The Light Over the Ranges, Chapter One: The Chums of Chance Visit the Chicago World's Fair!

I think I'm going to give each chapter here a title. Whether these titles will be more descriptive, jokey, or efforts to imitate the chapter's particular idiom...remains to be seen. But it seems fun.

Here we are introduced to the Chums of Chance. The book ends with them flying in and ends, twelve-hundred-odd pages later, with them flying out. These are heroes of boys' adventure stories in the Tom Swift of Submarine Boys vein. They are:

Randolph St. Cosmo--he's the leader of the bunch; you know him well. Unfortunately, he has little or no personality behind that. Or so I remember thinking; maybe he will reveal himself to have heretofore hidden dimensions.

Lindsay Noseworth--the puritanical, fastidious second-in-command.

Miles Blundell--the ship's cook. In this first chapter he's presented as just clumsy, but later on he'll reveal himself as a kind of mystic.

Darby Suckling--a few years younger than the others; presented as a brat, as well as the crew's "factotum and mascotte."

Chick Counterfly--the newest member of the crew; uncultured and unruly. He just recently joined Chums after they rescued him when he was being pursued by the Klan. An interesting detail that hints at the difference between the levels of reality here, as well as the social problems that the novel addresses. Anyway, Chick's cool. If you were a Chum of Chance, you'd want to be Chick. Okay, maybe Miles.

Pugnax--the ship's doggie. We first see him reading Henry James' Princess Cassamassima, a book dealing with anarchism--as, indeed, does this one.

You would be forgiven for finding this first chapter, written more or less in the idiom of such books, to be a little twee, especially with the Pynchon addressing himself to "my young readers" and the like. Needless to say, this will change. Still, I find it kind of charming. There's one surprising moment of scatology that I had totally overlooked when first reading it: "Pugnax had also learned, like the rest of the crew, to respond to "calls of nature" by proceeding to the downwind side of the gondola, resulting in surprises among the surface populations below." Chums of Chance excrement just raining down. On one level clearly just a juvenile joke for the sake of it, but on another it emphasizes a certain disjuncture here: you do not expect a book like the Chums' (or almost any, really, but theirs especially) to deal with such things. It's also funny to read this and realize that oh my goodness, for how G-rated this first part is, there is SO MUCH graphic sex later on in the book.

Anyway, the title basically says what the chapter is about: we're introduced to the Chums as they approach Chicago for the 1893 World's Fair. The chapter end with a cryptic exchange between Randolph and Chick about how "north" is the same as "up." This will pay off way way way way WAY later in the book, but for the time being, it's worth noting this as an early example of the "doubling" theme that pervades the novel: multiple worlds. But different worlds...? Well, it depends on what you mean by "different."