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.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride

James McBride, who arrived on the literary scene with his unforgettable memoir The Color of Water, has since leaned on his heritage (Black father, hard-headed resourceful Orthodox Jewish mother) to produce some lively novels. His 2023 book, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, weaves the histories of Jewish immigrants, Black people, and Italians, and the WASP contingent that controls little Pottstown, PA, in the 1930s. 

The grocery store, owned by the small Jewish community’s rabbi, is largely run by his disabled daughter Chona. When recent arrival Moshe meets her, he falls in love and they marry. Her father dies, leaving Chona the store. Despite not making money, it serves as a community hub. Pottstown has a Negro/ Jewish area called Chicken Hill. The store serves its residents, and Chona, a kind soul, lets its denizens shop on credit, hires a couple Black women to help run the store, and writes a pointed letter to the local paper about Doc Roberts, the town doctor, readily identifiable in a KKK march photo by his shoes. She doesn’t care whose sensibilities she offends with her call-out. 

Her husband runs a theater which hosts many prominent jazz musicians, drawing audience from all over. Moshe’s right-hand man, Nate, is married to Chona’s employee Addie – the Black couple are fostering (after the death of his mother) a 12-year-old injured by the explosion of a faulty stove. The boy is called Dodo, but he’s no dummy. He quit school because he couldn’t hear, so the state keeps sending enforcers to place him in Pennhurst, a medieval fortress of an institution for the crippled, retarded, and insane. Chona helps hide him – Pennhurst has a deserved and dreadful reputation – and you’ll have to read the rest yourself. 

A stove blew up in his mother’s kitchen when he was nine. Killed his eyes and ears. His eyes came back. His ears did not. But he could read lips. Nate held the lamp next to his face so Dodo could see them. “What you doing?” The boy’s eyes danced away, then he said, “Making a garden.” For what?” “To grow sunflowers.” “CJ and them said you was on a train this morning.” Dodo looked away. It was his way of ignoring conversation. 

McBride visits the minds of these characters, and we spend time with individuals from Pottstown’s different communities, understanding their behavior, language differences, and gossip. He has an ear for it!

Dylan Considered: James Mangold's "A Complete Unknown"

Neither the first nor the best movie about Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown is nonetheless a respectable addition to the canon. So, how does it stack up to D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back, or I’m Not There (Todd Haynes’s 2007 sketches, my personal fave)? 

I’m not counting Renaldo and Clara, Dylan’s own 1978 film featuring his Rolling Thunder Revue (they toured in 1976, after which the concert album Hard Rain was released – I attended the Fort Collins, CO show, where it did indeed rain hard the whole time but was truly great anyway). R&C is semi-documentary, semi-fictional, Dylan making up versions of himself as he’s done lifelong. This 4-hour creation is in a class by itself. 

Timothee Chalamet as young good-looking earnest Bobby Dylan arrives in New York with a newspaper clipping about Woody Guthrie, only to learn his idol is at a hospital in New Jersey. He barely blinks at the big city, catching the next cab out. At the hospital he meets not only Guthrie but Pete Seeger, and sings them a song. Seeger, impressed, becomes an early ally. Edward Norton gives a nuanced performance as the banjo-frailing activist – if you think of the folk singer as a hard-line traditionalist, think again – even at Dylan’s notorious 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance, Seeger wants to pull the plug on the young electrified musician, but doesn’t – he lets the moment play out. 

Is it intentional that Elle Fanning as Sylvie (a stand-in for Suze Rotolo, who insisted on her privacy and was not named in the film) and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez look so similar? I thought Baez was not given enough of her own fame to stand on – we see early performances where he doesn’t yet register with her audience, but soon he’s the one packing the shows. The script promotes a chemistry I didn’t sense, so I felt she put up with his hot/cold antics too long – in the absence of magnetism, I didn’t quite believe her. But Fanning does hit some of those gorgeous high notes Baez is famous for. 

Chalamet plays Dylan as a creature of whims, mercurial, contrarian, sliding out from under the crush of early fame and the demands of Albert Grossman (well played by Dan Fogler), his manager at Columbia Records. At first determined to guide this newbie and build a following by covering others' songs, two years later at Newport, Grossman can see his client is a true original and a star of his own making, and that a manager’s best move is to keep the tape rolling as the young dynamo takes off. Chalamet’s singing is no worse than Dylan’s, though he does sand some of the edges off that nasal delivery. 

Boyd Holbrook is a standout as Johnny Cash; before he married June Carter and (kind of) settled down, he was a wild man. He drank hard, took a lot of amphetamines (now we’d call that meth) and trashed hotel rooms, wrecked cars, chased women, got himself arrested. His friendship with Dylan in this movie was a touchstone – someone Dylan admired, who gave him all the approval he needed. “Track mud all over that carpet,” he said, and Dylan did. Though Holbrook – like everyone else – lacks Cash’s gravelly bass, he does his best, bringing that don’t-give-a-damn energy to the role. 

For a film approaching Dylan’s life as a series of Acts, I’m Not There has some fine sections: a Black teenager with a guitar, hitching freights and singing folk songs. Mid-sixties Dylan in a black-and-white sequence in which Cate Blanchett plays the insouciant subject of press curiosity who treats interviews as games – what’s the most baffling or outrageous thing she can say? What’s the most shocking thing she can do in this situation or that one? With those black sunglasses, black spiky hair, cigarettes, and amusement at the reporters who can’t tell when she’s bluffing, she’s a perfect Dylan. And in the early 70s era of the Basement Tapes with The Band, he goes all-in with costumes. He’s always been a shape-shifter taking on costumed personae – hippies wearing beads, colorful leather pants and cowboy hats, granny dresses and thin-soled leather boots – he could go hog-wild switching up his identity – Billy the Kid, a troubadour, a bandido, a joker – with The Band ready to play whatever roles he needed.

A Complete Unknown is a fine movie - lively, fun, capturing the spark of a prolific poet as he emerges into the light of public attention: startling, inspiring, resisting all attempts to pin him down - as he does today. Maybe early on he toyed with being a leader, but ever since he's been rebuffing admirers' efforts to elevate him, calculating ways to create offense, the whole time slipping off the microscope slide we're trying to squeeze him onto.