Mark Levine, _Enola Gay_

HIS SECOND, FROM ten years ago. Somewhat lower voltage than Debt, I thought, as though Levine had in the meantime encountered something of ample power to chasten and subdue. A pleasurable read, all the same.

The jacket copy suggests that Wallace Stevens hovers in the background of the book, but I was more reminded of Hart Crane. The combination of ornate but orthodox syntax with bend-y, startling, left-field semantic juxtapositions occurs in both Crane and Stevens, but Levine's forays in this direction made me think more often Hart than of Wallace. Here's Crane:

Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles out leaping-
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…

Levine likely would have avoided "slain," and the exclamation points, but he too loves to blend the syntactically clear with the semantically opaque:

I called on the orange

tab to rid me of this shawl, its heaviness.

Its contamination. Its need to be bundled

into silence and tramped with shears

among the skewed roots of industrial hair.

Can one terrace an echo? Can an encyclical be oval? How could an orange tab rid one of a shawl, and why would a shawl need to be tramped with shears? If you're a Crane-ite, as I am, or a Levine-ite, as I may yet become, the music of the poem persuades that such propositions are right and inevitable.

What I was most reminded of, though, was Eliot's "Marina." There's a recurring landscape in Enola Gay, a place of rock, shore, forest, and mist, of salt water and sand, the landscape of "Marina." A crucial difference is that in Eliot's poem some unfathomable blessing has occurred, while in Levine's something unspecified has gone badly amiss, or will soon ("And the stars began to fall, and though everybody is waiting / for a terrible surprise, it hasn't come yet, not just yet"). Yet there is no elegy or lament here, but a kind of stoic, clamped-jaw acceptance, a grim satisfaction in knowing the worst and dispensing with self-delusion.

"Forgetfulness" in particular seems to evoke "Marina," but the landscape and the boat seem to encode guilt rather than redemption:

Beware the dark sea.

What does darkness look like? What does it mean?

My bark is thinking of me, my unhappy bark

is balancing on its hook in the shaken sea

shrinking and sinking and blinking and thinking of the

distant blank blue hills. Where are my tall trees?

But is the landscape meant to evoke not Eliot's New England seacoast, but Japan? Is that why the book and its longest poem are named after the airplane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima --? But why does that very poem bring in clam-bakes and Jew's harps (an allusion to Eliot's Yankee anti-Semitism?) and end by landing us in "downtown Sumer"?

Well, I'm sufficiently intrigued. On to The Wilds.

One doesn't hear Hart Crane mentioned as often as he deserves to be. What's up with that?

Charles Dickens, _The Old Curiosity Shop_

AT THE RISK of being tiresome about William Logan's review of Against the Day, I note his parenthetical observation, "no one has ever wept over the death of a Pynchon character the way thousands wept over Little Nell." Coincidentally, I was reading the Dickens novel in which Little Nell figures, The Old Curiosity Shop, over the same weeks in which I was reading the last 700 pages or so of Against the Day. While I'm glad to have finally gotten around to The Old Curiosity Shop -- I haven't read any other pre-Copperfield Dickens -- I'd have to say Against the Day was a more captivating read, really.

Logan writes that Pynchon's sentence rhythms are those of Dickens, and that Pynchon resembles Dickens in other ways as well: "These are almost the rhythms of Dickens, whose freakish surplus of characters, juddering episodic plots, and teary sentiment Pynchon half imitates, though in each case with a nearly lethal dose of irony." Then there are the amazing names, of course.

It's those "lethal doses of irony," I suppose, that prevent our weeping at the death of a Pynchon character? So is Logan suggesting Dickens's teary sentimentality has the saving grace of having made people cry once upon a time? Is he sneering at Dickens's sentimentality and at the same time sneering at Pynchon for not trafficking in it? A classic Loganism.

I found Nell difficult to appreciate it, actually -- I couldn't quite manage Esther Summerson, either, for that matter. Bleak House is in a lot of way Dickens's best work, but the Esther half of it I found barely readable. Nell and Esther are just too Victorian picture post-card for me, and just about anyone this side of 1914, I suspect. So, no, I did not weep.

Then there's the fact that I knew going in she would die -- Little Nell is famous for dying, after all. Her death most have come as a shock for the novel's first readers, of course -- quite daring, really, of Dickens to not provide the usual happy ending.

Dick Swiveller, though -- there's the Dickens I love.

