Tuesday, January 29, 2008

AGAINST THE DAY by Thomas Pynchon (Part I)

I've read Book One of Pynchon's Against the Day, and it's all I could have wished for: brilliant, surprising, endlessly imaginative, satirical, topical, a masterwork, a genius-piece... If Pynchon can sustain the inventiveness of the first 100 pages for the next 900+ (an ENORMOUS 'if'), this will be the first great American novel of the 21st century, one that raises the imaginative bar very high. It's also a thoughtful, engaged, political novel, a book as poltically astute as it is imaginatively fertile (a genuine rarity in American literature, where 'political' usually means 'naturalistic,' an idea held over from 1930's social realist dogma). Onward, Pynchon Readers!!

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