Thomas Pynchon's extraordinarily long, labyrinthine new novel, Against the Day, is equal parts Jules Verne, Zane Grey, Dashiell Hammett, Henry Miller, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Monty Python. It is, at various points, everything one expects from a Thomas Pynchon novel?tangled, funny, prone to digressions, mind-numbingly convoluted, perceptive, over-the-top, louche, erudite, perplexing, heartfelt, encyclopedic, indulgent and, for the intrepid reader who makes it to the end, ultimately worth the often arduous journey.

Weighing in at around 1,100 densely typeset pages, Against the Day is not for the fainthearted (or the weak-muscled). The multiple plotlines repeatedly converge, diverge, then converge again, and it would be a fool's errand even to begin to try to summarize the plot with any hope of getting it all. The key word is "anarchy," which is the driving political motivation of some of the central characters, as well as the pervasive tone of the book. The story, or, more accurately, stories, begin at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exhibition, which marked the fourth centenary of Columbus' arrival in the New World and celebrated the dawn of what would much later be called the American Century. It closes in Los Angeles just after the First World War, as "the world as we knew it" has come to an end.

In between, the narrative travels just about everywhere you could imagine, from the Colorado mines and Mexican desert, to above the Arctic Circle and Siberia, to London, Venice, Paris and Sarajevo. There are occultists, mathematicians, vaudevillians, robber barons and double agents. At numerous points the story veers with a sci-fi insouciance in two alternate, parallel directions, a phenomenon Pynchon calls "Bilocations." Anachronisms are de rigueur, and adding to the fast-and-loose grasp on realism, a band of (perhaps fictional) Tom Swift-like adventurers called the Chums of Chance literally drift in and out of the story in a hydrogen sky ship.

Just grazing the tip of this daunting narrative iceberg, we can say that the predominant story involves the family of Webb Traverse, a dynamite-wielding anarchist bent on destroying the mining interests of East Coast millionaire Scarsdale Vibe. When Vibe has a couple of hired guns kill the explosives expert, two of Webb's sons, Frank and Reef, vow to avenge their father's death. But a third son, Kit, a brilliant "vectorist," is seduced by Vibe's offer of a Yale education, and the only daughter, Lake, actually runs off and marries one of her father's killers. Eventually, Kit and Reef both wind up in Europe, as the internecine intrigues leading up to the Great War percolate, and espionage, betrayal, spiritualism and no small amount of sexual deviation abound. Playing central roles are two women?Dahlia, an American actress, and Yashmeen, a mathematician from Kit's time at Cambridge?and a Wyatt Earp-like detective, Lew Basnight, who dips in and out of the story at key moments.

It has been nine years since the famously private Pynchon's last novel, Mason & Dixon, and it is not hard to imagine the National Book Award winner spending every waking hour during those years working on this doorstop of a book. Readers who have never read him before would be better served to begin with one of the earlier novels, notably the much more concise and accessible The Crying of Lot 49. But Pynchon devotees and other adventurous readers are sure to embrace Against the Day. Copyright 2006 BookPage Reviews.

Descending in balloons on the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the do-gooding young Chums of Chance (part of a worldwide brigade) get help from White City Investigations' Lew Basnight. Lew is soon off battling anarchists in the American West, where bad guys Deuce and Sloat do in Webb Traverse, whose daughter marries Deuce and whose son is escaping this accursedness at Yale. Meanwhile, the Chums float through the center of the earth to the Arctic, where they are alarmed to discover a scion of the robber Barron-ish Vibe family excavating a dangerous artifact. And that's just a minuscule part of the action in this grand Wellsian fantasia from the author of Gravity's Rainbow , whose skewed look at history is a powerful act of imagination, bending the rules (with quartz translucence figuring in somehow) to reveal "worlds which are set to the side." Written in packed, densely detailed prose too dryly smart and ironic to be called Baroque, the narrative has its longueurs, and different readers will likely take to different story lines (this reader was partial to the balloonists). But pick up another book for a break, and it will seem relentlessly ordinary. Brilliant if sometimes exasperating, Pynchon's latest is highly recommended for any library that takes its fiction seriously, with the warning that it does not yield easy pleasures and should not be read on deadline. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 8/06.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Knotty, paunchy, nutty, raunchy, Pynchon's first novel since Mason & Dixon (1997) 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. Yet just when his recurring themes threaten to become tics, this perennial Nobel bridesmaid engineers another never-before-seen phrase, or effect, and all but the most churlish resistance collapses.

It all begins in 1893, with an intrepid crew of young balloonists whose storybook adventures will bookend, interrupt and sometimes even be read by, scores of at least somewhat more realistic characters over the next 30 years. Chief among these figures are Colorado anarchist Webb Traverse and his children: Kit, a Yale- and Gttingen-educated mathematician; Frank, an engineer who joins the Mexican revolution; Reef, a cardsharp turned outlaw bomber who lands in a perversely tender mnage trois; and daughter Lake, another Pynchon heroine with a weakness for the absolute wrong man.

Psychological truth keeps pace with phantasmagorical invention throughout. In a Belgian interlude recalling Pynchon's incomparable Gravity's Rainbow , a refugee from the future conjures a horrific vision of the trench warfare to come: "League on league of filth, corpses by the uncounted thousands." This, scant pages after Kit nearly drowns in mayonnaise at the Regional Mayonnaise Works in West Flanders. Behind it all, linking these tonally divergent subplots and the book's cavalcade of characters, is a shared premonition of the blood-drenched doomsday just about to break above their heads.

Ever sympathetic to the weak over the strong, the comradely over the combine (and ever wary of false dichotomies), Pynchon's own aesthetic sometimes works against him. Despite himself, he'll reach for the portentous dream sequence, the exquisitely stage-managed weather, some perhaps not entirely digested historical research, the "invisible," the "unmappable"—when just as often it's the overlooked detail, the "scrawl of scarlet creeper on a bone-white wall," a bed partner's "full rangy nakedness and glow" that leaves a reader gutshot with wonder.

Now pushing 70, Pynchon remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below and sex from all sides. His new book will be bought and unread by the easily discouraged, read and reread by the cult of the difficult. True, beneath the book's jacket lurks the clamor of several novels clawing to get out. But that rushing you hear is the sound of the world, every banana peel and dynamite stick of it, trying to crowd its way in, and succeeding. (Nov.)