The action, much of it fairly pointless, takes place over a 30-or-so-year span between the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and just after the First World War. It centers around the three sons of Webb Traverse, a Colorado union “organizer” (his political activities seem to consist entirely of blowing things — and presumably people — up) who is brutally killed by a couple of thugs hired by an industrialist named Scarsdale Vibe. The Traverse boys — Frank, Reef and Kit — spend most of the book drifting in and out of a purposeful determination to avenge their father’s murder. Dropping in (literally) every now and then are a troupe of pubescent boy balloonists called the Chums of Chance, whose exploits fighting “the Yellow Fang” and other antagonists are also recorded in a series of “boys’ own” pulp novels that the other characters occasionally read.

Like Pynchon’s previous novel, “Mason & Dixon,” “Against the Day” doesn’t really start to cohere until a point so far into the book that all but the most fanatical acolyte (and there are plenty of those, of course) will have given up and wandered off. “Mason & Dixon” doesn’t become an actual novel until about page 250; with “Against the Day,” it takes more like 400 pages. Unlike “Mason & Dixon,” which does finally deepen and solidify into a consideration of the original sins of both America and the Enlightenment, “Against the Day” eventually wobbles out of focus again, leaving the diligent reader with a grab bag of themes to consider. The novel is partly, like “Mason & Dixon,” about the corruption, by the conniving of the powerful, of the pure human impulse toward adventure and discovery. “Say, I’m in the wrong business!” a theoretical mathematician remarks when a sleek arms dealer describes how much money he makes. “No you’re not,” the arms dealer replies.

That’s one of the funnier jokes, and there aren’t a lot of those. Much of the humor in “Against the Day” is considerably flabbier. The Chums of Chance (as if that name weren’t bad enough) provide the occasion for some of the most lumbering bids for laffs. You see, the Chums are supposed to observe a code of Boy Scout-style purity of mind and body — but some of them are horny! At one point, the banter between the straightest-arrow Chum and the sassy-lecherous Chum became so painful that I began to wonder if this all wasn’t just a parody of a lame parody of a form of pop culture so dated that hardly anyone remembers it well enough to parody it. But then I realized that even Pynchon isn’t that convolutedly ironic and it was just bad.

Which is not to say that there isn’t some fine writing in “Against the Day” — a hallucinatory bit depicting a method of traveling through sand, under the surface of the desert as if it were the ocean, and the flight of two fugitives through the Balkan Mountains in winter are two standouts — but for most readers not enough of it is good enough to make up for all the parts that aren’t especially vivid. To get to either of those tours de force, you will first have to read about 68 monotonous descriptions of one or another of the Traverse boys (it hardly matters which) walking into a bar, saloon, cantina, casino, etc., filled with “desperados,” “disreputables,” “notoriously unprincipled gents,” “adventuresses,” “pigeons,” “sharpers,” etc. — all of it related with what the narrator apparently, but mistakenly, believes to be a jaunty, rakish charm.

Admittedly, “Mason & Dixon,” with its faux-18th-century diction, could also be trying, but at the heart of that novel were two characters who approximated actual human beings. What the uniformly young, attractive and randy characters of “Against the Day” approximate is more like the cast of “The OC.” When we talk about “Against the Day,” we must talk about themes and prose set-pieces and the handfuls of intellectual and historical spangles (The Riemann Hypothesis! The Great Game! Theosophy!) tossed into the mix because the novel doesn’t really have characters — and strange to say about a book with so much happening in it — or much of a plot, either. But then, the two elements are related, since when you don’t care about (or, for that matter, can barely distinguish) the characters, it’s also hard to care what happens to them.

Naturally, there are all sorts of superpersonal issues in play. There’s a great deal of portentousness about the coming of World War I, and a lot of pre-quantum woo-woo physics about alternate universes, refracted light, the elasticity of time and bilocation (being in two places at once), but that doesn’t effectively play out in the characters’ lives. They head out on preposterous missions, get embroiled in assorted unfathomable conspiracies and engage in frequent, energetic but trivial sex without the nature of time-space or the coming geopolitical catastrophe figuring into it in any meaningful way.

