Review of the Day: Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon

 

In some ways Pynchon’s epic sprawling novel resembles a Donald Trump rally speech with multiple plots. Trump has said, “I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I'll talk about, like, nine different things and they all come back brilliantly together.” I will not comment on whether or not things come back together brilliantly.

There are probably more than 100 characters in the book, and as is a Pynchon trademark, the names are worth noting. The characters include: 

The Chums of Chance: Darby Suckling, Lindsay Crouch, Miles Blundell, Chick Counterpane, and a dog named Pugnax.

The villains: Scarsdale Vibe, Foley Walker, Deuce Kindred, and Sloat Varnish.

Some intellectuals and mystics: Cyprian Latewood, Yashmeen Halfcourt, and Professor Werfner. 

And the minor characters: The Inconvenience (an airship), Dally Rideout, Lew Basnight, Tatzel and Luca Zombini. 

And there are many quotable lines:

Every map of the city is a map of a different city, and every memory of the city is a memory of a city that no longer exists, and never did, except in the mind of the dreamer who is now awake.

Pugnax was currently reading a translation of The Princess Casamassima by Henry James, though he found the pacing a bit slow for his canine attention span.

On a hangover: His head felt like a map of a country that had just been invaded by a very loud and poorly disciplined army.

The meeting was attended by several high-ranking officials, a few professional agitators, and a man who claimed to be the inventor of a revolutionary new type of hat that could predict the weather.

“Someday you’ll explain to me how that’s possible. Seeing that, on the face of it, all mathematics leads, doesn’t it, sooner or later, to some kind of human suffering.”

But lately he was finding a perverse fascination in Patience, not so much as a virtue but more as a hobby requiring discipline, like chess or mountain-climbing.

Kindle and Libro fm audiobook. 1100 pgs. 5 February 2026.