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Against the Day

And all that jass

Thomas Pynchon
Cape, 1104pp, £20,

Sam Leith

Wednesday, 22nd November 2006

‘Were the phrase not self-contradictory,’ commented ‘Dope’ Breedlove.
‘Yet I’ve noticed the same thing when your band plays — the most amazing social coherence, as if you all shared the same brain.’
‘Sure,’ agreed ‘Dope’, ‘but you can’t call that organization.’
‘What do you call it?’
‘Jass.’

He knows what he’s on about, old ‘Dope’. I’m far from the first person to point it out, but it bears pointing out again: Pynchon’s novels behave much more like jazz than they do like anything else. Themes emerge, are riffed on, returned to, and transfigured. Passages refer to eachother not so much directly as by a sort of sympathetic vibration. You suddenly notice something — be it as slight as the conjunction of the colours mauve and green — that clicks in your mind. I’ve seen this earlier. Where the hell was it? What’s he getting at?

Accordingly, my notes are as bizarre as those I have made on any book I’ve read for review. Arrows snake across the page like a catastrophe involving spaghetti; question marks are scattered as if they’d been shot out of a blunderbuss. One portion of the page, carefully ringed in biro, contains page references for ‘talking parrot’, ‘invisible chillis’, ‘London Eye’, ‘human doughnut’, ‘fellatio dog’, ‘Smegmo’, ‘mayonnaise cult’ and ‘jealous of oatmeal’.

What is Against the Day about? What is it not about? To try to summarise the plot would be insanity. It is a comedy of ideas with people in it. Describing it as if it were a realist novel would be like trying to transcribe in musical notation the sound of a piano falling down the stairs.

It is, itself, insane. Its very method seems to be positively lifting with paranoid schizophrenia, among whose classic symptoms, as I understand it, is the maniacal conviction that everything connects with everything else. It proceeds by hints and hallucinations. More or less anything that can be roped into a dialectical — or, more often, paradoxical — relationship, is: the real and the imaginary; time and space; light and dark; Christian and chthonic mysticisms . . .

It is virtuoso nonsense; it is a giant shaggy dog story, serious as history; it is by turns mind-crushingly tedious and utterly exhilarating; it is remorselessly facetious and yet deeply moving. It is like watching the European apocalypse as scripted by Looney Toons. It is brilliant, but it is exhaustingly brilliant.

When my friend the algebraic geometer caught sight of my notes, he picked out the phrase ‘Maths decorative?’ I explained that there is an enormous amount of mind-bending stuff about theoretical maths, that — being a mathematical illiterate — I imagined was simply there to add science-fictional texture. ‘He goes on about these things he’s made up called quaternions,’ I said.

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