Part of the problem lies in a conflict between Pynchon’s would-be populism and the gnomic, smarty-pants style of fiction he practically invented. In his ethos, the brave, heroic, decent individual is pitted against merciless institutions, systems and elites (he’s got a thing about Ivy Leaguers) that openly or covertly run the world. (He’s also prone to personifying those systems, hence the mustache-twirling villainy of Scarsdale Vibe.) That’s the essence of Pynchonian paranoia, but the rub is that Pynchon’s heroes (in this novel, at least) aren’t paranoid. True understanding is reserved for the author — or dedicated reader — who’s capable of grasping the “secret” knowledge of how the world really works. It’s no coincidence that the character in “Against the Day” who most resembles an actual reflective human being (and presumably the one the author most identifies with) winds up as an initiate in a quasi-gnostic religious order. Most Pynchon protagonists, however, would never read Pynchon novels, let alone worship the man who writes them. They are men of action, not men of sitting around thinking up crackpot theories about the Tunguska event.

At the heart of all this is a romantic delusion, namely a keen nostalgia for the heyday of 1960s counterculture, which as we know from “Vineland” was single-handedly destroyed by Richard Nixon. The good guys in “Against the Day” are anarchists, just about the only revolutionary persuasion compatible with Pynchon’s notion of virtuous political behavior — that is, hanging out in dives, doing drugs, screwing, and bickering about which head of state ought to be assassinated first. Although, to his credit, Pynchon is intelligent enough to know that this dream is jejune, he cannot give it up, and so he makes the Earth of “Against the Day” haunted by the apparition of a lost paradise, the fabled Shambhala, “a convergence of gardens, silks, music — fertile, tolerant and compassionate. No one went hungry, all shared in the blessing of an oasis that would never run dry.” Eventually, he relocates this magical utopia to the sky, where the Chums of Chance, those embodiments of callow idealism, carry on with what can never actually be achieved on this planet.

Maybe this would be sufficient, if by now we didn’t have, say, a writer like David Foster Wallace, who can give us a novel every bit as antic and intellectually demanding as “Against the Day,” and can also populate it with believable people whose fates not only interest but break our hearts. It’s already the tenth anniversary of “Infinite Jest,” the novel that applied the encyclopedic, cerebral approach of “Gravity’s Rainbow” to the territory where most of us experience the knock-down, drag-out struggles of modern life: the interior of the human psyche. Or, take a writer like Neal Stephenson, whose grasp of the systems that fascinate Pynchon — science, capitalism, religion, politics, technology — is surer, more nuanced, more adult and inevitably yields more insight into how those systems work than Pynchon offers here.

The bar is higher now, and it’s not quite enough to sketch a dozen or so characters without trying to make them breathe in a novel that raises Big Questions and then just leaves them dangling. Time doesn’t exist, but it crushes us anyway; everyone could see World War I coming, but no one could stop it — those are two weighty paradoxes that hover over the action in “Against the Day” without truly engaging with it. This is the stuff of tragedy, but since the people it sort of happens to are flimsy constructions, we don’t experience it as tragic. We just watch Pynchon point to it like bystanders watching the Chums of Chance’s airship float by overhead.

How did Barton, a yoga instructor and graduate of the University of Iowa’s MFA program, accomplish the feat that most fledgling novelists would kill to pull off? “It was actually pretty easy. I think my editor wrote Pynchon and told him the truth,” the 30-year-old Brooklynite said, referring to FS&G’s Ethan Nosowsky, who sent the letter, along with Barton’s novel, to Pynchon’s agent and wife, Melanie Jackson. “Ethan just said, Look, she thinks you’re the greatest thing ever and she said that she would really like it if you read her book. It was really straightforward.” The blurb, which the publisher has extracted from Pynchon’s reply, reads, “I found it blessedly post-ironic, engaging and heartfelt, a story that moves with ease and certainty, deeply respecting the given world even as it shines with the integrity of dream.”

