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• eric - Mar 20 2007 | books, Thomas Pynchon, The Morning News, Tournament of Books, thepugetnews

  In The Morning News Tournament of Books, Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day," kicked the hell out of Brian K. Vaughan's and Niko Henrichon's graphic novel, "Pride of Baghdad."

  Can I get a "What what?"

  Quoted: Look, pretend for a moment you’re an ant. To read The Pride of Baghdad is to take a trip across a leaf. It’s fairly absorbing. There’s lots to see. Your view of the world might be minimally altered once you get across it.

  Quoted: To read Against the Day is to spend a boatload of ant-lifetimes exploring a tree with a trunk as big as a beer truck. There are forks and boughs and limbs and twigs and parasitic vines and tens of thousands of shimmering leaves. The tree moves and even seems to grow; you experience it only a centimeter at a time, but as you climb you begin to sense its vast, beyond-baroque architecture, its athletic density, its almost miraculous existence as a self-contained entity, simultaneously highbrow and lowbrow, ironic and heartfelt, campy and genuine.

  Quoted: Against the Day is a messy novel, fat as a phone book, foaming over with pop-fiction prose and go-nowhere chatter. It is not built to please, and readers who like their stories tidily put to rights will quickly find their brains pulped. But I am very grateful I had the opportunity to read it.