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My initial reaction to ATD was one of relief that I enjoyed it. It's been a long time since university when I read Gravity's Rainbow and all the others. In the intervening years I'd been exasperated with Mason & Dixon and read V. for the first time (my second-hand paperback has the best cover ever, a photo of a uniformed sewer worker with a rifle in a dark tunnel and a thought-balloon saying something like, "Plenty of alligators... still no sign of V...") but been relatively unimpressed with it. It's a first novel, after all.
So after all this time I feared that maybe I didn't like Pynchon, that it was an affectation from my undergraduate years when I had whole days to do nothing but read weighty shit. It was a delight to forge into ATD and remember that no, Pynchon's just fantastic and always worth the effort. After the 50 pages or so you need for the descriptions to accrete in the subconscious and for the conscious reader to abandon forlorn hopes of a linear plot, I sank back in gratefully.
After 1,085 pages, the settings have stayed with me more than the characters or the labyrinthine plot. If I'd been asked in a focus group to choose an historical period for Pynchon to chronicle, the American West would have been up there. His endlessly-travelling protagonists take you through so much variety, so much detail invented or researched, and the ranges felt solid against the aether. Choosing anarchism as a theme, the forgotten turn-of-the-century battles for the working man, provided a different perspective.
As has been noted the plot hung from a simpler overstructure than we're used to from Pynchon: revenge, three-pronged because of the three sons. Everyone else, apart from Yashmeen and Cyprian later on, is incidental. It'd be nice to say the more occasional characters represent themes in some way but they don't seem to. Makes the book easier to follow, waiting for a Traverse to turn up, but it also makes the reader wonder what exactly the point is of the minor characters like Lew. What purpose they serve apart from a few illuminating scenes. Maybe none.
If there's an overall theme to the book it's bilocation and perhaps the insubstantiality, the thinness of our world with the aether and the heavens and mathematics providing more concrete and proveable realities all around us. The Chums of Chance representing here maybe a fictional reality which intersects with our own. Shamballa's where you find it and light is crucial. I was hoping to find more analysis here, because apart from a few bad-tempered reviews and the reference-spotting of the wiki there's little online.
Who's finished this? What did you think? What's worth rereading and giving more attention to? |
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