Against the Day

Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day, published in 2006, tells the story of how two generations of working families, the Rideouts and the Traverses, fare from 1893 until the mid 1920's. Typical of Pynchon's style and the encyclopedic novel, Against the Day develops no character particularly much, but often uses them to articulate watershed historical developments in more depth than ordinarily expected of fiction. Both families originate in the west and midwest of the United States, where the Traverses live anti-establishment lives rebelling, in their ways, against the life-draining and exploitive practices of robber barons and fast-growing corporations, particularly of the mining and railroad industries. The Rideouts lead more free-spirited lives, which cross paths frequently with the Traverses.

Merle Rideout follows a career oriented around graphic representations of light ("redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals" (80)), such as photography. Merle's adoptive daughter Dahlia (Dally) travels to New York, Venice, the Balkans, and Paris. Webb Traverse, believed to be "The Kieselguhr Kid"--a mysterious Anarchist expert with dynamite who blows up the property of oppressive corporations--fathers three sons and a daughter, Frank, Reef, Kit, and Lake, who follow in his footsteps in different ways. Early in the novel, the tycoon Scarsdale Vibe, the novel's personification of capitalist villainy, has his henchmen murder Webb Traverse, and the Traverses' impetus to revenge against Vibe and his family structures much of the novel's story, though it is never the main story.

Pynchon, as in his other novels such as Gravity's Rainbow, makes extensive metaphorical use of modern technology, technical means, and techniques of aeronautical and electrical engineering, as well as higher mathematics. For example, as a young man Kit Traverse's romantically championing vectors over quaternions reflects the young mathematician's relation to the world. Most prominently birefringence, the decomposition of a light ray into two rays, a property of the mined mineral Iceland Spar, provides the physical representation of the novel's sense of there being two worlds, one of which remains unseen to us and only gnostically available. Light, and people's historical representations of its properties, recurs as a theme in the novel, and Kit Traverse's illumination regarding important aspects of how he conducts his life happens when he witnesses the blinding flash of the Tunguska Event of 1908 while fleeing from the clutches of Vibe near Irkutsk.

Pynchon's prose ranges from the erudite and scientific to the langorously wistful (see for example pages 298, 767, 816, and 836); the novel includes pornographic sex scenes, farcical poems of song lyrics, noir crime fiction, Mexican, Russian, and American slang and cadences (see for example the pleonastic "is" on pages 309 and 375).