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 Being the Pynchonite that I am, today I searched Amazon.com for “Thomas Pynchon,” just to see if maybe he has a new book coming out, even though there’s no way. And why? For the same reason that I search record stores for impossible new albums from my favorite retired bands, to torture myself with the hope of magic.
But magic is on the way. Pynchon has a brand new 900+ page novel coming out in December of this year, called Against the Day. The novel will be Pynchon’s first since 1997’s Mason & Dixon, breaking a decade-long silence.
If this isn’t enough, Pynchon himself has even posted a description of Against the Day on Amazon.com, describing the book’s characters as “anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns.” Pynchon describes the setting as “spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I,” in a time when “a worldwide disaster [is] looming just a few years ahead…a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places.” We can expect this to spawn all types of speculation, rumor-making and theory-devising until Pynchon fans are satiated this Christmas.
Of course, you probably won’t be able to eagerly rip through Against the Day like you would an Oprah club page-turner. Pynchon’s writing is notorious for both its difficulty and its sense of reward, appealing to a literati fan base willing to slug through his complexity. If you took Joseph Heller, Monty Python and Italo Calvino and put them in a blender you would get a sense of Pynchon’s absurd, confounding, hilarious, devastating genius. In Gravity’s Rainbow, for instance, what some would call The Pynchon Bible, you’re about as likely to encounter detailed information on rocket science as you are dick and fart jokes. He gracefully brings together the high and the low, is critically acclaimed and a publishing success.
But don’t expect Thomas Pynchon to sign your new copy of Against the Day at a Barnes & Noble near you; Pynchon doesn’t do interviews, is insanely reclusive and the only photographs we have of him are from the 50s. Yet, Pynchon made a bizarre appearance on The Simpsons in 2004, with a paper bag over his head. Or, more accurately, his voice made an appearance.
No interviews, no pictures, no readings or book tours, but The Simpsons? That sounds like Pynchon. Against the Day is scheduled for release December 6th, 2006.
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