You're a busy person, what with reading blogs, magazines, Captivate Network, instant messages, e-mail newsletters, the nutritional value labels on potato chip bags, and the use-by date on your A.D.D. medication between watching TV, showering, occasionally spending time with loved ones, and sleeping. You definitely don't have the kind of time needed to read Thomas Pynchon's 1,085 page cinderblock Against the Day.

Hell, you probably don't even have time to read the reviews of Against the Day. Well, maybe you can make some time in your busy day to read this rundown of Pynchon's reviews, big shot. (And call your mother—she's worried sick.)

Review nuggets after the jump!

• "Whereas Mr. Pynchon's last novel, the stunning 'Mason & Dixon,' demonstrated a new psychological depth, depicting its two heroes as full-fledged human beings, not merely as pawns in the author's philosophical chess game, the people in 'Against the Day' are little more than stick figure cartoons."—"A Pynchonesque Turn by Pynchon," by Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times, November 20, 2006

• "Part of the problem lies in a conflict between Pynchon's would-be populism and the gnomic, smarty-pants style of fiction he practically invented. In his ethos, the brave, heroic, decent individual is pitted against merciless institutions, systems and elites (he's got a thing about Ivy Leaguers) that openly or covertly run the world. (He's also prone to personifying those systems, hence the mustache-twirling villainy of Scarsdale Vibe.) That's the essence of Pynchonian paranoia, but the rub is that Pynchon's heroes (in this novel, at least) aren't paranoid. True understanding is reserved for the author—or dedicated reader—who's capable of grasping the "secret" knowledge of how the world really works. It's no coincidence that the character in "Against the Day" who most resembles an actual reflective human being (and presumably the one the author most identifies with) winds up as an initiate in a quasi-gnostic religious order."—"The fall of the house of Pynchon," by Laura Miller, Salon, November 21, 2006

• "[I]n 'Against the Day,' Pynchon takes to the sky, as if to gain a better vantage on what lies beneath. However, setting his narrative (notionally) around the turn of the last century, he soon decides he would rather not look down after all. Far better to ponder alternative realities: 'a giant railway-depot, with thousands of gates disposed radially in all dimensions, leading to tracks of departure to all manner of alternate Histories.' Beating a retreat from the injustices of capitalism and the looming atrocity of World War I, he builds himself the refuge of a dream-draped world by overlaying bloody late-19th-century labor disputes and 20th-century catastrophes with the raiment of escapist popular literature.—"Dream Maps," by Liesl Schillinger, the New York Times Book Review (page 1 review), November 26, 2006

• "From one point of view, perhaps a narrow one, there is an error of scale here. As we read, we are frustrated looking forward and forgetful looking backward—episodes open and fail satisfactorily to close, or, when they come back on line, we can no longer remember how they started. But compared with the hill in your back yard, Mt. Everest is an error of scale. The universe is an error of scale. Scale and form are functions of our capacity to perceive them. The preposterous length of the new book does include a vertiginous sensation, somewhat in the way of a 'Where's Waldo?' cartoon: the text exceeds our ability to keep everything in our heads, to take it all in at once."—"Do The Math," by Louis Menand, the New Yorker, November 27, 2006

• "The fun of Pynchon's books—and they are in fact more fun than not, and this is for better and worse one of the key differences between Pynchon and the major novelists who preceded him—has always been to read them into the present. Gravity's Rainbow, while ostensibly about World War II, was actually about American Cold War hegemony and Vietnam; Against the Day likewise works with what feels like contemporary material, though its subject is ostensibly the turn of the twentieth century."—"Thomas Pynchon vs. the World," by Keith Gessen, New York, December 4, 2006

• "As usual, there are dozens of characters with silly names (Mia Culpepper, an astrologist, is my favorite, but Pleiade Lafrisee's hard to beat). And dozens of words we have to look up (absquatulated, fulgurescence, xanthocroid, cataplexy). And geography-drops to shame Bruce Chatwin (Tsangpo-Brahmaputra, Domodossola). And snacks to sate velociraptors (brain tacos, Meat Olaf). And, though nothing is quite as addictive as a blood vendetta, enough mind-altering substances to kill the White Rabbit (opium beer, cactus peyote, chloral hydrate, cigarettes soaked in absinthe, 'cocainized brain tonics' and somewhere on the Silk Road between Turfan and Novosibirsk a flowering hemp twelve feet tall and fungomaniacs who drink each other's urine)."—"Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind," by John Leonard, the Nation, December 11, 2006

• "Grade: A."—"Recluse Driving," by Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly, November 24, 2006

PREVIOUSLY
• Pynchon's Son a Big Man on Campus