_Against the Day_ (IV)

THE TITLE CAN be taken in at least three ways. For one, the novel participates in the same neo-Zoroastrian children-of-light vs. children-of-darkness opposition that figures often in Pynchon, so one may say the novel is about those who are making war on the day. (The principal child of darkness, Scarsdale Vibe, has the best Pynchonian villain-name since Brock Vond.) Second, the resistance, the children-of-light, are in a confrontation with the hegemonic powers, with things-as-they-are, so they are "against the day" in the sense of opposing the prevailing temper of their times. ("'Sometimes,' said Virgil, '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...'." Amen.)

Third, we have the idea of providing for the future, anticipating some eventuality, preparations. The novel insists that the 20th century we had was not the one we had to have, that unrealized hopes did not go unrealized because they were impossible, unattainable -- that we need to remain loyal to those hopes, to keep imagining another world is possible. This is uncharacteristically sunny stuff from Mr. Entropy, and William Logan in the VQR got a bit snarky about it -- "The final pages of the novel offer a frazzled sentimental tale of coupling and growing old" -- but I'm old enough or long-coupled enough to have found these pages convincing, even moving. I was moved by this, for instance, the birth of Yashmeen Halfcourt's & Reef Traverse's daughter:

The baby was born during the rose harvest, in the early morning with the women already back from the fields, born into a fragrance untampered with by the heat of the sun. From the very first moment her eyes were enormously given to all the world around her. What Cyprian had imagined as terrifying, at best disgusting, proved instead to be irresistible, he and Reef to either side of the ancient bed, each holding one of Yashmeen's hands as she rose to meet the waves of pain, despite the muttering women who plainly wanted the two men elsewhere. Hell, preferably.

I witnessed the births of both my daughters, and I would say that Pynchon got something absolutely right here. (My daughters were not born during rose harvests, but even that seems utterly spot on.) That bit about the eyes... perfect.

Or take this subjunctive-mood vision of happily-ever-after he conjures up for Kit Traverse and Dahlia Rideout:

May we imagine for them a vector, passing through the invisible, the "imaginary," the unimaginable, carrying them safely into this postwar Paris where the taxis, battered veterans of the mythic Marne, now carry only lovers and cheerful drunks, and music which cannot be marched to goes on uninterrupted all night, in the bars and the bals musettes for the dancers who will always be there, and nights will be dark enough for whatever visions must transpire across them, no longer to be broken into by light displaced from Hell, and the difficulties they find are no more productive of evil than the opening and closing of too many doors, or of too few. A vector through the night into a morning of hosed pavements, birds heard everywhere but unseen, bakery smells, filtered green light, a courtyard still in shade...

Yes, in twenty years the Wehrmacht will be marching into this paradisal Paris -- but we need to keep contemplating that music that cannot be marched to -- it too goes on.

_Against the Day_ (III)

I DID NOT read Against the Day with the slack-jawed wonder at its thematic architecture that I felt in reading Gravity's Rainbow way back when, more than thirty years ago. How much of that is simply due to my own aging? Would I be agog at the complexity of Gravity's Rainbow if I read it now, would I have been astonished by Against the Day had I read it at 25?

No way to answer that, is there?

At the same time, I don't remember being much smitten with the prose style of Gravity's Rainbow. It seemed a convincing pastiche of several pulp-fiction styles of the 1940s and 1950s to me, but neither comely nor graceful, hardly to be savored for its own sake. The pastiche of 18th century prose in Mason & Dixon, however, I often found myself relishing, probably simply because I found the source of the pastiche congenial.

And now -- I don't know whether Pynchon learned a few tricks following the subtle volutes of Gibbon and Johnson or what, but I think the prose of Against the Day is frequently gorgeous. Pynchon is still a pasticheur -- a master, the master pasticheur of our time, greatest since Beerbohm perhaps -- and the source of the pastiche is an unpromising territory bounded by H. Rider Haggard, Talbot Mundy, Robert Louis Stevenson, "Frank Richards," and a touch of Zane Grey whenever we're in Colorado. But even while indulging in the winding circumlocutions of turn-of-the-20th-century adventure prose, Pynchon can sound great.

She dreamed, the night she knew for certain, of a hunter arrived at last, a trainer of desert eagles, to unmask against her soul the predatory descent that would seize her, fetch her away, fetch her back, held fast in talons of communion, blood, destiny, to be plucked off the defective Riemann sphere she had been taking for everything that was, and borne in some nearly vertical angle of ascent into realms of eternal wind, to hover at altitude that made the Eurasian continent a map of itself, above the glimmering of the rivers, the peaks of snow, the Tian Shan and Lake Baikal and the great inextinguishable taiga. (891)

"Lake Baikal and the great inextinguishable taiga." Sigh. All right, I know, not for everybody, awfully high in cholesterol compared to, say, Beckett. But one or another Pynchon sentence walks across some such Niagara on a tightrope on almost every page of Against the Day. The prose had me slack-jawed this time.

