A Pynchonesque Turn by Pynchon

The New York Times review that appears today is not exactly ecstatic about the book. Warning: Full of spoilers.

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.

The novel plays with themes that have animated the whole of Mr. Pynchon’s oeuvre: order versus chaos, fate versus freedom, paranoia versus nihilism. It boasts a sprawling, Dickensian cast with distinctly Pynchonian names: Fleetwood Vibe, Lindsay Noseworth, Clive Crouchmas. And it’s littered with puns, ditties, vaudevillesque turns and allusions to everything from old sci-fi movies to Kafka to Harry Potter. These authorial trademarks, however, are orchestrated in a weary and decidedly mechanical fashion, as the narrative bounces back and forth from America to Europe to Mexico, from Cripple Creek to Constantinople to Chihuahua.

There are some dazzling set pieces evoking the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and a convocation of airship aficionados, but these passages are sandwiched between reams and reams of pointless, self-indulgent vamping that read like Exhibit A in what can only be called a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Dozens of characters are sent on mysterious (often half-baked) quests that intersect mysteriously with the mysterious quests of people they knew in another context, and dozens of portentous plot lines are portentously twined around even more portentous events: the appearance of a strange figure in the Arctic, a startling “heavenwide blast of light”, the hunt for something called a “Time-weapon” that might affect the fate of the globe.

Whereas Mr. Pynchon’s last novel, the stunning “Mason & Dixon,” demonstrated a new psychological depth, depicting its two heroes as full-fledged human beings, not merely as pawns in the author’s philosophical chess game, the people in “Against the Day” are little more than stick figure cartoons.

The narrative supposedly focuses around a miner turned anarchist bomber named Webb, who is killed by hit men hired by a fat cat capitalist, and the efforts of Webb’s children to avenge or come to terms with his death. But this tiny skeleton of a story (treated in the sketchiest, most perfunctory manner) does not provide a firm enough scaffold for the manifold digressions, asides and secondary, tertiary, quaternary, even quinary story lines that are piled on top of it, story lines involving everything from an aeronautics club featured in a series of boys’ adventure tales to an anarchist hunter with possibly paranormal powers to a femme fatale’s ménage a trois to the “Ragtime”-esque antics of the real-life scientist Nikola Tesla, who pioneered wireless communication.

To make matters worse, there are hordes of subsidiary characters, many of them no more than bit players with walk-on parts, who are memorable only for their whimsical names or peculiar professions. “Against the Day” seems to want to provide an encyclopedic look at a rainbow-wide spectrum of people going about their business in the years before World War I. In the course of more than 1,000 pages we meet anarchists and arms dealers and alchemists, capitalists and con men, as well as miners, magicians, mathematicians, motorcycle pilgrims and a mayonnaise expert. In addition there are inventors, spies, hit men, ukulele players, time travelers, reindeer herders, Siberian convicts, Yale undergrads, Cambridge scholars, Belgian nihilists, a psychic detective and at least one transvestite belly dancer.

No doubt the point of all these snapshots is to give the reader a sense of the myriad individuals who either played a part in the lead-up to the war or who will see their lives irrevocably altered by the fallout of that conflict. In seeing how these characters’ paths cross — through large, deliberately implausible heapings of coincidence — we are presumably meant to contemplate the roles that destiny and random chance play in people’s lives, to see how little control ordinary human beings have over their lives, how subject they are to the machinations of the world’s movers and shakers, to the larger workings of history, to the haphazard dice rolls of Lady Luck.

The problem is these characters are drawn in such a desultory manner that they might as well be plastic chess pieces, moved hither and yon by the author’s impervious, godlike hand. Sad to say, we really don’t give a damn what happens to them or their kith and kin. Especially when we are treated to pages and pages of them blathering on about things like “the four states associated with one of the four ‘dimensions’ of Minkowskian space-time” or their desire to “reach inside light and find its heart, touch its soul.”

Like “V.” and “Gravity’s Rainbow,” this novel aspires to give us a sort of alternative history of the modern world, to probe the multiple layers of reality people can inhabit. And while its narrative is centered on events leading up to World War I, it reverberates with echoes of the world today. Terrorism (in the form of anarchist bombings) is perceived as a pervasive threat, and surveillance — whether by private detectives or unseen eyes in the sky — has become a constant of day to day life.

A deadly board game is being played out around the globe, as the great powers jockey for position, and arms dealers, madmen and mercenaries scheme to outmaneuver one another. There is much yearning after genuine spiritual wisdom, but there is an equal amount of yearning after false gods, bogus knowledge and hokey, New Age mumbo-jumbo.

Technology promises quick fixes and quicker destruction, and the up-ending of life as everyone knows it. Con men abound, and so do philistines and double agents. America, it seems to some of Mr. Pynchon’s characters, has passed “irrevocably into the control of the evil and moronic.”

For all its razzle-dazzle brilliance, Mr. Pynchon’s earlier work tended to be cold, hard and despairing: devoid of any real sense of human connection, soulfulness or redemption. That began to change with his 1990 novel “Vineland,” which evinced a new interest in an individual’s relationship to family, and with “Mason & Dixon,” which made its heroes’ longings and dreams as palpable as their comic high jinks.

Although this impulse can be discerned in “Against the Day,” it’s blunted and stillborn. The loss of innocence — both individual and collective — runs like a dark melody throughout this novel; many of its central characters are looking for salvation; and the vague search for progenitors that lurked in the earlier books has turned, in the case of the Webb clan, into a full-blown preoccupation with familial duty. But because these people are so flimsily delineated, their efforts to connect feel merely sentimental and contrived. And that, in the end, is one of the more telling problems of this labored production, which lacks both the ferocious energy and bravura literary gamesmanship of “The Crying of Lot 49” and “Gravity’s Rainbow,” and the heartfelt emotion of “Mason & Dixon.”