ATD Reviews
Review aggregators
Reviews
Please add any relevant reviews as they come in. Blog reviews are acceptable as long as they're substantial and more than just a few paragraphs.
12/11/06 - New York Magazine - Keith Gessen: ""
12/4/06 - New Statesman (UK)) - Rachel Aspden: ""
12/2/06 - The Times (UK) - Douglas Kennedy: ""
12/1/06 - Chicago Reader - Jonathan Rosenbaum: ""
12/2007 - Bookforum - Tom LeClair: "I hope some future scholar will read the novel twenty times and either illustrate how it recapitulates the whole history of narrative or demonstrate how every piece fits together into a fourfold design that will replace four-base genetics as a model of all life."
11/29/06 - The Times Literary Supplement (UK) - Sophie Ratcliffe: "This is not to say Pynchon suggests any solution. What he does is highlight how invisible our claims for salvation are, thus disturbing all the familiar comforts they might offer, including the comforts of the novel’s structure. This gets its clearest exposition in his handling of the relentlessly optimistic airborne crew at the novel’s end."
11/28/06 - Entertainment Weekly - Ken Tucker: ""
11/27/06 - Sci Fi Weekly - John Clute: "The hundreds of figures who jam into Against the Day are not in fact characters at all, because Pynchon has evacuated his book of that degree of hope. They are utterands: people-shaped utterances who illuminate the stories of the old world that their Author has placed before us in funeral array; they are codes to spell his book with."
11/26/06 - The Scotsman (UK), Scotland on Sunday - Stuart Kelly: ""
11/26/06 - Providence Journal - Sam Cole: ""
11/26/06 - The Oregonian - Richard Melo: ""
11/26/06 - The Observer (UK) - David Gale: ""
11/26/06 - The Independent (UK - Tim Martin: ""
11/26/06 - New York Times (Sunday book review) - Liesl Schillinger: "In “Against the Day,” Pynchon’s voice seems uncharacteristically earnest. He interrupts his narrative from time to time to lay down pronouncements that, taken together, probably constitute the fullest elaboration of his philosophy yet seen in print"
11/25/06 - The Guardian (UK) - James Lasdun: ""
11/25/06 - The Scotsman - Tom Adair: "a gaze that holds you in its grip for a thousand pages. Quite a feat."
11/24/06 - The Spectator (UK) - Sam Leith: ""
11/24/06 - Milwaukee Sentinel Journal - Mike Fischer: ""
11/22/06 - The Nation - John Leonard: ""
11/21/06 - Newsweek Pt. II - Malcom Jones: ""
11/21/06 - Library Journal - Barbara Hoffert: ""
11/21/06 - The Guardian/Comment Is Free (UK) - John Crace: ""
11/21/06 - Salon - Laura Miller: "it's obvious [Pynchon's] disciples now write better Big Idea novels than he does."
11/20/06 - Dissident Voice - Ron Jacobs: ""
11/20/06 - Bloomberg News - Craig Seligman: ""
11/20/06 - USA Today - Bob Minzesheimer: "Falling into a novel can be like enjoying a weekend trip to a place you've never been. Against the Day is more like going away for a month, getting lost on your way there and back, returning exhausted, but with bags full of stories."
11/20/06 - The Modern Word - Allen Ruch: "for those willing to suspend disbelief and leave the ground behind, Pynchon’s great Inconvenience proves to be one hell of a ride."
11/20/06 - New Yorker - Louis Menand: "with this one there is the feeling that the magician has fallen in love with his own stunts, as though Pynchon were composing a pastiche of a Pynchon novel."
11/20/06 - New York Times - Michiko Kakutani: "It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex." (Written by Michiko Kakutani, so let the reader definitely beware!)
11/19/06 - Philadelphia Inquirer - Carlin Romano: ""
11/19/06 - Cleveland Plain-Dealer - Jean Dubail: ""
11/19/06 - Washington Post - Steven Moore: “Pynchon fans will accept this gift from the author with gratitude, but I’m not so sure about mainstream readers.”
11/19/06 - Los Angeles Times - Christopher Sorrentino: “A book this long that amazes even 50% of the time is amazing.”
11/19/06 - Austin American-Statesman - Roger Gathman: "Forget it, fellow Pynchonians. [Against the Day] isn’t “Gravity’s Rainbow II.” That time, that place and that writer won’t ever come together again.”
11/19/06 - Newsday - Scott McLemee: "a novel as exhilarating, tiresome, unnerving and exhausting as all the others put together.”
11/19/06 - Boston Globe - Mark Feeney: ""
11/17/06 - Seattle Times - John Freeman: ""
11/17/06 - Newsweek Pt. I - Malcom Jones: ""
11/16/06 - Time Out New York - Joshua Rothkopf: ""
11/15/06 - New York Sun - Adam Kirsch: "The silliness of "Against the Day" about the very subjects where we are most urgently in quest of wisdom proves that, whatever he once was, Thomas Pynchon is no longer the novelist we need."
11/14/06 - The Complete Review: "impressive in its parts, but near confounding as a whole."
11/14/06 - The Phoenix - Peter Keough: “Undaunted in the past by the big questions that bug a guy, he here takes on, in addition to the elusive quality of light... time travel, multiple universes, the death struggle between anarchism and capitalism, the dance of order and chaos.”
11/13/06 - Time - Richard Lacayo: “More than in any of Pynchon’s previous books, just what it all means is a problem in Against the Day, where plots and ideas and fantastic developments pile up in exhausting profusion.”
11/3/06 - The Modern Word (first impressions): "It seems like the logical evolution/conclusion to Pynchon’s career as a prose experimentalist."
10/24/06 - Publisher's Weekly: "reads like half a dozen books duking it out for his, and the reader’s, attention. Most of them shine with a surreal incandescence, but even Pynchon fans may find their fealty tested now and again."