Knipfel, a columnist for the New York Press whose book about going blind Pynchon praised for its “amiably deranged sense of humor,” followed a similar approach. “Publishers and authors make a wish list of authors that they would want blurbs from,” Knipfel said. “My editor and I came up with about 25 names. At the end, I said, ‘What about Pynchon?’ My editor said, ‘No, that’s just throwing one away. These are expensive.’ But he sent it. With just a basic cover letter. To Pynchon’s wife’s office. Expecting nothing. A day before Thanksgiving, I got a call from my editor. He could barely speak. He said, ‘I just got a fax from Melanie Jackson’s office,’ and then he sent it over to me, and I could barely speak.”

In 1996, Pynchon crossed genre lines and wrote the liner notes for “Nobody’s Cool,” an album by New York indie rockers Lotion. Two years earlier he wrote the liner notes for “Spiked,” a Spike Jones compilation.

The next year they drifted to Paris, where Fariqa fell in love with Mimi Baez, a lovely piece of 15-year-old jailbait. Fariqa would eventually divorce his wife. Von Schmidt says Richard and Mimi then had a “secret” marriage ceremony. Other accounts name Pynchon best man. (Neither item cancels out the other.) What is known is that the two Fariqas began singing as a duo and released two spectacular folk records, “Celebrations for a Grey Day” (1965) and “Reflections in a Crystal Wind” (1966). “Folk” music usually refers to limp white folks’ music, but the Fariqas’ music was not tedious strum-strum-strumming like famous sister Joan. The Fariqas played weird Appalachian dulcimer music as well as Dylanesque electric folk-rock. Fariqa certainly followed in Dylan’s electric footsteps — he even used Dylan guitarist Bruce “Bringing It All Back Home” Langhorne. As a songwriter, however, Fariqa was not sitting in anyone’s back seat.

The Vanguard collection contains some of his best songs, such as “Bold Marauder” — a harrowing account of the malevolent “white destroyer” Klan. Be warned, however, that the record starts tame. Have patience. The songs get progressively more lyrical, electrical and sophisticated — climaxing with “Morgan the Pirate,” Fariqa’s biting take on Dylan during the days when he was an amphetamine prick. (That’s my term. The sanguine liner notes from the original ’60s album sleeve says the song is Fariqa waving “farewell” to Dylan.)

So what happened to Richard Fariqa? He died in California. On May 1, 1966, Fariqa crashed his motorcycle on the way to the autograph party for his first novel, “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me” at the Discover Bookshop in San Francisco. A posthumous album called “Memories” was released a little later. Although “The Vanguard Years” contains two cuts from this album, a handful are missing (including a live version of “House Un-American Blues Activity Dream” recorded during a rainstorm at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, a day before Dylan went famously electric).

As for Fariqa’s connection with Pynchon, the latter dedicated “Gravity’s Rainbow” to his dead friend. Reportedly a double biography of Fariqa and Dylan is in the works that documents a romance between Pynchon and Fariqa’s widow. As for Mimi herself, she’s made several folk records over the past 30 years, but none is worth finding. Together, however, they had something that still reverberates, 33 years after his death.

Lean and hungry geeks tend to be ambitious, and “Cryptonomicon,” Stephenson’s latest book, fits the bill — it’s an insanely ambitious techno-thriller/historical novel that critics are mentioning in the same breath as Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.” It’s being labeled Stephenson’s “crossover” book, mainly because it doesn’t fit neatly into the same science-fiction slot as his last two novels, “Snowcrash” and “The Diamond Age.” But Stephenson hasn’t actually left his home territory. If anything, the truth is the opposite. “Cryptonomicon” is clear proof of Stephenson’s ongoing intention to delve ever deeper into the heart of the digital era, to lay out in detail both excruciating and poetic the awesome influence the computer has exerted on the 20th century.

