Let's Call Her Halcyon And Hope That She Holds

I have just finished reading 1,085 pages of Thomas Pynchon, and if Malcolm Gladwell's premise in Outliers is correct, I only need to read 8,015 more pages to become good at it.

Against the Day spans the time frame between the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and the close of the first World War. It involves boy scientists, densely described Steampunk airships, anarchism, Colorado mining, the era of "The Great Game," mole men, time travel, the Tunguska Event, union busting, private detectives, and warring Balkan states.

This being a Pynchon book, it also contains invented song lyrics, strange sexual practices, passages of unattributed and/or untranslated dialogue, the occasional absence of needed context, and very complex mathematical problems. In places, the novel is as compelling and readable as any potboiler, and in other places it is as abstruse and impenetrable as French critical theory. ("The less you understand, the better you listen," said Lacan.)

With hundreds of characters and locations both real and not real, I won't even try to recount anything like a plot, despite the fact that things happen and certain interests are carried forward in the manner that fiction typically required. A Belgian mayonaise factory blows up. A stock boy who may later become Groucho Marx appears for a page or two. Russian balloonists drop heavy cubes in quadratic formation, just as in Tetris. Ships sail on the sea of sand beneath the Central Asian deserts. There is romance and revenge and dynamite and coffee.

Did I enjoy the book? Long parts of it, yes.

Was it funny? It was amusing. I laughed out loud once while reading it, during a scene in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand plays the dozens in an African-American proto-juke joint in 1893 Chicago. (In fairness, I don't often laugh out loud while reading; most books, including ones mean to be humorous, really just result in knowing smiles. Also in fairness, I laughed out loud three times while reading the first chapter of Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.)

I do remain somewhat unsatisfied by the reading experience, particularly since I invested a lot of precious time into the project. I feel like there was a lot I didn't fully understand, a lot of nuance missed, a lot of metatextual jokes I didn't catch, and I'm sort of left wondering if that book wasn't f*cking with me. The question is put best by the British: "Are you taking the piss?"