ATD Reviews
Please add any relevant reviews as they come in. Blog reviews acceptable as long as they're substantial and more than just a few paragraphs.
11/26/06 - New York Times (Sunday book review): "In “Against the Day,” Pynchon’s voice seems uncharacteristically earnest. He interrupts his narrative from time to time to lay down pronouncements that, taken together, probably constitute the fullest elaboration of his philosophy yet seen in print"
12/2007 - Bookforum
11/20/06 - The Modern Word: "for those willing to suspend disbelief and leave the ground behind, Pynchon’s great Inconvenience proves to be one hell of a ride."
11/20/06 - New Yorker: "with this one there is the feeling that the magician has fallen in love with his own stunts, as though Pynchon were composing a pastiche of a Pynchon novel."
11/20/06 - New York Times: "It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex."
11/19/06 - Austin American-Statesman: "Forget it, fellow Pynchonians. [Against the Day] isn’t “Gravity’s Rainbow II.” That time, that place and that writer won’t ever come together again.”
11/19/06 - Newsday: "a novel as exhilarating, tiresome, unnerving and exhausting as all the others put together.”
11/19/06 - Boston Globe
11/15/06 - New York Sun: "The silliness of "Against the Day" about the very subjects where we are most urgently in quest of wisdom proves that, whatever he once was, Thomas Pynchon is no longer the novelist we need."
11/14/06 - The Complete Review: "impressive in its parts, but near confounding as a whole."
11/14/06 - The Phoenix: “Undaunted in the past by the big questions that bug a guy, he here takes on, in addition to the elusive quality of light... time travel, multiple universes, the death struggle between anarchism and capitalism, the dance of order and chaos.”
11/13/06 - Time: “More than in any of Pynchon’s previous books, just what it all means is a problem in Against the Day, where plots and ideas and fantastic developments pile up in exhausting profusion.”
11/3/06 - The Modern Word (first impressions): "It seems like the logical evolution/conclusion to Pynchon’s career as a prose experimentalist."
10/24/06 - Publisher's Weekly: "reads like half a dozen books duking it out for his, and the reader’s, attention. Most of them shine with a surreal incandescence, but even Pynchon fans may find their fealty tested now and again."