“Cryptonomicon,” like “Gravity’s Rainbow,” is partly set during World War II. But it also takes place in the present day. The drama set in the earlier period centers around the invention of the digital computer as a code-breaking means of thwarting the Nazis. Meanwhile, in 1999, descendants of the WWII characters are gallivanting around the Far East, using computers in a venture-capital-funded attempt to set up a secure “crypt” for digital information. It’s all tied together by multiple conspiracies, the mysteries of code and lots and lots of stolen gold.

I caught up with Neal Stephenson as he came through San Francisco on his book tour. He’s not an easy interview (lean and hungry geeks rarely are) — but I already knew that from previous interactions. In person, he is measured and restrained, judicious almost to a fault, offering a sharp contrast to the flamboyant exuberance that makes his novels such giddy, enjoyable rides. He doesn’t get carried away. He doesn’t like interpreting his own work. He’s heard most of my questions too many times already. It is all too obvious that he is only meeting with a reporter because he is doing his duty promoting his novel, that he’d much rather be back home in Seattle pounding away at his keyboard, at work on his next delirious masterpiece.

His attitude is not uncommon in writers or, for that matter, computer geeks. And there’s no question that Stephenson is both. His credentials as a writer don’t need repeating. But his identity as a geek may run even deeper. He comes from a family of engineers and physicists, on both sides, and he was programming in BASIC when he was 15. He’s been programming all his life — he once even wrote an image processing program for the Macintosh — but never as a paying job. He certainly doesn’t try to hide it. When I meet him, he is wearing a T-shirt with the word “hackers” emblazoned across the chest.

I want to find a way to unleash the energy lurking inside of Neal Stephenson, the lean and hungry geek, but he’s too cagey for me. He anticipates the direction of every question. He even prefaces his answers with framing meta-commentary: “This is where I’m going to be annoying,” he says; “this is where I’m going to be evasive.”

“This is where I’m not going to be helpful.”

He’s never actually annoying. He’s quite civil, and he seems genuinely apologetic when our time runs out. But you sure don’t want to ask him dumb questions. Like, is he happy with the comparison to Pynchon?

“I’m not unhappy with it,” he says. He doesn’t actually roll his eyes, but you can feel him thinking, “Well duh, what ambitious writer who just wrote a technologically obsessed book set partially in WWII wouldn’t want to be compared to Pynchon?”

Well then, what about the problem of whether mainstream readers will be taken aback by the lectures on the mathematics underlying cryptographic theory, which Stephenson includes in his novel. Did he worry about that?

“Not really,” he says. “When it comes down to it, the few pages of the book that have equations on them don’t contain a whole lot of plot or character development. So if you skip over that stuff you miss very little.”

Indeed, to refrain from including the hard stuff, says Stephenson, would be tantamount to giving into what he sees as a popular reluctance to face up to the implications of technological progress.

“To me it seems like there is a kind of a strange denial in a lot of our culture, about just how important science and technology have been this century,” says Stephenson. “There’s just an unwillingness to come to grips with it at all. I don’t deprecate people who feel that way, but I do think that at the end of a century like this one it’s not the end of the world if you toss an equation into a work of art.”

“Cryptonomicon” is a book about many things — World War II, the Philippines, venture capital and the high-tech economy, to pick just a few — but the axis around which everything revolves is precisely that issue of how important science and technology have been — as viewed from “the end of a century like this one.” The novel’s journey back in time follows directly, Stephenson says, from his ruminations about the future.

“The more I thought about the future of computing the more interesting it was to consider the history of it. This is true not only in computing but in a lot of areas. Maybe we could have known more about what was going to happen in the Balkans if we paid more attention to the history there. I started feeling the need to put things in a longer historical context.”

Part of that historical context is the rise of what Stephenson calls “hacker culture.” Until very recently, the culture generated by computer hackers was an underground phenomenon, usually misunderstood by the mainstream as something illicit and vaguely dangerous.

