Against the Day

Against the Day is a historical novel by Thomas Pynchon, published in November 2006. It is set between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the years immediately after the First World War, and it gathers more than a hundred characters across the United States, Europe, Mexico, Central Asia and Africa, along with, in the author's own synopsis, "one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all."

The most recognizable thread is a story of revenge. Webb Traverse, an anarchist who uses dynamite against the mining and railroad interests of the West, is killed by two gunmen hired by the arch-plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe. His sons set out to avenge their father. Around this line unfold countless episodes, digressions and minor characters who return much later, together with abrupt shifts of tone that parody various styles of popular fiction. Among the cast are the Chums of Chance, the crew of an airship; the mathematician Yashmeen Halfcourt; the psychical detective Lew Basnight; and appearances by Nikola Tesla, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Marx Brothers, among others.

The book belongs to what is often called historiographic metafiction or metahistorical romance: it recreates a real period, but through an imagination that blends fact, myth and literary allusion. Its title alludes to verses in the Book of Job and the Second Epistle of Peter, and the notion of the day of judgment runs through its pages. At roughly 1,085 pages, it is Pynchon's longest novel to date.

Its critical reception was largely positive, though many reviewers stressed how hard the tangled plot is to follow. Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker, described a text that exceeds the reader's capacity to hold everything in mind, reading that overload as part of the deliberate design: a simulation of the disorienting excess of modern culture.