With “Against The Day” receiving mixed reviews, it’s important to present both sides. New York Times gave the book a thrashing last week, from a reviewer who claimed Pynchon had lost it, as if every page of “Gravity’s Rainbow” made perfect sense to him (even Pynchon admits that on some pages he was so drunk nothing meaningful should be taken from them). Mike Fischer of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is a bit more kind to the latest Pynchon.

Calling the book “masterful” and “epic,” Fischer was clearly enthralled with Pynchon’s unusual approach to history. Metaphors run rampant in Pynchon’s works, but some people would rather read a history book and learn the “facts.” Pychon likes to play with history and science like a ball of clay, and he’s made it clear that he is the one who owns it. No other writer living today can morph reality in so many complex ways while remaining an enjoyable read.

Fischer clearly sees things that way. I think of Pynchon as a William S. Burroughs-type writer, except more focused on technology than drugs. Burroughs once said something like “if you can’t figure out how I went from Interzone to Paris in a single paragraph, I can’t really help you.” Perhaps after years of reviewing books from the likes of James Patterson and ‘Da Vinci Dan’ Brown, reviewers from the likes of the New York Times have become soft. They need to have their hands held from page to page so they don’t encounter any literary danger, such as a sentence they can’t understand the first time they pass over it.

I don’t require every book reviewer to love Pynchon. I just want them to attempt to understand it. I have the same problem with movie reviewers. Should Roger Ebert review a film like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? He trashed the movie and basically said it disgraced a literary classic, without making any direct references to the book. My gut tells me he never had the chance to read the book, because he lived through the 1950s three times and then skipped right into the 1980s.

Fischer is a Pynchon fan. It’s obvious from his review. I doubt there will be many reviewers who will read Pynchon’s back catalog before reviewing “Against The Day,” which probably decreases the chances it will get a good review. It’s obviously not a book for the casual reader of writers I’ve listed above, which is a group most reviewers fall into.  I just hope enough experienced Pynchon readers come out to review this book before it gets thrown in the dumpster.

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