When will I learn to bookmark these things?

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Yesterday, I hit the big annual book sale. I got some wonderful things, notably, seven or eight volumes of Patrick O'Brian's celebrated sea saga, and I found Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon.

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I am in heaven. This is one of the most wonderful things I have ever read. Arnbar put me onto Pynchon, informing me that he and I share several disreputable impulses. I meant to only sample, and move on immediately to O'Brian. That strategy is out the window. I'm transfixed. 

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I've only reached to the end of chapter one, and I already have three pages of tasty notes. That's my measurement of a good read, until a plot makes itself felt. Here it looks like it will be a long wait, just like my thing; until then I am pulled along by the fun of the language. And Pynchon is a master at it.

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I am resolved to finish the read before I jump back on Sly. It’s doing me a world of good, in terms of morale. This is a man after my own heart. I knew the name, of course, but I’d never read the guy. Book in hand down on the deck, I’m cackling away like a madwoman, my husband smiling his usual that’s-my-favorite-nut-there smile.

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Unfortunately, I didn’t find The Maltese Falcon, or anything else on my list. But at this point I couldn’t care less. 

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I just googled Against The Day. It got mixed reviews. Time called it "brilliant, but exhaustingly brilliant". I see also, in a string of unattributed remarks, "a fairly pointless grab-bag of themes". No crime, in my book. To me, that is a selling point. Just let it be gorgeously written. And, it is.

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--edited by Mimi Speike on 8/31/2014, 4:52 PM--

I have emailed to arnbar my reaction to three chapters of Pynchon. Here is his reply:

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Amelia - (that's my real name, Mimi is my nickname)

--edited by Mimi Speike on 8/31/2014, 8:05 PM--

Honestly, I can’t get over how marvelous this is.

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An investigative hot air balloon club, The Chums of Chance are recruited to hover over the Chicago Exposition fairgrounds, watching for suspicious activity by the anarchists that are believed to be rampant. (Latter nineteenth century was the hey-day of social movement agitators.) This is the jumping off point for the author doing whatever he damn well pleases. A story about anarchy (initially, anyway; it's a huge book) by a full-tilt-boogie literary anarchist. Delicious!

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I recommend a big spoonful of Mr-Pynchon’s-Guartanteed-To-Twerk-Your-Thinking-Screw-Rules-Snake-Oil. I say there’s none of us who wouldn't benefit from a slurp or two of his wonderfully playful point of view.

--edited by Mimi Speike on 9/1/2014, 10:54 PM--

Mimi--I'm envious! It's been a few weeks since I was reading a book I was really head over heels in love with. I'm not a Pynchon fan (or at least, my attempt to read THE CRYING OF LOT 49 in college didn't go so well), but I want to find something that I love the way you are loving this one!

Also, I didn't start a specific Labor Day thread, just linked to the board so people could start their own threads, as you did. Sorry to be confusing!

I do love it, though I'm into the stretch about the dynamite now, which I don't love nearly as much, but I still find plenty to like. I gather this is going to be something of a roller coaster ride in terms of loosely connected episodes, although a sort of 'Rage Against The Machine' attitude still holds and I bet it is the unifying factor. I have no idea if the 'this-and-that' approach drives his other books but, if it does, you have a fair idea what Sly is like.

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Chapter five, paragraph one: Pynchon shoves it in our faces. Ostensibly constructing the micro-climate of the opening adventure, he is also giving himself carte-blanche on a breathtaking scale: ". . . the Chicago Fair . . . possessed the exact degree of fictitiousness to permit the boys access and agency. The harsh nonfictional world (I make of this, rightly or wrongly, conventional expectations, for he's already fed them to the dogs, in chapters one through four) waited outside the White City’s limits, held off for this brief summer, making the entire commemorative season beside Lake Michigan at one dream-like and real." 

--edited by Mimi Speike on 9/2/2014, 9:23 PM--

Sick of this thread yet? One more eruption and I'm gone. (I predict that my next post will begin: So I lied, all right?)

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I’ve been reading the reviews on Amazon. There seems to be little middle ground, you love Pynchon or you hate him. His true believers are almost cult-like in their worshipful attitude. I am a solid Pynchonphile after seven chapters.

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The reader comments that I’m seeing on Amazon are as entertaining as the book. Of 93 reviews, all but six are four and five stars, with ninety-five percent of those the latter.

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The professional reviews take note of a frustrating pastiche but generally agree with the following appreciation: “Pynchon's gift for the English language . . . Joyce, Nabokov and Gaddis are really his only peers in the last hundred years.”

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Who’s this Gaddis? Got to look him up for sure.

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Arnbar, (he's the one set up my blind date with Pynch) you've created a monster. And I can't thank you enough.

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--edited by Mimi Speike on 9/3/2014, 1:34 PM--