Enigmatic novelist delivers another dense, majestic plot

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AGAINST THE DAY

By Thomas Pynchon

Penguin Press, $35, 1,085 pages

REVIEWED BY BRUCE ALLEN

Thus far, both the Library of America and the Nobel prize givers have declined to honor him, despite impressive (if not oppressive) evidence that Thomas Pynchon is an American writer like none other before him. Behind the cloak of reclusiveness he has worn for more than 40 years lurks the possessor of a versatile intelligence that straddles almost casually what C.P. Snow called the two cultures of science and literature, and an analyst of historical, contemporary and future shock who observes the likely consequences of our global endgames with a grief-stricken stand-up comedian's cadaverous grin.

Though few readers can command the range of knowledge and reference his burly books contain, we've known for some time more or less what Mr. Pynchon is up to. His first novel "V" (1963) brilliantly conjoins the pursuit of a mysteriously elusive woman with a quest bent on unmasking the forces that rule, and threaten the universe. Paranoia assumes simpler form in "The Crying of Lot 49" (1965), about a lone woman's efforts to comprehend the machinations of an "underground" postal system.

The massive "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973) considers the consequences of applied science and super-sophisticated technology in the theater of world war (WWII), and the hearts and minds of those who would control, if not destroy us all. After "dropping out," as it were, to portray California's hippie culture imperiled by soulless bureaucrats in "Vineland" (1990), Mr. Pynchon rattled our brains again with "Mason and Dixon" (1997), an ebullient historical novel which pits its eponymous surveyors' reductive mathematical calculations against a "wild" young country unprepared for such definition and regulation.

The planet is in trouble again in Mr. Pynchon's huge, shaggy sixth novel. "Against the Day" returns to the inglorious days of yesteryear, and yes, Virginia, it was a simpler, more innocent time. However, its movers and shakers sowed seeds that would become the future. This, God help us all, will be the case with our present age.

This time around, Mr. Pynchon likewise returns to the encyclopedic multi-plotting of "Gravity's Rainbow." The novel's trajectories are located in two diametrically opposed clusters of characters. We meet the first as the story begins, in the air, where a group of aeronautical adventurers, the Chums of Chance (whose feats of daring and good will are chronicled in a series of bestselling adventure books for boys), have pointed their "hydrogen skyship" the Inconvenience toward Chicago, and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. (Attendees will also include Austria's Archduke Ferdinand, but that's another story.)