Stephenson’s own success is one sign of the changing times. Before the emergence of the Internet as a mainstream phenomenon, before Wired Magazine suddenly promoted the prominence of the computer geek as a cultural icon, publishing “Cryptonomicon” as a major hardcover release would have made no sense. But the undeniable importance of techno-culture at the close of this century has spawned a widespread popular desire to understand how we got here. “Cryptonomicon,” which Stephenson envisions as just one installment of a series of novels taking place in the past, present and future, makes eminent sense when seen as a response to this social hunger.

Both the novel and the hubbub of contemporary computing culture are fueled by the energy that seethes though one crucial contradiction — the computer’s significance as a tool for both hiding meaning from view and for enhancing access to information. The word “code,” after all, can refer to something that has been encrypted and hidden, but it also refers to the basic building blocks of a program — something that, with a little knowledge, is right out there in plain view.

If Stephenson’s obsessions with the meaning of code weren’t obvious enough from “Cryptonomicon,” all one has to do is consider what Stephenson decided to do after finishing his humongous tome. He took a little “break” and dashed off a 40,000-word meditation on the cultural significance of computer operating systems, “In the Beginning was the Command Line.” Not only does the essay illustrate just how logically “Cryptonomicon” follows from Stephenson’s earlier work, but it also provides useful clues on how to view the evolution of Stephenson’s entire body of work.

“Ever since the Mac came out,” writes Stephenson, “our operating systems have been based on metaphors.” But as Stephenson matured as a computer user, he found himself increasingly disenchanted with the metaphorical stuff that came between him and his computer. He abandoned the Mac-style point-and-click “graphical user interface” (GUI). Instead he opted for direct contact via text input at the “command line” prompt.

Stephenson’s psychological transition was encouraged by his growing infatuation with the Linux operating system, the flag bearer of the so-called open-source software movement. “Open-source software” refers to software in which the underlying source code to a computer program is made freely accessible to all, rather than locked away from users as a proprietary corporate secret. For Stephenson, his change of operating system heart was a sign of upward evolution. He found it empowering and liberating to move from a metaphorical GUI desktop to a command-line interface, from closed code to open code.

Stephenson’s last three novels follow a similar trajectory. In “Snowcrash” Stephenson won the enduring adulation of geeks everywhere by delivering two fabulously cool metaphors for what the computer could offer the world — the Metaverse, an online reality in which hackers donned their favorite personas and acted out their fantasies, and the Librarian, a helpful digital entity, not unlike a real-life librarian, who is also a really, really neat way of imagining how we puny humans might some day be able to plumb the database of all recorded information. Then in “The Diamond Age,” he went a step further, entrancing his readers with the “Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer,” a “smart” book that delivered lessons in life and computer theory disguised as interactive fairy tales, all with the intention of educating its young female owner in how to thrive in a treacherous world.

In “Cryptonomicon,” Stephenson cuts to the chase. Instead of elaborate metaphors for how the computer works or might work, he brings us directly to ground zero: Alan Turing, the creator of the first digital computer, is even a character in “Cryptonomicon.” As the novel flips back and forth across the last 50 years, we see both the birth of the computer and its current state-of-the-art implementation. Stephenson goes so far as to include actual code for an encryption algorithm in the text.

It’s as if, after giving his readers a pair of advanced metaphor-based GUIs with which to contemplate the role of the computer in modern life, Stephenson has now decided to show us the “source” — to deliver to us the truth about computing in all its raw, unblemished command-line beauty.

I lay out for him my painstakingly constructed analysis. What does he think? Is this a fair appraisal?

He nods his head briefly.

“That’s a good analogy,” he says. And then he pauses, waiting for the next question. (Lesson for would-be interviewers of geeks: Never ask them a yes-or-no question, because that’s all you’ll get in response.) But Stephenson does agree with the general thrust of my questions about the contradictory nature of code.

“That’s the basic contradiction I’m trying to deal with here,” says Stephenson. “There’s always been this duality between secrecy and openness. The digital computer as we have it today was born in the attempt to deal with codes, to go into these impenetrable messages and bring back the information. In that time the codes that we were breaking were to us a sinister force. We had to break these codes or the bad guys were going to take everything over. Now, the computer is all about openness and spreading information to every corner of the world. But at the same time, we’re finding that the more we do that, the more we are perceiving a need to encrypt our stuff, to keep it out of the hands of the bad guys.”

