“I don’t know why Against the Day hasn’t been banned” | Ishmael Reed on Thomas Pynchon

I don’t know why Against the Day hasn’t been banned. In one of the most remarkable scenes penned by an American writer, Pynchon cites events that the anti-woke crowd would want deleted. Referring to the Blacks and Filipinos, Mexicans and hillbillies who are present in that scene, the character Lew Basnight “gradually understood that what everybody here had in common was having survived some cataclysm none of them spoke about directly — a bombing, a massacre perhaps at the behest of the U.S. government.” Those with prominent media megaphones today are denying that such cataclysms took place.

Ishmael Reed on one of his favorite Thomas Pynchon novels. The extract is from a piece in The New York Times on different writers and artists sharing their “favorite pinch of Pynchon.” William Gibson’s riff is especially nice too–he singles out Father Rapier’s sermon on They/we systems in Gravity’s Rainbow. Don DeLillo contributes a loose haiku. I didn’t read the remarks of Homer and Lisa Simpson.