Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) -- He has been busy, it turns out. After a decade of silence, Thomas Pynchon has published his sixth novel, ``Against the Day'' -- more than 1,000 pages of his dark harmonies and of extravagant images that shimmer just past the brink of the possible.

Why the incontinent length? Partly because ``Against the Day'' is more like three novels.

The first, set in the U.S. and Mexico, is a revenge tale. It's about the children of Webb Traverse, a turn-of-the-century anarchist miner with an almost spiritual feeling for dynamite.

Pynchon, 69, still despises the power structure, yet where three decades ago, in ``Gravity's Rainbow,'' the enemy was a faceless, malignant Them, in ``Against the Day'' it's called the plutocracy and it's embodied in a Robber Baron named Scarsdale Vibe, a caricature of capitalist evil (``we set them beneath inhuman loads, we harvest from them their muscle and eyesight and health, leaving them in our kindness a few miserable years of broken gleanings'') for whom Webb is a vermin to be crushed.

The second novel, set in Europe, involves Cyprian Latewood, a homosexual twit possibly modeled on Evelyn Waugh's Sebastian Flyte, and Yashmeen Halfcourt, the beautiful mathematician he has fallen improbably in love with. When Yashmeen leaves Cambridge to study at Gottingen, she meets Webb's youngest son, another mathematician, and, with the jargon of higher mathematics rattling across the page (``eigenvalues of some Hermitian operator yet to be determined''), the stories start to intertwine.

Antique Diction

The third novel, and the most charming and the strangest, begins in 1893 aboard a fantasy ``hydrogen skyship'' piloted by five boys. Pynchon, who loves the antique diction of earlier eras (the 18th century in ``Mason & Dixon,'' the Renaissance in ``The Crying of Lot 49''), has a wonderful time parodying the juvenile science fiction of a century ago. Over the course of the book, as the boys shed their freshness and their optimism, this story grows weirder, darker.

``Against the Day'' is overstuffed with wonders -- a Mexican beetle so luminous that ``by the light of even one of them you could read the newspaper''; an atmospheric disturbance above Siberia (the historical Tunguska Event of 1908) that leaves the native reindeer soaring and ``stimulated by the accompanying radiation into an epidermal luminescence at the red end of the spectrum, particularly around the nasal area.''

There are the usual silly songs, puns and lots of sex, perverse and occasionally very funny.

Pynchonland's Magicians

Three overarching themes struggle to hold it all together. One is doubling. Pynchon makes much of a variety of calcite called Iceland spar, valued for its optical quality of double refraction; in Pynchonland, a magician can use it to split one person into two, who then wander off to lead their own lives.

The second is light itself; the novel is full of images of light, like those beetles and those noses (and the title). Finally, there's war. During most of ``Against the Day,'' the First World War looms as an approaching catastrophe. Pynchon writes, echoing the political paranoia of ``Gravity's Rainbow'':

``Central governments were never designed for peace ... The national idea depends on war. A general European war, with every striking worker a traitor, flags threatened, the sacred soils of homelands defiled, would be just the ticket to wipe Anarchism off the political map.''

Egalitarian Fury

These are words of rage, drawing on the egalitarian fury that has long fired Pynchon's work. But what's most dispiriting about ``Against the Day'' is how pro forma the rage feels. For all its beauty and melancholy, the book lacks the acid-trip intensity and the radical anger of the earlier work, and it might not be all that hard to figure out why.

Pynchon's novels have conquered the world. He's prosperous. He has a family -- the odes to family life in ``Against the Day'' do more than hint at happiness. Good for him. He's earned it. But contentment is no emotion to fuel a book this big.

A destructive streak -- or maybe it's just an ornery streak -- has always been a part of Pynchon's art. In his earlier books he'll violate a scene of the most delicate sadness or beauty with a dumb joke; it's like seeing a painter take a knife to his perfect canvas.

Yet the curious effect is of making the art even more intense; these funny, unhappy jokes are part of the reason ``Gravity's Rainbow'' seems etched in pain. In the new novel this self-undercutting takes the form of massive verbiage -- a kind of dare to the reader drowning in words to keep forging ahead.

Crowd of Characters

In Proust -- to cite the most obvious instance of the gargantuan novel -- the characters grow and change. When one of them reappears after 500 pages, the new incarnation is a surprise and a delight. But Pynchon has never really been a novelist of character, and this book has dozens, maybe hundreds of them, all with funny names. Too often when somebody turned up after a long absence I couldn't remember where we'd met before.

Having finally finished, I felt like an exhausted swimmer crawling onto the far shore of a body of water that turned out to be even wider than it looked. And like the swimmer, I remember more about the effort than the scenery I passed along the way.

``Against the Day'' is published by Penguin Press (1,085 pages, $35).

(Craig Seligman is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Craig Seligman at cseligman@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 20, 2006 10:54 EST