Against the Day

Against the Day is an epic historical novel by Thomas Pynchon, published in 2006. The narrative takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the time immediately following World War I and features more than a hundred characters spread across the United States, Europe, Mexico, Central Asia, Africa and "one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all," according to the book jacket blurb written by Pynchon. Like its predecessors, "Against the Day" is an example of historiographic metafiction or metahistorical romance. At 1,085 pages it is the longest of Pynchon's novels to date.
Title.
Besides appearing within the book itself, the novel's title apparently refers to a verse in the Bible (2 Peter 3:7) reading "the heavens and the earth ... [are] reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men."
William Faulkner, whose diction frequently echoes the King James Bible, liked the phrase, and many reviewers have traced it to a speech of Faulkner's against racism. Perhaps as relevant is a passage in "Absalom, Absalom!" in which Sutpen, a Faustus character of the sort that Pynchon deploys everywhere, seeks "a wife who not only would consolidate the hiding but could would and did breed him two children to fend and shield both in themselves and in their progeny the brittle bones and tired flesh of an old man against the day when the Creditor would run him to earth for the last time and he couldn't get away." The Creditor there is Mephistopheles, to whom Faustus/Sutpen would owe his soul. (The passage in "Gravity's Rainbow" about the "black indomitable oven" with which the witch-like Blicero, another Faustus character, is left once the Hansel-and-Gretel-like children have departed, alludes to another passage in "Absalom, Absalom!".)
Nonliterary sources for the title may also exist: "Contre-jour" (literally "against (the) day"), a term in photography referring to backlighting. There are also two uses of the phrase "against the day" in Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon", and, anecdotally, three uses in William Gaddis's "J R".
One may assume that Pynchon has read his Walter Benjamin, who in his famous "Theses on the Concept of History" XV quotes a satirical ditty composed on the occasion of the July Revolution of 1830, when it was reported that several clock towers across Paris had been fired on: 
Who would have believed it!/ we are told that new Joshuas/at the foot of every tower,/ as though irritated with time itself*,/ fired at the dials/ in order to stop the day. - * The French makes it clearer: "qu’irrités contre l’heure" 
Speculation before publication.
As Pynchon researched and wrote the book, a variety of rumors about it circulated over the years. One of the most salient reports came from the former German minister of culture, and before that, the publisher of Henry Holt and Company, Michael Naumann, who said he assisted Pynchon in researching "a Russian mathematician [who] studied for David Hilbert in Göttingen", and that the new novel would trace the life and loves of mathematician and academic Sofia Kovalevskaya. Kovalevskaya briefly appears in the book, but Pynchon may have partly modeled the major character Yashmeen Halfcourt after her.
Author's synopsis/book jacket copy.
In mid-July 2006, a plot-synopsis signed by Pynchon himself appeared on Amazon.com's page for the novel, only to vanish a few days later. Readers who had noticed the synopsis re-posted it.
This disappearance provoked speculation on blogs and the PYNCHON-L mailing list about publicity stunts and viral marketing schemes. Shortly thereafter, "Slate" published a brief article revealing that the blurb's early appearance was a mistake on the part of the publisher, Penguin Press. Associated Press indicated the title of the previously anonymous novel.
Pynchon's synopsis states that the novel's action takes place "between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the years just after World War I". "With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred." Pynchon promises "cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi and Groucho Marx", as well as "stupid songs" and "strange sexual practices".
The novel's setting
Like several of Pynchon's earlier works, "Against the Day" includes both mathematicians and drug users. "As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them."
The synopsis concludes:
The published jacket-flap of the book featured an edited-down version of this text, omitting the last three sentences, references to specific authorship (as well as misspelling Nikola Tesla's first name as "Nikolai"; Pynchon had previously spelled it correctly).
Plot summary.
Nearly all reviewers of the book mention the byzantine nature of the plot. Louis Menand in "The New Yorker" gives a simple description:
As to the multitude of plot dead-ends, pauses and confusing episodes that return to continue much later in the narrative, Menand writes:
Writing styles.
Many reviewers have commented on the various writing styles in the book that hark back to popular fiction of the period. John Clute identifies four "story clusters", each with one or more prose-styles mimicking a popular fiction genre in the style used before the end of World War I:
"Examples": "boys' adventure fiction, from the [contemporary] Airship Boys tale by Michael Moorcock to Horatio Alger; the Dime Novel in general; the British school story in general ... the future war novel"
"Examples": Edward S. Ellis, Bret Harte, Jack London, Oakley Hall
"Examples": "the Lost Race novel; the Symmesian Hollow Earth tale; the Tibetan Lama or Shangri-La thriller; the Vernean Extraordinary Journey; the Wellsian scientific romance; the Invention tale and its close cousin the Edisonade ..."
"Examples": "the European spy romance thriller a la E. Phillips Oppenheim; the World Island spy thriller a la John Buchan; the mildly sadomasochistic soft porn tale as published by the likes of Charles Carrington in Paris around the turn of the century." [Clute may mean to include "the "Zuleika Dobson" subgenre of the "femme fatale" tale in particular" in this cluster.] 
Clute sees (but does not specifically categorize) another style mimicked in the book: "the large number of utopias influenced by Edward Bellamy and William Morris".
Characterization.
