I am really looking forward to Thomas Pynchon’s new book Against the Day, which is due out near the end of the year. The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland and Gravity’s Rainbow are already considered classics. This guy is a genius. Vineland is probably my favorite read. The Crying of Lot 49 is a perfect logical construction of undecidability, and if you’ve never read Pynchon, it’s a good place to start. Gravity’s Rainbow is something you have to read to believe – sex and machines, a computational epic.

I haven’t read V. or Mason & Dixon yet. I skimmed Mason & Dixon at a bookstore, but it didn’t appeal to me at the time.

Against the Day looks to be something that I might really enjoy – a mix of that analytical sophistication, humor, complexity and texture that makes you feel like you’re in a completely different reality – maybe. Pynchon is the real deal. I’m not sure how many creative intellectuals that we have in this country, but he’s one of them.

I also take it as a good sign that he wrote the foreword to the 2003 centennial edition of George Orwell’s 1984. Not to mention his voiceovers on The Simpsons (playing himself).

Here’s what he has to say about Against the Day.

(Can you tell I’m excited about this? I’m still grinning from reading this the first time.)

Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

–Thomas Pynchon

This is going to be a good one – I feel it in my bones.

I’m hoarding my desire for this book, putting it aside – against the day…