Charlie Kaufman speaketh.

I finally got my hands on a copy of Synecdoche, NY. It is mad. Asylum-grade mad. I love it more than anything else in my life at the moment. Here is a passage (Caden = protag, Madeline = his therapist):

CADEN

Oh, I wanted to ask, how old are
kids when they start to write?

MADELINE
Varies.

CADEN
Could a four year old keep a diary?

MADELINE
There's a brilliant novel
written by a four year old.

CADEN
Really?

MADELINE
'Little Winky.' By Horace Wood.

CADEN
Cute.

MADELINE
Hardly. Little Winky is a virulent anti-semite, who
works in a gin mill during prohibition. The story
follows his initiation into the Klan, his introduction
to the pornographic snuff industry and his ultimate
degradation at the hands of a black ex-convict, with
whom he embarks upon a homosexual affair.

CADEN
Wow.

MADELINE
He killed himself at five.

Now you know what I mean.

This here afterglow.

I just finished reading Against The Day. It's big and plucky and brilliant. Every page nurses a line/paragraph/turn of phrase/idea so drop-dead magnificent that you have to stop, backtrack, re-read it immediately. The language here is a drug; you will read the book in big, greedy, breathless binges. This bit, for instance, on page 805, which I hereby declare The Definitive Passage of ATD, an apt distillation of 1,085 wondrous pages:

It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day.

May you fly toward grace, Mr Pynchon, sucking us all along in your slipstream.