It’s a messy situation, especially for engineers and hackers used to thinking of the world in neat binary terms of ones and zeros, or as a set of problems that can all eventually be solved. The “open-source” advocates that Stephenson rhapsodizes about in his essay on operating systems are often the same people working hardest to ensure that individuals can keep their personal information private.

As our all too short interview comes to a close — Stephenson doesn’t want to keep a photographer waiting — I try, again, to pull his novel and his essay into line with one another. I observe that the very same open-source hackers who are luxuriating in Stephenson’s beloved command-line world are hard at work devising their own Macintosh-like GUIs. Isn’t this going backwards, I ask him? To me, it seems that the gist of Stephenson’s writing, his comments about the importance of science and technology and his enthusiasm for incorporating code and equations in his novel all add up to a strong authorial point of view stating that the world would be a better place if people were smarter about their relationship with computer technology. But those open-source hackers are busily striving to make it easier for people to be stupid.

Doesn’t the world need more smart users, I ask Stephenson?

“I think we need an upgrade path,” he answers. “I think we need a way to encourage people to become smart users.”

Is “Cryptonomicon” part of that upgrade path? Showing people the “source” — delivering to them the roots and history of computing culture — is this Stephenson’s contribution to social smartening-up?

“I can see where you are going,” says Neal Stephenson. “It would make a nice wrap-up for your story. I don’t know. I mean, the only way I could see that happening is if somehow this makes geek culture a little more accessible to people, so they don’t feel like they are becoming some kind of monster as they learn how to use this kind of technology.”

He is too modest — a rare compliment to bestow upon a hacker. With “Cryptonomicon,” Stephenson has embroidered the phrase “computer literacy” with a whole new layer of meaning. He has become the poet laureate of hacker culture. So why even bother with the dumb questions? Cut the book tour short and send this man back to Seattle. He’s got some more writing to do.

“The Intuitionist” is a stylish, highly original mix of detective story, Borgesian metaphysical puzzle and portrait of pre-Civil Rights race relations, set in a place almost, but not quite, like New York City. Its soft-spoken author — still nervous enough about publishing his first book that he glanced away after spotting a stack of fresh copies at a local bookstore — recently stopped by to talk with Salon.

When did you decide that you wanted to be a novelist?

When I was a kid. I read Stephen King and I thought he was really cool. I wanted to write novels with monsters in them. It was kind of funny, this year, to see the rediscovery of Stephen King.

Did you learn things from being a TV critic that helped?

I think I got a lot of stuff out of my system. I learned some good habits from having to produce every other week and trying to make it fresh. Village Voice style back then encouraged the first-person — that sort of me-me-me stuff — and I worked through various preoccupations with pop culture. Some of the pieces were very satirical and over-the-top, and I would go overboard sometimes and think, “Oh, that didn’t work very well,” so I’d come back with something better. You can’t just make ’70s references all the time. After the 10th “Good Times” joke, it’s not fresh.

There’s a lot of people who need to learn that. I don’t know if I’d want to give them all TV columns to get them over it. Where did the idea for the elevator inspector in the “The Intuitionist” come from?

My whole life I’ve seen those elevator inspection certificates. I’d go to school, when I was a kid, and come back and the person had been there, the exact same guy for 10 years. The elevator seemed perfectly fine, so what’d he do? I was thinking about what would make a funny detective story. Well, why not put this person in a situation where he actually has to apply his esoteric skills to a straightforward mystery? But then I had to actually make up what kinds of skills he had, and it became all about elevators and not so much this chase-the-McGuffin sort of story.

Did you do a lot of research into elevators?

Yeah, I just went to the library. Sadly for me, a lot of it was reference, so I had to troop around. But, yeah, there’s engineering manuals, there’s state guidebooks, actual code books of elevator inspection. They tell you what violation 3.04a(d) is, whatever.