Some reviewers complain that Pynchon's characters have little emotional depth and therefore don't excite the sympathy of the reader. For example, Laura Miller in "Salon.com":
Time doesn't exist, but it crushes us anyway; everyone could see World War I coming, but no one could stop it — those are two weighty paradoxes that hover over the action in "Against the Day" without truly engaging with it. This is the stuff of tragedy, but since the people it sort of happens to are flimsy constructions, we don't experience it as tragic. We just watch Pynchon point to it like bystanders watching the Chums of Chance's airship float by overhead.
"New York Times" reviewer Michiko Kakutani writes of the characterizations: "[B]ecause these people are so flimsily delineated, their efforts to connect feel merely sentimental and contrived."
In some of the reviews to his previous works, Pynchon had been called a cold, lapidary writer. Poet L. E. Sissman, from "The New Yorker", instead praised and defended him, saying I do not find him to be one. Though his characters are not developed along conventional lines, they do, in their recalcitrant human oddity, live, and they do eventually touch the reader more than he at first thinks they will.
As a complement to Miller's criticism about tragedy, Adam Kirsch sees comedy as undercut as well, although parody remains:
The gaudy names Mr. Pynchon gives his characters are like pink slips, announcing their dismissal from the realm of human sympathy and concern. This contraction of the novel's scope makes impossible any genuine comedy, which depends on the observation of real human beings and their insurmountable, forgivable weaknesses. What replaces it is parody, whose target is language itself, and which operates by short-circuiting the discourses we usually take for granted. And it is as parody — in fact, a whole album of parodies — that "Against the Day" is most enjoyable.
Themes.
Critic Louis Menand sees an organizing theme of the book as
something like this: An enormous technological leap occurred in the decades around 1900. This advance was fired by some mixed-up combination of abstract mathematical speculation, capitalist greed, global geopolitical power struggle, and sheer mysticism. We know (roughly) how it all turned out, but if we had been living in those years it would have been impossible to sort out the fantastical possibilities from the plausible ones. Maybe we could split time and be in two places at once, or travel backward and forward at will, or maintain parallel lives in parallel universes. It turns out (so far) that we can’t. But we did split the atom — an achievement that must once have seemed equally far-fetched. "Against the Day" is a kind of inventory of the possibilities inherent in a particular moment in the history of the imagination. It is like a work of science fiction written in 1900.
Menand states that this theme also appeared in Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" and that it ties in with a concern present in nearly all of Pynchon's books:
Steven Moore, in a book review in "The Washington Post", writes:
Pynchon is mostly concerned with how decent people of any era cope under repressive regimes, be they political, economic or religious. [...] 'Capitalist Christer Republicans' are a recurring target of contempt, and bourgeois values are portrayed as essentially totalitarian."
Jazz (or, as Pynchon refers to it in one variant spelling of the novel's time period, "Jass") provides a non-hierarchical model of organization that the author relates to politics about a third of the way through the novel, according to Leith, who quotes from the passage, in which ‘Dope’ Breedlove, an Irish revolutionist at a Jazz-bar, makes the point. Breedlove characterises the Irish Land League as "the closest the world has ever come to a perfect Anarchist organization".
In a Bloomberg News review, Craig Seligman identifies three overarching themes in the novel: doubling, light and war.
Doubling.
"Pynchon makes much of a variety of calcite called Iceland spar, valued for its optical quality of double refraction; in Pynchonland, a magician can use it to split one person into two, who then wander off to lead their own lives", Seligman writes.
Sam Leith identifies the same theme: 
War.
Although the novel directly portrays the First Balkan War (1912–1913) and the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), it dispatches World War I after a few pages. But during most of the book the Great War "looms as an approaching catastrophe", according to Seligman. This theme might form part of what Menand describes above as the struggle between power-pursuers and power-transcenders.
Reviewer Adam Kirsch criticizes Pynchon's overall treatment of political violence:
Light.
Light becomes a "preoccupation [...] to which everything, finally, returns", according to reviewer Sam Leith.
Light appears as a religious symbol or element and as a scientific phenomenon, as Peter Keouge, in his "Boston Phoenix" review points out:
In his "Bloomberg News" review, Craig Seligman portrays the book as "overstuffed with wonders" often related to light, including a luminous Mexican beetle and the Tunguska Event of 1908 that leaves the native reindeer soaring and "stimulated by the accompanying radiation into an epidermal luminescence at the red end of the spectrum, particularly around the nasal area" (reminiscent of the luminescence of a certain fictional reindeer). "[T]he novel is full of images of light, like those beetles and those noses (and the title)", Seligman reports.
Reviewer Tom Leclair notes light in various flashy appearances:
God said, 'Let there be light'; "Against the Day" collects ways our ancestors attempted to track light back to its source and replaced religion with alternative lights. There is the light of relativity, the odd light of electromagnetic storms, the light of the mysterious Tunguska event of 1908, when a meteorite struck Siberia or God announced a coming apocalypse. [...] the dynamite flash, the diffracted light of Iceland spar, the reflected light of magicians' mirrors, the 'light writing' of photography and movies, the cities' new electric lighting that makes the heavens invisible at night.
Scott McLemee sees connections between light, space-time and politics:
It remains unclear whether Pynchon himself regards such escape or transcendence as really possible.
Critical reception.
The book received generally positive reviews from critics. While the review aggregator Metacritic no longer aggregates reviews for books, it was reported in 2007 that the book had an average score of 68 out of 100, based on 25 reviews.