Pynchon's Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide ed. by Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise (review)

The essays in Pynchon's Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide, make a powerful case not only that Pynchon's 2006 novel is a major work, but that Pynchon's career is both stranger, and more exemplary of recent American literary history generally, than we have realized. The anthology is divided into three sections—"Narrative Strategies," "Science, Belief, and Faith," and "Politics and Eco-nomics"—which actually overlap quite a bit. The first section in particular introduces an emphasis on genre that runs throughout the entire book, rightly so given what Brian McHale identifies, in his essay, as Against the Day's "appropriat[ion of] the conventions and materials of genres that flourished at the historical moments [from 1893 to the 1920s] during which the events of his story occur" (19). This attention to genre yields numerous compelling insights, as when Jeffrey Severs notes that the novel marks "a new approach [on Pynchon's part] to gender, women's economic roles, and women's sexual selves" (216) indebted to both popular working girl fiction and Theodore Dreiser's 1901 Sister Carrie. But in describing Against the Day as "a library of entertainment fiction" (24) that represents the turn of the twentieth century as a "map [of] its popular self-representations" (and our contemporary attitudes towards these representations) (25; McHale's emphasis), McHale opens up a more thoroughgoing reconceptualization of Pynchon's career. Specifically, he gives us a way of understanding Against the Day's difference from Pynchon's previous big novels like Gravity's Rainbow (1973) while also relating it to the work of a range of younger novelists—Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Colson Whitehead—whose bid for high literary prestige has taken the form not of postmodern formal experimentation but of genre play. So far from being stuck in an outmoded high postmodernism, that is, Pynchon's career in fact exemplifies the transition from this mode to the current genre turn. Indeed, Pynchon was there first: noting in his introduction that critics took Against the Day to task because it failed to extend the realist turn that seemed to characterize Pynchon's preceding book, the 1997 Mason & Dixon, Christopher Leise argues that these critics in fact imposed their own version of authorial maturation on an earlier instance of genre play in which Pynchon "ape[d] the conventions" of the realist fiction that emerged in the eighteenth century during which Mason & Dixon is set (4).

But if Pynchon's 2009 novel Inherent Vice closely resembles the work of younger novelists influenced by genre fiction—drawing on and even inhabiting the 1970s neo-noir in the way that Chabon and Díaz do the superhero comic book, or Egan the Stephen-King-inflected gothic, or Whitehead the zombie story—Against the Day remains manifestly different and undeniably Pynchonian. This quality, which might best be described as encyclopedic, is also thoroughly addressed by the contributors to A Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide. Amy Elias accounts for Against the Day's loose narrative structure, for instance, by arguing that it takes the form of a "postmodern pilgrimage" (29-30) that mediates between "the secular realism of picaresque and the romance of quest" (42) by elevating the community over the individual, and seeking over finding; while Krzysztof Piekarski, Martin Kevorkian, and Elisabeth McKetta contend that the profusion of major and minor characters in the novel, and their tendency to morph into each other, bears an unexpected affinity with "the democratic and potentially anarchic premises of the [nineteenth-century] realist novel" (56). Both these essays, one might argue, take up the way in which neither plot nor character have been the most important elements of Pynchon's fiction, demonstrating how Against the Day reworks these standard features of the novel to accommodate its other investments.

The remaining essays address these other investments, collectively suggesting that we can call Against the Day encyclopedic...