THE UNTOUCHABLE by John Banville

This is another of those little-known masterpieces that deserves much greater recognition. More than merely a roman a clef about the Anthony Blunt spy case, it's a marvelous novel of ideas, a genuinely literary espionage novel written in a beautiful allusive prose punctuated by marvelously apt figural strokes. It's a magnificent, penetrating novel that leaves Le Carre gasping in the dust.

AGAINST THE DAY by Thomas Pynchon (part IV)

Well, Pynchon pulled it off... Against the Day ends brilliantly, with images of hope (imagination, love) juxtaposed against intimations of the fascism to come. Pynchon's satirical inventiveness is indeed downshifted after page 700, to be replaced with something more unexpected, a dramatic seriousness that's as close as Pynchon comes to earnestness. Is the book too long? Perhaps. But given its ambition--nothing less than a radical re-imagining of modern history, perhaps Pynchon's lifetime project--I wouldn't want it a page shorter. It belongs on that short (but reinforced) shelf of great, big, bloated comic masterpieces, a shelf that constitutes a counter-history of the novel as an essentially comic and satirical form: Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Tom Jones, Bleak House, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, The Satanic Verses, and of course Gravity's Rainbow. There are small gems of satirical imagination in AtD (the Vormance expedition as a satire of Sept. 11; the gasophilia satire of mass media addiction; the harmonica school as a satire of the academicization of American radicalism; the German mental hospital, and so on), and there are also scenes of such brilliant, tragic power that they will haunt me for the rest of my life (the bicycle jaunt over the future WWI battlefields and one character's prophecy there; the mining camp massacre; the transformation of a passenger liner into a battleship). This is an overwhelming novel, one of the truly great ones, and now that I've finished it I have that feeling familiar from my readings of other great books (The Master and Margarita, Blood Meridian): I'm wandering around the bomb crater of the book's being, still feeling aftershocks...Against the Day cuts deep; it's one of those rare works of art that possesses the power to change us, to set up a branch office in our brains (to paraphrase Gravity's Rainbow), to turn our thoughts and imaginations in its direction... This could conceivably be dangerous for me, as I plot my own next novel, but instead of seeing AtD as something to hold at arm's length and guard myself against, I want to embrace it as inspiration, as a license to do my thing as wildly as Pynchon does his.

And my immediate response upon completion of the novel wouldn't be complete without a few niggling criticisms: the 'British idiots' Neville and Nigel are too annoyingly one-dimensional; the silly names and acronyms do tend to get on one's nerves after 800 pages or so (though I loved The Burgher King and L.A.H.D.I.D.A.); and do we really need two harrowing walking tours of the Balkans in the last 400 pages; also, the novel's anti-British stuff seemed gratuitous and wasn't always funny. (I find myself wondering now if all these Brit twits are versions of Tony Blair, as Scarsdale Vibe is a monstrously imagined G.W. Bush figure). But these are all rather minor beefs (as the Burgher King might say). The novel's most serious flaw is a loss of narrative momentum between pages 700 and 900 (due, I think, to too much Cyprian Latewood). Something like this is inevitable, however, in a work of this size. All long novels sag somewhere. Consistency is probably unattainable in a literary work of more than 400 pages. (Unless it's a negative consistency; it's easy to write 600 equally bad pages.)

Bottom line: Pynchon has raised the bar for American fiction so high that most American writers won't be able to see it anymore. WOW!

AGAINST THE DAY by Thomas Pynchon (part III)

Around page 700, Pynchon's surreal comic inventiveness, his singular genius for energetic imaginative improvisation, begins to flag, and the novel modulates, for the next 200 pages or so, into a more sober performance occasionally punctuated with absurdities and groaningly bad gags that seem calculated to keep the air from becoming too, too HEAVY. The Cyprian Latewood narrative, initially irksome and stereotypical, eventually becomes both a decent adventure story (in its Balkan phase) and, most unexpectedly, an exploration of the complexities of male homosexuality, giving Pynchon an opportunity to finally deal with the homophobia so apparent elsewhere in the book. Now, at page 900, I'm hoping for a return of the darkly playful Pynchon satirical imagination before this big book ends.

AGAINST THE DAY by Thomas Pynchon (Part II)

I'm approaching the halfway point in AtD (as it's called on the Pynchon chat sites) and the book remains brilliant, outrageous, endlessly imaginative and inventive... It's a book to remind us what the novel, at its best, can be.

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!!

RUNNING DOG by Don DeLillo

This book is good, very good. I admire the way DeLillo uses the classic 'Macguffin' device--the search for the film made in Hitler's bunker--as a structural backbone on which to hang a wide variety of characters and situations. The quest plot for this ultimately disappointing Maltese Falcon-like object (and a parallel quest for a human 'subject') provides the glue that binds DeLillo's American mosaic, his panorama that takes in senators, pormographers, mafiosi, NYPD cops, a hooker with a heart of brass, spies, compromised 60's radicals, etc., etc. It's a marvelously rich novel of ideas (about technology and its effect on human beings, the systematization of life, the terroristic side of capitalism, the paranoia of ordinary life, etc.) that feels and moves like a thriller. In a way, it reads like a more intellectual, East Coast equivalent of Robert Stone's great 1970's West Coast novel, Dog Soldiers.

FIGHT CLUB by Chuck Palahniuk

Fight Club is, on balance, inferior to its film adaptation. To be fair, it's Palahniuk's first novel and probably not the screenwriter's first movie, but it is a story that seems to work better, in many ways, on film. Like most popular fiction--indeed, like most American thought--it's performed (written) with media models in mind, so the postmodern medium of film seems a more natural home for this material than the pre-modern novel. The movie was also a more intelligent and self-conscious work, was more surprising overall, and, not least, had a much stronger ending. (C.P. leaves some questions unanswered, such as: How did the narrator escape from that bus in a late chapter [or did he?]). The movie also, mercifully, doesn't emphasize the book's Christian parable theme, which suggests that the fight club is a form of left-hand Christianity, sinning to attract the attention of God. This is a very silly, transparently juvenile theme which the author himself ultimately ironizes in the heaven/nuthouse of the last chapter.

One thing this novel, along with Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, does suggest to me is the efficacy of building a fiction around a constructed metaphor that is symbolically rich (the fight club and Project Mayhem; elevator inspectors). A novel built around such an idea can be a very effective satirical novel of ideas. Thinking up such a symbol is the most deeply imaginative part of writing, perhaps the hardest mental work a writer does.