The Road v. Against the Day
presented by
ZOMBIE ROUND
The Road
v. Against the Day
Judged by Andrew Womack
TMN Founding Editor Andrew Womack lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He has no connections to any of this year’s authors.
About 300 pages into Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day—you know, right around when it’s starting to make sense—I got the flu. It began in the morning with the aches, then the fever set in pretty quickly, and I was under the blankets by afternoon. The timing really couldn’t have been better. I, like the judges before me, dreaded this 1,100-page monster. I cheered when it was knocked out in the semifinals; I groaned when it climbed out of its grave for the Zombie Round; then it chomped me in the arm and gave me some kind of bacteria. And with that bacteria came lots of time to do nothing but read.
I continued through the book, though I confess to passing out a number of times—I cannot guarantee I was always able to find exactly where I’d left off when I came to.
Things got blurry. The book’s details jumbled in my mind, and Pynchon’s many characters’ many tangents crossed me up. Deciding Against the Day was not getting its due from me right then, I set it aside for The Road.
The fever faded in and out. I still felt like death, and the tone of The Road could not have matched more perfectly. I am a sucker for apocalypse tales, and to Maria Schneider’s quip that The Road could have been directed by Steven Spielberg, I’d like to add: “And starring Charlton Heston.” Except if the mutants from Omega Man were trying to eat the other survivors—or worse. There’s hardly anything cheesy about The Road—sorry Charlton, but this isn’t Soylent Green—it’s more along the lines of 28 Days Later or Children of Men. (And to continue that line of thinking, Against the Day is more like Wild Wild West. Seriously.)
I finished The Road. And as my condition improved I returned to Pynchon’s tome, which I’d been using as an ottoman while recuperating. As much as I tried to get back into the book—or into it at all—The Road stuck with me. Even healthy, I couldn’t pay attention to Against the Day. It felt pointless, wasteful, fictional (if that can be used pejoratively here). I could think of so many better things to do than read Against the Day. Instead, I wanted to re-read The Road. (And I since have.) I wanted to find out more about the dangers of pollution and global warming. I wanted to hold my loved ones close.
McCarthy’s vision of a wasteland goes beyond anything I’ve ever read or seen, and is so conceptually possible as to be nothing less than chilling. With an economy of words, McCarthy travels an astounding distance; yet with nearly five times the content, Pynchon accomplishes monumentally less.
Advancing:
The Road
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
WARNER: For me, by far the best part of the Tournament of Books is the transparency, a function of the structure for sure, but a byproduct of the judges’ willingness to tell it exactly as they saw it as well.
So here we have Andrew Womack being the third out of four judges to admit to being defeated by Against the Day with the flu apparently playing a contributing factor in this case. Props for the effort, though. I had my own recent bout with this plague and couldn’t manage to read the dosage guidelines on the Tylenol PM—resulting in a three-day coma—let alone a thousand-page novel.
Let this honesty spread to the awards where authors receive cash prizes and crystal figurines instead of live fowl. Imagine the National Book Award or Pulitzer juries actually releasing the transcripts of their deliberations so we can find out what really happened. Don’t you think it’s entirely possible that when faced with 20 books to consider for a prize that three-quarters of the judging panel just says no to Pynchon’s latest whale when it comes time to give it a look? Don’t get me wrong. I like Pynchon. I think he’s an absolute giant in American literature. I’ve read just about all his books, but in each case it was a mission, a commitment, as in, this month I’m not going to do the dishes or speak to my family or bathe because I’m reading Gravity’s Rainbow. This is what makes Pynchon great, but perhaps also what makes him a bad bet for literary awards.
If we could get him to come out of seclusion, perhaps we could ask him how he feels about being denied the Pulitzer and the Rooster.
GUILFOILE: Yeah, wouldn’t it be great if the Pulitzer committee would come out and say, “We almost gave the award to Pynchon, but one of our judges had the flu and just couldn’t deal with him this week.” Because you know that happens all the time.
But this was the battle of heavyweights that Tournament observers were waiting for. Pynchon was the battler who outlasted every judge and just wouldn’t die, and McCarthy was the man of destiny. A thrilling start to the Zombie Round.
Speaking of destiny, The Road’s move into the finals puts Brockman way out in front of the Book Bloggers’ Office Pool. The only thing that could keep his champagne corked at this point would be the loss tomorrow of the undefeated One Good Turn to Absurdistan, a top-seeded, first-round flop brought back to life by TMN readers.
Then things would get interesting. Stay in your seats everybody.