I’m about seven hundred pages into his 2006 novel Against the Day, with almost another four hundred to go, and I’m here to tell you that it’s a fucking hoot! I don’t think that I could at any point so far have provided a coherent account of any given preceding hundred pages—one doesn’t read the thing so much as surf it—but it’s chockfull of hugely entertaining anecdotes and set pieces, and Pynchon by seventy had developed into a prose stylist of no mean gifts. The rap (well, one of the raps) on TP has been that he needs an editor, but so far I wouldn’t have this dazzling yarn a page shorter. Sample:
Life in Göttingen appeared to proceed on its blade-twinkling way, wheelfolks on brand-new bikes crashing into each other or careering out of control and scattering pedestrians, beer-drinkers quarreling and bowing, preoccupied Zetamaniacs forever on the verge of walking off the edge of the Promenade being rescued by companions, a town he had never loved become all at once a place, now he was obliged, it seemed, to leave it, whose most quotidian detail shone with a clarity almost painful, already a place of exile’s memory and no returning, and here just to make that official was the angel, if not of death at least of deep shit, and nobody else seemed to notice…
More anon.

cordially,