On the contrary
Reader comment on: Pynchon: He Who Lives By the List, Dies by It

Submitted by alec michod, Nov 15, 2006 12:54

The Thomas Pynchon of "Against the Day," in fact, is precicely the Thomas Pynchon we need. Yet he is a different Thomas Pynchon from the Pynchon we have known and loved and who has mystified us, Mr. Kirsch excluded. Having read "Against the Day," I can say that Mr. Kirsch is dead wrong on all points. The characters--well, OK, not all but the central characters, e.g., the Traverse family--and particularly the stories that swirl in and from what happens in Colorado are so human, and so sad, they are unlike none we have seen in Pynchon's fiction before, in fact in all of fiction. What Pynchon can do in a paragraph, or with a sentence, other novelists spend their careers attempting...and book reviewers, such as Adam Kirsch, can only take the brilliance and phosphorescent glow of fiction as trenchant and as distinct as the kind that proliferates "Against the Day" and try to make sense of it. That, of course, is like rigging an experiment before the experiment even begins. In his assessment of "Against the Day," Adam Kirsch--and The New York Sun, in their unheroic attempts to be on of the first publications to run a review of the novel--fail miserably, but predictably. Clearly, Kirsch hasn't read "Against the Day" with the kind of care it...and all serious fiction...require. Yes, Kirsch has succeeded in semi-digesting part of what goes down in Pynchon's new novel. And, yes, he is one of the first out of the gate. And, yes, he will be one of the few to savage the book, probably...but all that adds up to career grandstanding on the part of Adam Kirsch. "Against the Day" is more than a collection of lists. And Pynchon's swirling, dizzying, disorienting plots are more than mere ciphers--though, admittedly, they can confabulate and confound careerist reviewers such as Adam Kirsch. But what Pynchon has done with "Against the Day" is, he's created a world that resembles and refracts and is refracted by the world we think of as our own. Sure, Pynchon's not for everyone, but the Pynchon of "Against the Day" is the most accessible, the funniest, the most human, and--yes--the most mystifying Pynchon yet. "Against the Day" is the "War and Peace" of our times, and it will last longer than any "list."

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