Against the Day

At the Anarchists' Convention

"Sometimes," Virgil was saying, "I like to lose myself in reveries of when the land was free, before it got hijacked by capitalist Christer Republicans for their long term evil purposes . . . "

"And what good's that gonna do?" somebody objected. "Just more oldtimer's dreaming. Enough of that around. What we need to start doin's go out and kill them, one by one, painfully as possible."

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

So how's the book? Well, it's not Gravity's Rainbow. But not much is. (Only Gaddis's JR is better.) It is, however, Pynchon's best work since Gravity's Rainbow, a crystalline hallucination, astonishingly detailed, without need of point or purpose. Just like life, but so elegantly written that each of those 1,085 pages is a pleasure.