And where did the idea of Empiricism vs. Intuitionism come from?

I had a book called “The Evolution of Useful Things.” I looked through the index, didn’t see “Elevator.” [Author Henry Petroski] did have a chapter on how inventors come to create improvements on various objects. Like, why does a fork have four tines instead of five? It was so over-the-top — it was well-written, but impractical. He wrote, “Our objects are weak, they drink like fishes, they cuss like sailors, you have to keep control of them.”

He was personifying them.

Yeah. And so, from that, it became this absurd doctrine of how we can treat elevators, how we can tend to them and nurse them.

I’m assuming that you always meant your main character to be black. Did you always mean her to be a woman, too?

No. I had the bare bones of the plot, and I was starting to get the voice of the book down, and it was just coming out the same, like my stock ironic black man character I’ve always used.

What are the characteristics of your stock ironic black character?

He’s hard to describe, but I guess he can be kind of tedious at times.

Is he wisecracking?

Yeah, sort of wisecracking — he knows what’s going on. I guess the book would have been perfectly fine with him in it, but I was doing the same old thing, so I thought, “Let’s just switch it up.” Of course, that changed the entire book. I had to throw out a lot of the plot I had before, and it became a lot more … it was harder but it became more interesting. I was struggling through the first chapter, and when she takes that bribe in the beginning, I was “OK, this is who she is.”

The building super puts the money in her pocket, and she just ignores the fact that he’s done it. She still gives him the citation, but she doesn’t say, “No, take that back!” or “How dare you?” How did that form your sense of who she was?

She is incorruptible, but she has her own set of rules. She’s not giving back the bribe, and she’s not doing what she’s supposed to do in that situation. She’s in this middle ground. For me that fed into her responses later on, with the intrigues with the Empiricists and the Intuitionists.

Another unusual thing about your book is that often, when black writers are writing about race, they feel it needs to be very realistic. Do you feel you have more freedom than previous generations?

Yeah. Definitely, decades ago, there was the protest novel, and then there was “tell the untold story, find our unerased history.” Then there’s the militant novel of insurrection from the ’60s. There were two rigid camps in the ’60s: the Black Arts movement, denouncing James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison for being too white, and Ralph Ellison calling the Black Arts writers too militant and narrow, not universal enough. Now I think there are a lot more of us writing and a lot more different areas we’re exploring. It’s not as polemicized. I’m dealing with serious race issues, but I’m not handling them in a way that people expect.

You’re using elements of a style that people associate with white men — the Thomas Pynchons and Don DeLillos of this world. People who don’t like that kind of book tend to dismiss them for being white men. By writing these big novels that make big statements about society they’re supposedly showing a bogus sense of entitlement.

I love all those guys. And I certainly don’t feel that way. I think they’re great writers and I think they’re attacking, grappling with, the culture in a way that interests me. I think if it’s a good book, it’s a good book.

You are in this literary territory that isn’t usually associated with black writers, though.

I think Ishmael Reed has done it — “Mumbo Jumbo” and “Flight to Canada” are in the same sort of vein, I think he’s overlooked as a groundbreaking voice in black fiction. And Jean Toomer’s “Cane,” a ’20s novel. He’s a Harlem Renaissance guy. I think it’s always been there, it’s just that mainstream critics, maybe even readers, don’t see the linkages.

They don’t see that there’s a tradition of the black intellectual novel?

Yeah. This guy Charles Wright, not the poet, had some very crazy books that came out in the ’60s, and Clarence Majors, his book “All Night Visitors,” which came out in the early ’70s. You could say it’s been ghettoized. No one’s really picking up on experiments that were going on in the late ’60s.

And what’s your new book about?

It’s about John Henry, the steel driving man. It takes place in 1996.

But how does John Henry, who died a long time ago, come into it then? I take it this is not the literal 1996 that we all lived through?

No.

It’s the special Colson Whitehead version.

Right.