UniBrow

Not yet a quarter of the way through Against the Day, I guess I’d say I’m in provisional disagreement with Adam Kirsch, Michiko Kakutani, and the other critics who have faulted the book for its thin and cartoonish characters, its ungainly shape and size, its supposedly pointless multiplication of plot lines, its flourishing of scientific and mathematical esoterica. I’ll wait until I’ve read the entire book to get into what I think is behind the impatience many reviewers have shown toward these staple elements of Pynchon’s work. Let me just say for now that, while Kirsch’s review at least makes a good-faith attempt to engage the substance of Pynchon’s novel, Kakutani’s review is an arrant disgrace. I don’t, of course, know the conditions under which she read this book, how unreasonably tight her deadline was and how hasty her reading may have been–but let’s say you were in her place. You’ve read Pynchon’s earlier books, you know the themes he likes to play upon, you’re familiar with his stylistic tendencies, the eccentricities of his humor, etc. Now you have to read this massive new novel and produce a daily-newspaper-sized review in just a few days’ time, or in a week, or at any rate much faster than seems reasonable with an author who has in the past turned out highly intricate fictions of almost overwhelming scope and detail. And let’s throw in that you don’t care how large a potential for unfairness happens to be built into this setup. What would you say about it?

You might say something very much like this: 

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.

You might, in other words, find yourself reading “Pynchon” rather than Pynchon, and managing to absorb only the most conspicuously “Pynchonesque” characteristics of the narrative. You might be stone dead to any deeper rhythms and meanings–the more especially if you’re in thrall to a 19th-century novelistic standard that prizes an Aristotelian shapeliness, and character-based psychological depth, above all else. You would likely see Pynchon impotently pantomiming his younger and more vital self.

And you might be as wrong and irrelevant as it is possible to be.    

Here, at least until Michiko Kakutani is heard from, is just about as flat out a negative review as you’ll probably see of Pynchon’s Against the Day, due out a week from today. It’s by a very good critic named Adam Kirsch, whom I’ve mentioned before as the author of The Wounded Surgeon (2005), an excellent critical/biographical study of six postwar American poets. I have to say, based on my prior experience of Pynchon’s work, that I find Kirsch’s review pretty persuasive, but of course I haven’t yet read Against the Day. (UniBrow’s advance galleys have evidently gone astray in the post. Either that or one of my perfidious clerks has absconded with them.) 

I think I could end up both agreeing and disagreeing with Kirsch given the fact that a Pynchon novel, to a degree greater than the novels of any other author I can think of, can be mesmerizing and exhilarating in progress while appearing in hindsight to be somewhat deficient in thematic nuance and (pardon me) gravity. And it’s just amazing how that concern disappears when you’re in the coils of Pynchon’s prose. I would say this disparity is fairly wide in the cases of V. and The Crying of Lot 49, less gaping but still noticeable in the case of Mason & Dixon. With Gravity’s Rainbow–the most stunning achievement of the imagination that I’ve ever read, amazing both in progress and in retrospect–it’s nonexistent. And Vineland isn’t very good from either perspective, I’m sorry to say. But that one clunker aside, in the end I think Pynchon appears deficient when one is doing what Kirsch is doing–i.e., searching out ”meaning,” or message. And this is usually a dull and dreary errand. Nothing saps the life out of a literary text quite like the pursuit, capture, stuffing, and mounting of its “thesis.”

Anyway, here’s a YouTube clip about Pynchon. It features the CNN footage of him walking along a New York street in 1997, just before Mason & Dixon appeared. But this extremely rare glimpse of Pynchon’s face, the first since his U.S. Navy photo from the 1950s, isn’t the really remarkable thing about this clip. What makes it special is the geeky Pynchon devotee attempting to analyze the footage. It’s just so supremely silly. Addison’s thoughts on pedantry won’t go amiss here:

The worst kind of pedants among learned men, are such as are naturally endowed with a very small share of common sense, and have read a great number of books without taste or distinction.

The truth of it is, learning, like travelling, and all other methods of improvement, as it finishes good sense, so it makes a silly man ten thousand times more insufferable, by supplying variety of matter to his impertinence, and giving him an opportunity of abounding in absurdities.

See for yourself:

Apologies for the tardiness–I have been indisposed. But Michele Bachmann, UniBrow’s favorite religious lunatic, defeated Democrat Patty Wetterling and Independent John Binkowski on Tuesday and will represent Minnesota’s 6th District in the 110th Congress. So to the ontological, the cosmological, the scriptural, and the teleological proofs of God’s existence, we may now evidently add the electoral.

