Against the Day (and past midnight...)
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
We kept the store open past midnight on Monday to sell the new Thomas Pynchon book, Against the Day. It was a cute idea, one for which, from a retail standpoint, I wasn't very hopeful. I supposed that people who liked Pynchon were smart enough to know that the book was not going to inspire a Harry-Potteresque midnight rush, and that the book would be very much available at breakfast and for six years thereafter on reminder, just like Pynchon's last book.
So I was surprised to find a small, intellectual-looking crowd milling around at 11:55, checking their watches. It was an odd crowd, mostly men, all displaying irregular haircuts--I'm not talking about the rakish, rock-star kind, but rather the kind that are performed in mirrors by bachelors or emphasized by peripatetic combovers. The atmosphere was jovial. A very young journalist was there, interviewing people. A man I'll call Fred--a fungally middle-aged, elvin professional and regular to the bookstore, who at noon looks as if he'd just rolled out of bed, and at midnight looks as if he'd actually stayed in it--followed the young journalist around, chatting. At one point he pulled from his trenchcoat a warped, soiled peice of paper he had been carrying around for weeks. It was a poem in rhymed couplets celebrating the release of the book and excoriating James Woods and Machiko Kakutani in advance for the bad reviews they were likely to bestow upon Pynchon (he was right, as it turned out). When he wasn't following the young journalist around, he was following me around, sort of chatting unconsciously and a bit giddily in expectation of a circus atmosphere to meet the sale of the book. The stray white hairs of his combover pointed in every direction, as at a cossroads. I believe he was expecting nudity. We were joined at one point by a travel writer for the New York Times, a pleasant, intelligent and quite patient Pynchon fan on whom I foisted Fred for a while, at just about the time Fred started fumbling through his pocket for the umpteenth performance of his poem.
There is a red-eyed fetishistic thing-love that science fiction geeks, grad students, gamers and conspiracy theorists don't admit they all share until they're standing in a bookstore waiting for the new Pynchon to go on sale. Together they made the night a success, and bought enough Pynchon to pay a week and a half of my salary, which is not as many books as it sounds, but is still respectable. I joined them at the end of the night a bought a copy, a little red-eyed myself. I mean, come on, it opens with a team of teenaged balloonists travelling to the 1893 Columbian Exposition. You don't have to be a geek to love that, right?
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:11 PM,
