Against the Day

A Novel

By: Thomas Pynchon

Narrated by: Dick Hill

"Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

"With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred. The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

"As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

"Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

"Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck."
—Thomas Pynchon

©2006 Thomas Pynchon (P)2007 Tantor Media Inc.

Critic reviews

"[Pynchon's] funniest and arguably his most accessible novel." (New York Times Book Review)
"Pynchon delivers a novel that matches his most influential work, Gravity's Rainbow...in complexity, humor, and insight, and surpasses it in emotional valence....A capacious, gritty, and tender epic." (Booklist)

brilliant!

Against the Day is Thomas Pynchon's most recent and one of his most accessible and entertaining works. (Mason & Dixon and The Crying of Lot 49 are better books, imo, but this one is certainly a worthy addition to Pynchon's formidable oeuvre.) Dick Hill's reading makes it even better.

Taking place between 1893 and 1914 in Chicago at the Columbian Exposition and going from there to the globe, inside and out, the story involves a group of very fictional hot-air balloonists, western mines unionists and anarchists (terrorists?) and their families, tycoons and their goons, scientists, mathematicians and a whole menagerie of assorted characters some historical, some not.

The plot involves the children of slain anarchist Traverse Webb as they basically try to 1. avenge his death and 2. escape the clutches of the evil tycoon Scarsdale Vibe. Meanwhile, the Chums of Chance glide around observing from their balloon above. But that's a very, very simplified version of the intricate convolutions the plot of this encyclopedic novel takes.

The themes are the closing of the frontier and the onset of modern life, including the boom of technology and capitalist greed. Meanwhile, the common man is doomed to live under the oppression of totalitarian regimes willing to use militaristic force to ensure domination.

Different styles are used for different plots of the book varying from Dime Novel to American Western to erotica and spy novel. This is quite effective in maintaining interest throughout such a long book.

The narrator Dick Hill gives a bit of very appropriate energy and drama to the reading and although it took a few minutes to get used to the voice (as usual for me), it's obvious Hill knows and loves the material and his interpretation is "cracker-jack!" Good show!

Plot, schmlot

Plot in a novel is overrated. If you want plot, read Dan Brown instead- though that's all you'll get.

This is a work of genius- and not only because of the author's penchant for self-promotion and intentional obscurity and obfuscation.

This is truly a piece of art painted with intentionally hammy techniques and wonderful surreal and non-linear streams of consciousness. All of these things dance around the sensation of the characters, the essence of spirit that the author wishes to share with those who can sense it.

I laughed when a reviewer preferred to go back to Ulysses instead. Well, that's a mighty difficult yardstick for each and every novel to stand comparison. It's like comparing every portrait to the Mona Lisa.

Full disclosure: this was my first reading of a complete Pynchon novel. I'm not a literary snob and don't feel the need to crow about how much better his other works are. Some folks more learned and well-read than I am have said Gravity's Rainbow is far superior. Great- more to explore!

For me, this is one of the most wonderful author "discoveries" since I first read Kafka.

Love Pynchon, but...

I advise anyone who really cares to read this book on the printed page where it won't be polluted by Dick Hill's intrusive and cloying narration. I tried to listen, but a giving up because I can't bear another minute of Hill.

Pure Genius

One of Pynchon's best with a great read from Dick Hill. Loved it. Just a brilliant work of fiction.
To address the negative reviews: if you tend to think of Nicholas Sparks or Dan Brown as great literature you may find this book a little confusing and off-putting. You'd be better off downloading the latest Sue Grafton or something of that ilk instead.

Against the Day not bad

It’s taken me two years to finish this novel. I’m a Pynchon fan, but the usual tropes and jokes got buried under layers and layers of plotting. So finishing the novel seems like van occasion for breaking out the champagne as one does at the end of a marathon. But parts of Against the Day are exquisitely funny, touching, brilliant. Will I r as it again? Probably not. Can I recommend it? Absolutely!

Great book and a great reader

Loved this book. True it takes some work to keep all the characters and plot lines clear, but each section, each paragraph and sentance is a chance to be delighted with a precise, playful description or honestly delivered revelation of character. The reader, Dick Hill is great. His multiple voices bring a smile and help keep everyone straight. I've downloaded dozens of books from Audible: this is one of my favorites, and one of the best readers on the team.

Excellent Pynchon

1st let me address the narrator whom I've run across in the past. He has vastly improved. I heard him perhaps too often long ago and didn't think some recordings were all that good but he is very good here, not Frank Muller's Moby Dick or Jim Dale's Harry Potter which are top of the line, but non the less excellent. NOW for the story. Pynchon is crazy but in a good way. Aside from a "wild west" type episode early in the novel which goes on a bit long for me, I thoroughly enjoyed this from beginning to end. If you are familiar with Pynchon at all then you'll pick up on his themes: entropy, colonialism, haphazard history, science fact and fiction etc. It is hard to keep all the characters straight when they pop in and out for long stretches but the episodes are sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic, sometimes fascinating. Tesla, World War 1, revenge, spies, obsessive sex, slapstick, puns, word play,pulp style comic scifi heroes, obscure history...What isn't in this book? I would still suggest starting Pynchon with Crying of Lot 49, and maybe even Inherent Vice to get a feel for whats coming, but though this is a big undertaking it was well worth it for me. Hopefully they'll get V., Mason & Dixon, Vineland, and Gravity's Rainbow on audio soon as well as his short stories which i also enjoy. & don't assume the craziest stuff in Pynchon is made up, i'm always amazed when i do a little research what turns up as real.

