Against the Day.

Against the Day (Penguin Press, 2006) is Thomas Pynchon's seventh novel and one of the most sprawling and encyclopedic works of fiction produced in the American literary tradition - a nearly eleven-hundred-page behemoth that ranges across the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, from the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition to the aftermath of the First World War. The novel weaves together an almost overwhelming multiplicity of storylines, characters, and registers, following anarchists and capitalists, mathematicians and spies, Balkan revolutionaries and Venetian glass workers, a family of Colorado dynamiters, and an airship crew called the Chums of Chance across a fictional geography that encompasses the American West, London, Central Asia, the Balkans, and Mexico. Characteristically for Pynchon, the novel's surface pleasures - it's slapstick comedy, its genre parody, its exuberant narrative energy - serve as vehicles for a deeply serious inquiry into the historical forces that shaped the modern world: the violence of industrial capitalism, the entropy of empire, the consolations and limits of anarchist resistance, and the catastrophe of 1914 that brought a particular dream of human possibility to an end.