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Orphans Against the Day

Two events, rare in my adult life, occurred yesterday: a new Tom Waits album (all 56 songs of it) was released and a new Thomas Pynchon novel (all 1,085 pages of it) was published. I had a very busy day at work, so I didn’t get a chance to listen to the album, but I did get a chance to read the first ten pages of the novel before going to sleep last night. It seems to be written in another new voice. Gone is the raw colonial voice of Mason & Dixon, replaced by a very accessible and playful narrator from the turn of the (twentieth) century. He begins in what seems to be the midst of an ongoing telling of the tales of the Chums of Chance, one of whom he describes as “picklesome.” I do hope that’s a real word, because I could really get some use out of it. I have almost all of the next two weeks (after today) off to explore further–I can’t wait.

One response to “Orphans Against the Day”

  1. morgannels » Blog Archive » Anarchy Now!

    […] It took a few weeks longer than I had hoped, but I finished Against the Day this week. To attempt any summary or assessment of Pynchon’s novels, given their complexity, is daunting. That this one runs more than a thousand pages only makes any such attempt that much more ambitious. I saw a few brief reviews before reading the book, and they could have been written without having read the book, for all of the depth and detail they offered. I admire anyone who actually did read the book and wrote a review of it on a deadline. Liesl Schillinger, whose reviews have puzzled me before, was one of those few. She concludes: The only prescription for salvation [Pynchon] offers is the same one a sheriff’s wife gives to the dynamiter’s troubled daughter midway through the novel: flight from reality. “Let go,” the sheriff’s wife explains. “Let it bear you up and carry you, and everything’s so clear because you’re not fighting back anymore, the clouds of anger are out of your face, you see further and clearer than you ever thought you could.” […]

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