UNMAPPABLE MINDSCAPE
January 17th, 2007“I suspect, to test reviewers’ persistence, Thomas Pynchon has inserted on page 853 of his new novel a lightly coded, only slightly tongue-in-cheek abstract of Against the Day, a passage that pleads to be quoted:”
The Book of the Masked . . . [was] filled with encrypted field-notes and occult scientific passages of a dangerousness one could at least appreciate, though more perhaps for what it promised than for what it presented in such impenetrable code, its sketch of a mindscape whose layers emerged one on another as from a mist, a distant country of painful complexity, an all but unmappable flow of letters and numbers that passed into and out of the guise of the other, not to mention images, from faint and spidery sketches to a full spectrum of inks and pastels . . . visions of the unsuspected, breaches in the Creation where something else had had a chance to be luminously glimpsed. Ways in which God chose to hide within the light of day, not a full list, for the list was probably endless, but chance encounters with details of God’s unseen world.
Tom Leclair reviews the novel at length in Bookforum:
As always, Pynchon is a master purveyor of compressed atmospherics, the “spidery sketches” of the abstract: the minute, webbed details of physical setting, what people are eating, drinking, smoking, wearing, and hearing—and the feelings his characters project upon their surroundings. He has to do atmosphere well because his characters frantically change locations (they are the Traverses, after all) and his narrative rapidly shifts focus among the four siblings, their lovers, the acquaintances of the lovers, the sidekicks of the acquaintances, the crazed people met in bars, the voices of their dreams, and so on. Sympathy is expressed for members of the underclass wherever they are found—in Chicago slaughterhouses, Colorado mines, Italian tunnels, Mexican fields—but Pynchon rarely lingers long enough in a scene to dramatize the cause and effect the naturalists unmasked.