"Against the Day"

At 10:49 pm on April 27, 2008, I finally finished Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day." I started it in November. At first, I thought it was the best book I had ever read. By the time I decided to finish it today, I thought that it might be the worst. There are stretches of the book that seem designed to punish. There are paragraphs of exquisite beauty. There are silly names. There is something like transcendence, although it may happen towards the start of the book or right at the very end. When I think back on every book that I have read this last year and a half, I will always think of them as tangents away from "Against the Day." Some strange part of my life is over, now. Some kind of passion has been expended. I became more afraid with every word in the last paragraph - afraid that when I finished the book I would die, my own existence a metafictional extra-narrative multimedia subplot dreamed up by Pynchon himself; and maybe afraid that the book would never explain itself, that there would be no final understanding, that the real meaning of "Against the Day" was behind me. That there was something I had missed, starting the book on the plane out to Hawaii (for a Family Christmas reunion), or on a ship sailing along the Mexican Coastline (for Spring Break), or at school when I was a student, or at home when I was a nothing, or here, in San Francisco, living a life I could never have imagined in 2006. "Against the Day" was never just a book, not for me.