SOMEWHERE AMID THE vast, sprawling terrain that is Thomas Pynchon’s new novel Against the Day, I found myself thinking about the sardonic comment made by Rossini, who had just sat through Wagner’s entire Ring cycle. When asked for a critical judgment on the Great Teuton’s epic undertaking, he said: “Well, it has some terrific quarter-of-an-hours.”

Granted, there have always been certain Götterdämmerung overtones to the Pynchon oeuvre. What other contemporary novelist has dealt with — in such an unabashedly voluminous and ambitious way — the crazed, nihilistic dance of modern life or the wholesale detritus of the American Century? What other postwar writer has dared to create such capacious fantasias on technology’s manifold horrors, yet simultaneously dazzled and/or overwhelmed the reader with a level of polymathic erudition that leaves most mere mortals (this one included) feeling punch-drunk from information overload?

Remember those circus performers who could twirl four plates atop billiard cues while pirouetting on a tightrope? Pynchon has always struck me as their literary equivalent. Consider his first novel V — in which he blended elements of a spy story with a detailed description of someone getting a nose job, not to mention a nod in the direction of Wittgensteinian thought with a wholly mad account of hunting for alligators in the New York sewer system.

Or then there is Gravity’s Rainbow — that meta-novel which, on one level, concerns espionage activity and V2 Blitzkriegs in wartime London, but which reads like an extended LSD flashback, full of wildly discursive sub-plots, deranged musings about an entire panoply of subjects, toilet humour (there’s that whole business about a bomb dropping every time a certain American soldier finds that his member has become erect) and a genuine sense of despair at the human capacity for collective and individual madness.

That’s the thing about Pynchon — though his flights of narrative fancy can have you feeling as if you’ve been dropped into a labyrinth from which there is no logical escape, he still wants you to have a good time.

As such, I’ve always considered him to be a literary showman — and a deeply American one to boot. After all, showing off is not considered a mortal sin in American life (on the contrary, it’s regarded as a sign of enviable assertiveness) and, like Bellow, Pynchon also loves to intermingle the ultra-cerebral with the lowbrow (remember the Tupperware party in The Crying of Lot 49 — a novel that, among other things, grapples with the way that life can turn you just a bit monomaniacal).

Certainly, Pynchon’s new novel displays, for all to see, his “lost in the funhouse” narrative proclivities, his intellectual super-nova fireworks and his delight in the arcane, the base, the idiotic.

But don’t open this 1,085-page book (which, just for the record, weighs 1.4kg) expecting to find anything resembling even a convoluted plot line. We start at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Our attention is taken up with a group of adventurers who like to go exploring in balloons.

But though the balloonists float (pun intended) in and out of the narrative, we also find ourselves spending time in the middle of a nasty Colorado labour dispute. We do time in a mayonnaise factory in Belgium (where an American maths whizz nearly loses his life in a vat of vinegar-flavoured egg yolks). We follow the flight of fugitives in high Balkan terrain. We bump into Bela Lugosi. We get sent to the University of Göttingen (with the previously mentioned American academic).

We learn a thing or two about card sharks, and about the Mexican revolution, and about the nascent days of film-making, and about the zeal of early 20th-century robber barons, and about an obscure part of Siberia called Tunguska (site of a huge explosion caused by an exploding extraterrestrial object), and about . . .

()Well, you get the idea — for these are but a handful of the narrative threads (all this and the First World War!) that comprise Pynchon’s crazy quilt. As such the book might strike many as one of those “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter” novels that seems to be in love with its demoniacal density and vertiginous razzle-dazzle. And I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that, at times, the novel lost me, forcing me to slog through some of its more obscurantist moments.

Given that, Against the Day eventually settles down into weirdly compelling reading — that does not require the reader to assume higher cognitive powers or a love of all things recondite. Enter the book thinking of Pynchon as P. T. Barnum — a great ringmaster, about to take you on a guided tour of the material, technological, geopolitical and philosophical forces that shaped the early years of the previous century — and you might just find yourself (as I did) caught up in its circus-like reveries. Pynchon can be totally maddening, but he has a great sense of mischief.

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