It's a very bad sign that, when no more than 50 pages into a book, you not only begin to question why you are bothering to read the thing, but are wondering aloud why the book even exists.

		"AGAINST THE DAY" By Thomas Pynchon Penguin Press ($35)

Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day" inspires these questions in its readers. While I can confidently answer the former, I'm reading the novel because I agreed to do it; the latter proves as puzzling to me now as it did on Page 43.

There are a few things I can confidently say about Pynchon:

As a recluse of American letters his mystique is second only to J.D. Salinger (he once appeared on an episode of "The Simpsons," his cartoon alter-ego wearing a paper bag over its head); he once wrote the incredibly flattering liner notes to a particularly lousy album by a band nobody bothered to care about; and, most importantly, his books are never, ever boring.

All of that, excepting the last I'm sorry to say, still holds.

Pynchon has finally written a mind-numbingly dull book that, at a bloated 1,085 pages, not only feels like it will never end, but also seems to be adding more pages to itself the farther along you go.

Ostensibly a tale of revenge wherein two sons set out to avenge the murder of their father, his novel sets the task for itself to do anything and everything to hinder the reader's ability to follow what little shred of a plot the book can claim.

Instead Pynchon throws all the tricks in his bag at his audience without any understanding of what does and does not work; from anarchists and the White City (the Columbian Exposition of 1893) to a dog with a real jones for the novels of Henry James and a nutty-professor cameo by Nikolai Tesla.

Even Archduke Franz Ferdinand pops up playing the dozens in a Chicago jazz club, asking, "Something about ... your ... wait ... deine Mutti, as you would say, your ... your mama, she plays for the Chicago Whote Stockings, nicht wahr?"

It's probably safe to say that whatever tiny whim that fluttered into Pynchon's brain took the express route down his arms, through his fingers and into the keys of his typewriter, and is now permanently pressed between the pages.

He appears to be practicing what may have proven to be a very interesting bit of sleight of hand with this book.

His primary strategy is historical displacement. While the novel takes place during the first decades of the 20th century, its real concern is the first decade of the 21st. It's hard not feel a shock of recognition at lines such as:

"(C)ause with them what you always have to be listening for is the opposite of what they say. 'Freedom,' then's the time to watch your back in particular -- start telling you how free you are, somethin's up, next thing you know the gates have slammed shut and there's the Captain givin you them looks... 'Compassion' means the population of starving, homeless, and dead is about to take another jump. So forth. Why, you could write a whole foreign phrase book just on what Republicans have to say."

Readers may also find the style of Pynchon's prose to be somewhat disorienting. Various imitations of pulp prose, most notably that of hard-boiled detective fiction, and boys' adventure stories are deployed throughout.

Perhaps I'm making a stretch here, but coupling Pynchon's absurdist rewrite of factual history with the language of such obvious and poorly composed fictions reads like nothing more than an indictment against our current historical moment.

James Frey's lies posing as autobiography and the Bush administration's newspeak-rendering of its various blundering policies (sectarian violence not civil war, detainees rather than prisoners of war, the Clear Skies bill, which actually encourages polluters, etc.) were no doubt attractive fodder for a satirist like Pynchon. Unfortunately, "Against the Day" is such an unrewarding read.

The author's prose in previous novels had been downright electric. There was so much energy in the sentences, so much goofy humor that you could not help but be swept up in the author's enthusiasm for weird arcane and technical mumbo-jumbo.

Here, the prose is drained of all vigor and the convolutions of Pynchon's sentences, rather than being deliriously dizzying as one had come to expect, are merely evidence of a writer no longer at the top of his game trying desperately to achieve the dazzle that once had been second nature.

All in all "Against the Day" is the most disappointing book I've read in a very long time.