally on the search for her absent mother. There's the story of the mysterious Yahsmeen Halfcourt - a target for the heart of almost every character. There's also the story of the adventuring youngster balloonist team called The Chums of Chance - Randolph St. Cosmo, Miles Blundell, Chick Counterfly, Lindsay Noseworth, the dog Pugnax (the names, the names! in place of sensual physical description, Pynchon assigns names - the boffin Professor Vanderjuice, the dandy Cyprian Latewood, the Reverend Lube Carnal). And Chicago's World's Columbian Expedition, the Tunguska Event, the Mexican Revolution, Anarchism, Colorado mining, World War I, Iceland spar, railway construction and corruption, ukuleles, photography, theatre, golf, and, yeah, mayonnaise. Death by mayonnaise: "Looking around, (Kit Traverse]) saw that the mayonnaise level had already climbed too high up the exit door for him to even pull it open… He was engulfed in thick, slick, sour-smelling mayonnaise."

It's also about innocence and experience, light and darkness, ignorance and clarity, love and indifference, serenity and despair, and the interchangeability, the maddening interdependence, of these concepts.

"As if innocence were some sort of humorous disease…Lew soon found himself wondering if he had it, and if so who he'd caught it from. Not to mention how sick it might be making him."

Forty years ago, Conrad Knickerbocker's essay "Black Humor" cataloged the new, post-World War II brand of American writers, Pynchon among them, providing a legend-key into this breed's embrace of the "difficult," and their rejection of realism:

"Bored beyond tears by solemnity and pap, an increasing audience finds in black humor no tonic, but the gall of truth. There are no more happy endings… Events have become too mysterious. The black humorists recount events in their natural - which is to say nonlogical - sequence."

Even as Pynchon tackles the absurdity of the history of the world between 1893 and just after World War I, with prose both singing from the heavens and pandering to the OED elite, with song and dance, with doubles, doppelgängers, love-triangles, and duels, something is off. The essence of quality literature is to never answer life's tricky questions but to avail itself to better questions. With Against the Day, the questions that arise are of an entirely distracting stripe, such as "How was this written - on a laptop, Olympia typewriter, pen 'n paper?" or "Would there be any disservice to the novel's integrity if it were a manageable four hundred pages?" or "How was the research compiled - was it done by the author or by a committee of travelers, historians, mathematicians, curators, pale obsessives?" or "Why are there no colons or semicolons?" (seriously, there are none) or, most importantly, "Does Pynchon care if anyone reads it? Who does he want to read it? Why all the exhaustive obfuscation - just for the point of it, an inside joke shared by none, a tree laughing in an empty forest?"

Like Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, Against the Day reads like a birthday present to himself; unlike that novel, there is no author's preface letting us in on the joke. Brilliant, but self-indulgent all the same.

You have to be patient with Against the Day, as you would with an extremely bright and hyperactive child who corners you with his dissertation on the history of all his toys and how each was made, without ever engaging in the act of playing with them.