I LOOKED in vain for the kitchen sink in this book. It really ought to have been there, for Thomas Pynchon has thrown everything else at this novel. Against the Day, at more than 1,000 pages, is the text that puts the ram back into ramshackle and most assuredly the shag back into the shaggy dog story. This shambling ragbag of prose rattles with more than 100 characters, multiple settings in this world and others and a multitude of narratives held together by gossamer skeins of plot.

The book offers, in unequal measures, parody, pastiche, allusion and illusion, cultural references and scientific theories, songs, gags, puns and practical jokes, innumerable metaphors, dead ends, one-way streets and highway intersections jammed with sleights of hand and literary tricks. . . and an awful lot of lists. If you like your characters rounded, sympathetic and plausible, you are in for a shock. If you like your narratives crisp and clean, you are in for a hard time. But then, you are in for a hard time whatever.

Consider this: Webb Traverse, a Colorado miner by day, is a dynamiting anarchist by night, wreaking havoc on the mining corporations of the Midwest.

Scarsdale Vibe, our emblematic robber-baron capitalist, orders his assassination by two low-life hustlers, Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno. Webb's sons Frank and Reef seek revenge, daughter Lake shacks up with Deuce and youngest son Kit is offered a Yale scholarship by Vibe.

Their stories entwine with, inter alia, the Chums of Chance, a bunch of do-gooding globetrotting aeronauts; itinerant anarchists plotting in Belgium and fighting in Mexico; and mathematicians, time-travellers and technologists from California to Gِttingen. The great powers struggle to locate the mythical city of Shambhala in submarines that travel through the sand of central Asian deserts.

Maybe that résumé will help you, but frankly you're on your own. I was lost by page 100 when the book began to talk to me. No, seriously, to me.

As TP himself knows, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that the author isn't trying to get you. Increasingly, from out of the great swathes of white noise and literary wallpaper a voice seemed to address me directly:

"The connections lie there, hidden and perilous. Those of us who must creep among them must do so at our peril." The perils included exasperation, boredom, irritation, regular visits to the outer reaches of the dictionary and plain old confusion, but there were also moments of monumental prose, hysteria, wonder and laughter.

Who knows, but what I think old TP is on about is something like this. The historical trends of western modernity that gathered pace in the late 19th century and exploded in the early 20th were experienced by those who were present as fragmentary and unknowable. To recreate that moment, to capture its irrationality, demands the most centrifugal use of words and stories. The impossibility of directly perceiving the real forces at work in humanity's cataclysm requires a long, chaotic meditation on the theme of invisibility, engagement with the dilemmas of mathematics and physics and the exploration of the alternative directions our history could have taken.

I'm prepared to go so far with this. I'm prepared to engage with Pynchon's multiple universes, fragmentary stories, ellipses, absences and red herrings. But there are limits. I lasted 850 pages before I was reduced to skimming.

First, if we're going to play this game, at this length, the jokes need to be funnier, the puns better, the prose tauter. And the songs?

Maybe just lose them altogether.

David Goldblatt is the author of 'The Ball is Round: a Global History of Football'