Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Pynchon Watch Y2K6: The handing off the torch edition

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, a book that, though I don't plan on reading it for at least another year, I have talked about more than any other book I have read in the last year, hits bookstores in less than a week, and it's time to admit defeat, before the shots are fired: there is no way in hell I'm going to keep up with the coming rush of Major Literary Event coverage. The interviews with the author, the profiles of his day-to-day activities--I am but one man and can not hope to keep track of all of it. For this admission of an all-too-human failing, I apologize.

(He says, deadpan.)

Luckily, this is the Internet, and there is now a blogger for every man, woman, and child on the planet, so if you need coverage tailored to your individual whims, it's out there, somewhere, waiting for you. For the general die-hards, there's The Complete Review. They've just posted their review of Against the Day. In the coming weeks, that page will grow flush with links to and quotes from every single major review of the book they can find. To them, this torch, I hand. (Yeah. Like I ever thought I'd held it.)

Hear-tell is the Complete Review's review is spoilerific; I haven't read it yet, for fear I'll start confounding the plot of Against the Day with Gravity's Rainbow (less than 200 pages to go!). The assessment summary is illuminating, in any case: they give the book a B+ and say that it is "impressive in its parts, but near confounding as a whole." To put it another way: the book is exactly what you want it to be. So, you know: yay!

(Also, The Complete Review, by the way? If I haven't mentioned it yet: beware ye who enter yonder review archives. Bring a couple extra canteens full of spare time.)

Before I attempt to retire this compulsion of mine, here's a closing burst of fireworks: the Literary Saloon (the blog at The Complete Review) offers some thoughts on the peril of the pre-publication review; The Modern Word interviews Zak Smith, who did the thing with all the drawings (the book of said drawings being released the same day as Against the Day, in case your wallet is feeling too heavy that day); and a bunch of people talk about liking Pynchon even though he never cooks breakfast for them, the bastard.

That last article, by the way, includes some quotes from Tim Ware, who runs the HyperArts Thomas Pynchon page, home of the previously-linked-to Web Guide to Gravity's Rainbow. Tim dropped by and left a comment here, to not only mention that he is amazed so far with Against the Day, but also to point to the Wiki page he started for the book, which, from the looks of things, is going to be as useful to the dedicated Pynchon reader as the current HyperArts web guides. Worth checking out; it will be interesting to see the pages fleshed out by readers in the coming weeks/months/years, as it will also be interesting to see the current web guides transitioned to the Wiki format. (If ever there was a web technology that seems unusually suited to discussion and clarification of Pynchon's books, it's the Wiki.)

And, so, okay, that's it. I'm done. Really for real this time. Like a bad drug or a good mistress, it is time I weaned myself off my need to gossip about Pynchon. (Even though gossip is all us bloggers are good for because we're all obviously nothing more than marketing droids, oh ho ho yes.) The Pynchon Watch tag will stay for at least as long as it takes me to finish off Gravity's Rainbow, because I'm a Technorati obsessive-compulsive, but I'll try to limit myself to reactions to actual book-text, not crap-text.

Currently, because I'm now so all-of-a-sudden smoochy-smoochy with Gravity's Rainbow, my proposed reading plan does involve reading Against the Day, but not for a while yet. I've decided to first work through Vineland and Mason & Dixon, because at this point I feel obligated to do those two before tackling the new one. My tentative time line has me reading all three books within the next year. Of course, if this goes as well as my Summer of Dostoevsky is going (which summer, by the way, has been extended indefinitely), you can expect that I'll finish Against the Day in about 2043.

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