Against The Day - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Nearly all reviewers of the book mention the Byzantine nature of the plot. Louis Menand in The New Yorker gives a simple description:

"his is the plot: An anarchist named Webb Traverse, who employs dynamite as a weapon against the mining and railroad interests out West, is killed by two gunmen, who were hired by the wicked arch-plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe. Traverse's sons set out to avenge their father’s murder. Of course, there are a zillion other things going on in Against the Day, but the Traverse-family revenge drama is the only one that resembles a plot that is, in Aristotle’s helpful definition, an action that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The rest of the novel is shapeless "

As to the multitude of plot dead-ends, pauses and confusing episodes that return to continue much later in the narrative, Menand writes:

"he text exceeds our ability to keep everything in our heads, to take it all in at once. There is too much going on among too many characters in too many places. This was all surely part of the intention, a simulation of the disorienting overload of modern culture."