Against the Day

Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day, published in 2006, tells the story of how two generations of working families, the Rideouts and the Traverses, fare from 1893 until the mid 1920's. Typical of Pynchon's style and the encyclopedic novel, Against the Day develops no character particularly much, but often uses them to articulate watershed historical developments in more depth than ordinarily expected of fiction. Both families originate in the west and midwest of the United States, where the Traverses live anti-establishment lives rebelling, in their ways, against the life-draining and exploitive practices of robber barons and fast-growing corporations, particularly of the mining and railroad industries. The Rideouts lead more free-spirited lives, which cross paths frequently with the Traverses.

Merle Rideout follows a career oriented around graphic representations of light ("redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals" (80)), such as photography. Merle's adoptive daughter Dahlia (Dally) travels to New York, Venice, the Balkans, and Paris. Webb Traverse, believed to be "The Kieselguhr Kid"--a mysterious Anarchist expert with dynamite who blows up the property of oppressive corporations--fathers three sons and a daughter, Frank, Reef, Kit, and Lake, who follow in his footsteps in different ways. Early in the novel, the tycoon Scarsdale Vibe, the novel's personification of capitalist villainy, has his henchmen murder Webb Traverse, and the Traverses' impetus to revenge against Vibe and his family structures much of the novel's story, though it is never the main story.