As Good As Fiction Gets (If This Is Your Cup of Tea)

Pynchon isn’t for everyone and Against The Day is no exception. It’s long, confusing at times, the sentence structures can be convoluted and the characters can feel distant. The sheer information overload can be daunting. It’s no mystery that some folks just don’t dig it. For me, however, it’s still the greatest novel that I’ve ever read (and now, heard).

To clarify a few things. First off - This book is a comedy- as dark as comedy gets, but IMO also about as funny as comedy gets. Warning: If you listen on your phone while walking the neighborhood (as I often do), people may think that you are strange- laughing out loud for no apparent reason. This, however, does raise the key question: Will you find it as funny as I did? Well....

Some of the action takes place on a globe trotting blimp that serves Truth, Justice, etc for a secretive organization whose purpose is as pure as the driven snow. The blimp is called “The Inconvenience”. If an institutional vessel with that name strikes you as funny, you’ll probably laugh a lot. If not, you might pass on this book.

Note: The humor is often quite low brow (even slapstick at times) tho at other times it’s also arcane, so you have to be willing to take both in the same package. Again, while I found it hilarious YMMV

As to making sense of it, the basic structure of the book is simply a tale of three families and how they are each affected by the huge changes that gripped the world between the 1890s and the 1920s.

On that lighter than airship Inconvenience, we meet the first of those three families that drive the plot. The Chums of Chance aren’t a biological family, but they’re a family nonetheless. At the book’s start, they approach the 1893 Chicago Exposition (Worlds Fair), a showcase for the emerging technologies that promise to transform the world. Though they are innocent and noble of purpose at the time (literally floating above the disturbing action below), they too will eventually be corrupted by the same forces that drive the families on the ground-principally the dehumanizing effects of capitalism on the working class and the havoc wrought by the anarchist movement that so devastated the Western World at the time.

The Chums feel a bit like The Hardy Boys at the outset, but -by the story’s end - no longer either volunteers nor virgins, they end up bailing on their noble mission to fix the world and end up taking their first paying gig in California. In Against The Day, no one survives the action with their principles completely intact.

In addition to the Chums, we follow two Earthbound families whose fates are intertwined by the struggle between the Capitalists and the Anarchists. The East Coast Industrialist Scarsdale Vibe hires a pair of assassins to kill Webb Traverse, a Colorado based, bomb toting anarchist who is disrupting The Vibe Mining Company’s activities with his bomb attacks. The extended Vibe family is eventually involved in a wide variety of ways when Webb’s progeny seek revenge for their father’s murder. Admittedly it all gets a bit confusing as the action sprawls to cover most of the globe (and beyond). This all takes place as the great disaster of WWI looms ominously in the background.

There’s not much in the way of pure heroes or villains in the book - it traffics mainly in dualities. The flaws in the cause for either side seem to be mirrored in their counterparts. Neither the “system” nor the “anti-system” will provide a satisfactory answer to these problems and the book ends with only the hint of a resolution

That ending, I suspect, bothers a lot of people who didn’t love the book. Its very much like most other Pynchon novels in that satisfying answers aren’t necessarily provided to the thorny questions that the books pose. After slogging through a thousand plus pages, I guess it’s not unreasonable that some people feel like they deserve more.

But....

Make no mistake, the ending of this book (like Pynchon’s other novels with “non-endings”) makes a very particular point. Even if that point is a bit abstract and maybe too philosophical for some, it is IMO still a completely legitimate way to to this epic story.

That perfect last sentence of Against The Day states it pretty directly: Human beings in this particular universe have only one hope for the future.....(tho you’ll have to read/listen to it to find out what that hope is - no spoiler here!)

Housekeeping: The performance is generally great but there are two caveats

1). The pace of the narration is a bit slow, you may want to increase the speed by just a bit

2) Pynchon’s prose demands a certain rhythm in order for the sentences to even make sense. There are a few occasions on which the narrator doesn’t quite pull that off. I’d say he scores a 93 or so, but there a a few moments where you might think “Huh?”

Overall, however, it’s a great listen

narrator shoved me into a wonderful word factory

reading Pynchon is like navigating a labyrinth. hearing Pynchon is navigating the labyrinth on a brakeless train.

Phenomenal, Sez Me. Must Listen

Big Pynchon fan. I have a newborn, so there’s not much free time with my hands at least to crack open one of these weighty door stoppers. So I decided, while occupied with diaper changings and bottle feedings and sleepy time rockings, to check out audible’s collection of pynchon’s larger works. This is clearly the one to get based on performance alone. You might wanna read GR and M&D first for chronology’s sake, but oboy is this an enchanting and theatrical read-along. My baby boy and I are two new Chums of Chance, and Shambhala approacheth.