Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon - Part 1

I’m in a book group these days with Heinz and Ernesto. The latter, a big fan of David Foster Wallace’s doorstop Infinite Jest, has been pressuring his brother to read that. I intervened – having already read it with Ernesto some years ago, I thought it was not worth a re-read even once, let alone Ernesto’s intended third time. So I suggested that instead we dive into a masterwork by the novelist Wallace wished he’d been: Thomas Pynchon. 

I’d lent my copy of Against the Day to Ernesto a couple years ago, and he didn’t get very far. Clearly, a cooperative enterprise was needed to get the guys through the book, which I wanted to re-read anyway. I gave a copy to Heinz and bought one for myself, and we agreed early this year on an amount to read per meeting. We’re reading approx. 110-page tranches, meeting every few weeks as time allows. 

Ernesto is captivated by the presence of dynamite in the lives of numerous characters: Webb Traverse, anarchist dynamiter who works the mines of late 19th century Colorado, private eye Lew Basnight who becomes addicted to cyclomite, a hallucinogenic chemical sweated off by sticks of dynamite. Basnight has been riding around the mountains of southwest Colorado trying not to get blown up by the Kieselguhr Kid, notorious dynamiter of the San Juans. Webb Traverse and his Finnish compadre Veikko blow up a railroad bridge, observing that “The railroad had always been the enemy… sooner or later you had some bad history with the railroad.” 

We have been introduced to Iceland spar, a form of doubly-refracting calcite which causes ordinary light, passing through, to divide into two separate rays, termed “ordinary” and “extraordinary.” “The Etienne-Louis Malus was named for the Napoleonic army engineer and physicist who, in late 1808, looking through a piece of Iceland spar at the sunset reflected from a window of the Luxembourg Palace, discovered polarized light.” And under the lagoons of Venice lie the submerged islands still occupied by artisans who craft mirrors from Iceland spar. Either they go mad and are committed to institutions, or they go mad and continue their work. 

By page 317 of the 1085 page novel, we have seen some threads which will recur: malign influence of the railroads; capitalist Scarsdale Vibe with his long and corrupt reach; centrality of dynamite, introduction of Iceland Spar, hints of the adversarial time-travel groups the Quaternions and the Vectorists (of which much more is to come); places of significance: Telluride, Colorado; Venice, Italy; Chicago; London; the Chums of Chance (dime novel adolescent balloonists who travel through the earth as well as above it, for hire by various terrestrial entities); and dabbling in chemicals – not only dynamite and its components but photograph-developing, and alchemy. We've seen a vile murder and disposal of the corpse in an evil place where such acts are commonplace; we've watched an unholy love story rise out of what should be enmity. And we've watched the existential clash of capitalism with anarchism. 

It's a densely packed book - one dare not skim. Any slippery turn of phrase may take a character to another part of life or perception. My copy is studded with small sticky notes, and I have a notebook as well where I record significant characters and the page numbers where we meet them. So much to learn! One of the best things about this novel is how much of what seems made-up, is true.

Defining "Commercial" vs. "Literary" Fiction

One trope suggests that commercial fiction is plot-driven and literary fiction character-driven. But I see their difference at a structural level:
In commercial fiction, story is all-important; the structure, from sentences to chapters, is designed to keep you turning pages quickly. J.K. Rowling does this so well that in the last Harry Potter book I failed to register a much-noted revelation about Dumbledore - I was reading so avidly that the details evaporated.

The words and phrasing of literary fiction call attention to themselves. Writers such as Thomas Pynchon and T. C. Boyle use words you're unlikely to know. Either you pause to look them up, or miss the point. This sort of thing can be a gimmick - a chapter seemingly constructed around the use of an obscure word - but I appreciate their efforts to expand my knowledge.

Writing in the vernacular, though frowned on by writing instructors, is a marker of literary fiction. I wonder if Jaimy Gordon's novel Lord of Misrule would have won the 2010 National Book Award without the phonetic spelling mirroring each narrator's vocal style. You almost have to read it aloud, which slows you down, which makes you savor a story and remember it longer.
Unusual use of punctuation is another way of establishing Voice - an example is Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I find his playful use of colons helps re-create the wildness of those early heady days of psychedelics.
I've been chided for my use of dashes - and finally noticed where I picked up the habit: I gave Ernesto a copy of one of my all-time favorite books, Little, Big, and for the accompanying card, I leafed through to find a quote. And there were the dashes, a whole population of them - I can't tell you how delighted I was, or how vindicated! Knowing John Crowley uses them, I feel less alone, less out-on-a-limb with my writing style.

Sentence length is another show-stopper. Ernest Hemingway's short declarative sentences and straightforward strings of phrases linked with ands, are far more accessible than Henry James' comma-laced concoctions. The latter is probably only read by English majors any more, which is a pity - I find that his sentences begin on the edge of a subject then circle around, phrase by phrase, gradually reaching a focal point - by the time he gets to the nut of his sentence, I know exactly where I am.
Very long sentences compel careful reading, for example Leonid Tsypkin's Summer in Baden Baden, a retelling of Dostoyevsky's The Gambler. A single sentence can run a page or more, but this is no stylistic gimmick - Tsypkin evokes in the reader a visceral empathy with the obsessed young man hopelessly in thrall to his gambling addiction, whose notions of luck and sensitivity to the humiliations of his daily struggle, are made more vivid by the particularity of each sentence.
The cadence of commercial page-turners eases your way forward, flowing smoothly, while the interruptions (what's that word mean? what did she say? etc.) of literary fiction slow you down, inviting you to savor the unfamiliar.
Your reading pleasure needn't be either-or - sometimes, the perfect book is a romance or mystery. At other times, the play of language is just the thing.