_Against the Day_ (II)

BACK IN THE 1970s when I was reading Gravity's Rainbow, it seemed like a lot of other people were as well, or had already read it, or were planning to. When Vineland arrived, I knew at least a few people who read it. I knew one other person beside myself who read Mason & Dixon. So far, no one else in my circle of acquaintance has mentioned taking up Against the Day.

"What's that you're reading there?"

"Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day."

"Whew! Good luck!"

Well, reviews were mixed. And the length is intimidating.

This era of the blog post, the YouTube clip, and the Tweet seems wholly unpropitious for the large-scale 800-1000-page novel -- yet they keep popping over the horizon: Against the Day, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, Alexander Theroux's Laura Warholic, Joshua Cohen's Witz, and a new one by William Vollmann every six months. Who is reading these? Are even the reviewers reading them (see Jack Green's Fire the Bastards!)?

There is an Against the Day readers website -- , part of a larger Pynchon website -- with acres of helpful annotations and indices, so obviously the book has its devotees, length notwithstanding.

I recall that my daughters were not dismayed as the later volumes in the Harry Potter series grew longer and longer -- if you're reading the book just for the sheer pleasure of reading it, more is better, perhaps, as three scoops of ice cream are better than two. Likewise, Stephen King's readers seem not at all put off by the length of The Stand, say.

But -- when a book is reputed to be complex, ambitious, intellectual, important, and so on, and it clocks in at, say, 1,087 pages, even serious lit folks (e.g., my faculty colleagues) will probably give it a pass.

Yet writers still read them, publishers still publish them... someone is reading them, in some Anti-Terra inaccessible to me.

Thomas Pynchon, _Against the Day_ (I)

I BEGAN READING this in January of 2007, a few months after it came out. I got about two hundred pages in, found it interesting enough, but somehow it got to the bottom of the pile, drifted into "dormant" status on my reading list. May 2008, back at it, got another hundred pages further, then the same thing happened. May 2009, another hundred pages and... same thing.

Some time in 2009 I read William Logan's utterly Loganesque takedown of _Against the Day_ in VQR and very nearly lost heart. Did I really want to commit to completing my reading of a nearly 1100-page novel that, if Logan was right, was mainly a self-indulgent, exhausted jumble?

But second thoughts arrived. What, am I taking my cues from William Logan now? Surely things haven't come to that. So, May 2010, back to it -- basically, a hour a day. And I finished today.

And I can certainly say I enjoyed it. Then again, I enjoyed Mason & Dixon while I was reading it, but later found almost nothing of it had stuck with me. The opening section, when M. & D. are in South Africa for the Transit of Venus, seems to me one of the best things Pynchon has ever done, and the account of the changeover to the Gregorian calendar in England was echt Pynchonian, but the rest of it just evaporated, basically. So will Against the Day linger in my mind, or not?

This will have to be continued, I see.

John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, _Game Change_

A PAGE TURNER, certainly -- hard to put down -- a hybrid of Balzac and _People_ magazine, let's say. As in the _Comédie Humaine_, the fates of nations turn on personalities, temperaments, alliances, betrayals, feuds, and who is sleeping with whom and who knows -- which sounds like _People_ magazine already (or Suetonius), but Balzac has a sense of history and conception of the whole of French society, while _People_ does not -- and _Game Change_ certainly does not.

Heilemann and Halperin certainly knew whom to talk to, and who would be willing to talk -- the whole book is the insiders' view. The view is so far inside that there is no outside, really. The United States and all its messy differences and dilemmas enter the book only when reacting to this leak or that gaffe or some zinger in a televised debate, some lowball TV spot.

As an academic, somewhere I picked up the idea that history is about classes, conflicts, consciousness, dialectic... now and then, a new idea, an emergent possibility... all of that is wholly and utterly absent from _Game Change_. Everything comes down to who said what to whom on the campaign plane, If this book is _the_ story of the 2008 campaign, as its popularity suggests it is, then history is basically _Grey's Anatomy_, with really high stakes.

Obviously there are better analyses out there. But if _New Left Review_ were on hand at your dentist's office, would you pick it up? Or would you rather know what John Edwards's campaign staff was saying about the real Elizabeth?