Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
Published 2006 · 1,093 pages · 390,000 words · about 26 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Postmodern Fiction
How hard is Against the Day to read?
Against the Day scores 74 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 80 out of 100
- Technical vocabularies from mathematics, physics, mining, explosives, and multiple national cultures. The genre pastiches bring their own specialized lexicons.
- Sentence structure: 72 out of 100
- Varies by section — some passages are in plain adventure-story prose, others in elaborate periodic sentences. The shifts between registers are themselves a source of complexity.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Mathematical concepts like quaternions and birefringence function both literally and metaphorically. The novel thinks through physics and geometry rather than conventional philosophical argument.
- Information density: 80 out of 100
- Nearly 400,000 words packed with historical, scientific, geographical, and political information across multiple continents and two decades. The cast of characters numbers in the hundreds.
- Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
- Dozens of plotlines that may or may not converge. Genre pastiches that may be literal or metaphorical. Characters who may be doubles of each other. The novel resists summary.
- Symbolic density: 75 out of 100
- Light — its splitting, refraction, and polarization — serves as the novel's master metaphor. Dynamite, the airship, the underground, and the Line all carry heavy symbolic loads.
- Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
- The genre pastiches are played with affection as much as irony. The political sympathies are earnest. But the novel maintains a comic distance from its own immensity.
- Resolution withholding: 75 out of 100
- Many plotlines are left unresolved or resolved only glancingly. The novel's final image is of ascension and possibility rather than closure.
- Structural complexity: 82 out of 100
- Five major sections spanning twenty-five years with dozens of interwoven plotlines across multiple continents. Genre shifts function as structural rather than merely stylistic events.
How Against the Day is regarded
Against the Day holds a literary regard score of 66 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.