And I’m sure we can look forward to some diverting news out of the Capitol. While in the Minnesota legislature, Bachmann once held hands in a prayer circle around the desk of an openly gay state senator. I’d like to see her try that with Barney Frank. 

The following letter from a voter in Forest Lake, Minnesota, appeared recently in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

I read with great interest the Oct. 28 Blog House that reported that Sixth District U.S. House candidate Michele Bachmann worships at a church affiliated with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, which “regards the Roman Catholic papacy as the antichrist.”

I then watched the Sixth District candidates’ debate Saturday evening and heard Bachmann say, when questioned about the Star Tribune item, “my church does not believe that the pope is the antichrist” and “that’s absolutely false.”

Being a voter in the Sixth District with two children enrolled in Catholic school, my curiosity got the better of me so I did some research by visiting the WELS homepage. I was surprised to find that one of the WELS core doctrines does indeed regard the Roman Catholic papacy as the antichrist.

I am thankful for hearing this before casting my vote and know, as a Catholic in the Sixth District, I will not be voting for Michele Bachmann.

I suppose a candidate who says God told her to run for Congress has opened the door to this sort of thing, but I suspect that Bachmann was unaware of this lunatic wrinkle in her sect’s theology–just as I imagine the writer of the above letter is unaware that her own church has never officially repudiated its disgusting ”perpetual wandering theology,” according to which the Jews, as punishment for the crime of killing Jesus Christ, must wander the earth forever without a homeland. And I wonder what our Forest Lake correspondent would say to someone who declared herself opposed to a Roman Catholic candidate solely on account of this insane doctrine–or even on account of the fact that the Vatican to which she and all Catholics owe moral allegiance is this very day sheltering a hideous criminal in the person of Bernard Law, formerly archbishop of the Boston archdiocese, who protected and knowingly enabled god knows how many child rapists in priest’s costume–a man better fit for a jail cell than a cozy church sinecure. I wish nothing but humiliating defeat and political oblivion upon Michele Bachmann and candidates like her all over the country, but I think we can probably let her skate on the pope-as-antichrist business. At any rate you certainly don’t have to get elbow-deep in the doctrinal arcana of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod to find reasons to vote against this woman. If I’ve neglected to mention it before–and pardon me if I have–SHE THINKS GOD TOLD HER TO RUN FOR CONGRESS.

Slate rounded up all the recent polls on important U.S. House races, including the Michele Bachmann-Patty Wetterling contest in Minnesota’s 6th District. Three of the five show Bachmann ahead, though the two that give Wetterling the lead are the most recent. On the other hand, the organizations whose polls put Bachmann out in front (Zogby, SurveyUSA) are undoutbedly more sophisticated polling operations than the Minneapolis Star Tribune, though not necessarily more on the ball than RT Strategies. And yet, of the three polls that show Bachmann ahead, her lead is less than the margin of error in two of them. The Lord speaketh in riddles. 

Congressional District: Minnesota 6
Incumbent: Mark Kennedy-R

“I give more credence in the Scripture as being kind of a timeless word of God to mankind, and I take it for what it is,” says Michele Bachmann, the Republican candidate for Congress from the 6th District in Minnesota, whose claim that her candidacy is the fulfillment of a direct order from God marks her as either a shameless demagogue or barking mad. She continues:

“And I don’t think I give as much credence to my own mind, because I see myself as being very limited and very flawed, and lacking in knowledge and wisdom and understanding. So, I just take the Bible for what it is, I guess, and recognize that I am not a scientist, not trained to be a scientist. I’m not a deep thinker on all of this. I wish I was. I wish I was more knowledgeable, but I’m not a scientist.”

Let the implications of this fantastically vacuous statement ferment a moment, and see this article on Bachmann for more of the same. Now I’m not a trained scientist either, but it’s just conceivable that mindless deference to Bronze Age delusions about the universe is exactly what we don’t need more of in Washington. We seem to have bales of it at the federal level already, and in the highest places: see this article, by Garry Wills, for more details than I’ve ever seen in one place about the controlling influence of religious fundamentalism within the Bush administration–which considers Bachmann’s race one of the five most crucial in the country. Which is why The Decider keynoted a Bachmann fundraiser in August.