Against the crying of gravity’s lot 49
Full marks to James Lasdun for his review of Thomas Pynchon’s new book, Against the Day. I’ve read two of Pynchon’s novels, in days when my culture/time balance was the opposite way round from today. Luckily I read Vineland first. As Ian Rankin said,
Vineland is a pretty good place for the novice to start. It’s a likeable book with a linear narrative and a single, identifiable hero [...]
So I wasn’t put off forever by dragging my way through Gravity’s Rainbow (Ian Rankin: “bonkers masterpiece”). Being able to compare both I can appreciate the importance of “a linear narrative and a single, identifiable hero”, and I was hopeful, but wary, as to whether Against the Day might be accessible by mere mortals, or only for the hardcore loyalists.
It’s with all this history that I welcomed James Lasdun’s review. He manages to convey the fun of the book that even I was able to recognise in Gravity’s Rainbow (anything that digresses for the story of Byron, the everlasting lightbulb, isn’t going to be entirely serious), but also its sprawling nature (1,104 pages), and the frustration of seeing coherence almost emerge, and then fall back out of reach:
Four or five hundred pages in there’s a promising impression of grand thematic convergence. [...] But it doesn’t quite happen. As if in obedience to the second law of thermo-dynamics, which states that the entropy of two combined systems is greater than the sum of the entropies of each individual system (a titbit I almost certainly picked up from earlier immersions in Pynchon), the stories drift apart, their energies dissipate and the book turns into a rambling transglobal picaresque, gathering volume without weight, full of train itineraries and descriptions of local dishes, and with an increasingly musty suspicion of having been adapted wholesale from a set of early Baedekers.
Lasdun tells me that this book is not the one I’ve been waiting for, for all the reasons I might have feared (”The cast keeps expanding right up to the last pages…”), and skewers it rather neatly in his final sentence. But he also tells me what I need to read next:
the pleasure [Pynchon's] books offer tends to be in inverse relation to their length. Gravity’s Rainbow may be the official masterpiece, but The Crying of Lot 49 is by far the most enjoyable: a quest novel of incendiary beauty, and under 200 pages long.
That’ll be on my Christmas list, then.
