andrew.pilsch.com

I had a bit of an intellectual crisis of late. In the last semester or so, my work ethic has … diminished, shall we say (and it was already pretty low). Sometimes, it makes me wonder if this is the right industry, etc. Anyway, I’ve been worried about my ability and/or desire to read novels for a living, at the same time that was struggling through Thomas Pynchon’s gargantuan (and grossly over-rated) Against the Day. Last night, around one in the morning, as I soldiered beyond page 350, trying to get to the end of Part 2, I realized I just didn’t care about the book, anymore. In a huff, I set it down, convinced I was a failure as a graduate student (I nominally study postmodernism and, despite this, have only managed to ever finish one of the quintessential postmodern author’s books).

This morning, I started reading Cormac McCarthey’s The Road, a stripped-to-the-bones travelogue through a postapocalyptic landscape. It’s fantastic. I really got into this afternoon and am hooked, having already finished pretty much a fourth of the novel (and generated at least one paper idea (possibly two)). Turns it out, the worrying was all for naught.

Getting back to Against the Day, after 400-or-so pages, I realized that there was not going to be anything resembling a plot (or even a loose story) and it was just going to be the meandering account of the lives of a bunch of boring individuals. Pynchon has always been accused of writing flat characters, but in this one, his characters, act completely at random and seem to have no motives for anything they do. In Crying of Lot 49, for instance, Oedipa Maas was a generic housewife, but at least her adventures through conspiracy-drenched SoCal were purposeful and interesting. The same can be said of Gravity’s Rainbow (or what I’ve read of it). In Against the Day, though, we are treated to a bunch of stock characters who just drift through their lives for 1000 pages. The chief problem with the book, though, has got to be the fact that Pynchon doesn’t spend enough time on the Chums of Chance. The saga of the Rideout, Traverse, and Vibe clans is, frankly, boring, but the brief encounters with the Chums and their disillusionment with the politics of the Earth is fascinating. With this in mind, I skipped to the end. The last part of the last chapter, where Pynchon concludes the story of the Chums, is fantastic and beautiful. That said, Pynchon’s conclusion (and, perhaps, the message of the text) is also the same conclusion that William S. Burroughs reached in Ghost of Chance and City of the Red Night. Frankly, that’s my other big beef with the new Pynchon book: it is a more lucid and linear version of the last few Burroughs novels. There are psychedelic cowboys, marauding elder gods, kinky sex, and contingent Utopian communities with an interest in space travel, just like Burroughs, only without the really kinky sex that marks Burroughs or the stylistic flights of genius that mark Burroughs as a true talent. Oh well, on to better and shorter things, I suppose.