Reviews Blair ultimately dismisses theoretical perspectives though, maintaining a strictly evolutionary line in her readings of Woolf. But while she demonstrates how Woolf’s novels may be therapeutic in some sense, there is little specific evidence in the book establishing narrative’s unambiguous role in evolutionary adaptation. Instead, Blair occasionally resorts to hypothetical just-so stories about early humans and passé Jungian archetypes from Joseph Campbell. Besides these interpretative missteps, the book also suffers from a number of conspicuous errors and stylistic tics. Blair frequently misspells the Ramsay family as ‘Ramsey’ in discussions of To the Lighthouse and incorrectly refers to the title of the novel Mrs Dalloway as ‘Mrs. Dalloway’. She also strings together numerous unanswerable queries, such as, ‘What does it mean to be human? What is the meaning of life? What can life mean in the face of certain death?’ (p. ). It is also unclear why Blair tends to capitalize the first letters of ‘Human’ and ‘Story’, despite never using those terms in anything but an ordinary, non-technical way. One of the main strengths of Blair’s book, however, is how it is framed by personal instances of grief and loss—both from Blair herself and from Woolf—adding a welcome immediacy and urgency to her readings while also making them open to more general readers. Each of the chapters on Woolf’s novels productively mines her endlessly fascinating diaries, providing a rich biographical dimension to the texts in question. ese more intimate forays reaffirm that if, as Blair suggests, ‘[s]tories help us with this imprecise science of life’s navigation’ (p. ), we would be well served to revisit the life and works of Virginia Woolf for guidance. B C M G e Ruins of Urban Modernity: omas Pynchon’s ‘Against the Day’. By U M. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. . vi+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Utku Mogultay is a very learned critic who persuades us that Pynchon’s Against the Day is not just zany and deliberately obscure. Rather, Pynchon is deeply read in the history and concept of cities, up to speed on modernist vs. postmodernist theories of cities, and drawn to popular fiction, which he recycles as pastiche or irony. Mogultay focuses on ideas about cities, since several famous ones function as significant locations and undergo phantasmagoric changes in the course of the novel. e theories of what a city was and should be were emerging at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the time-frame of Against the Day’s complex plots. New building techniques and forms of transportation made immense city growth—vertical and horizontal—possible, but also brought new problems. e World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago produced a model city center as the fair’s high-culture showpiece. Neoclassical façades with extended waterways flaunted prestige by taking elements from Rome and Venice. e Midway Plaisance held the popular displays: tribal villages, belly dancers, Buffalo Bill’s Wild MLR, ., West show, and other amusements to be gaped at. Pynchon’s adventure-hero aeronauts , the Chums of Chance, visit the fair, as do Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Merle Rideout, Lew Basnight, and several other characters. e focus on cities, Mogultay argues, spreads out from the Exposition, and in many we find variations on themes first offered here. e Archduke goes slumming in the Black region of Chicago, and that desire to view enclaves touristically is repeated in other cities, particularly in Venice and New York. e city is theorized as spectacle, and as something to be arranged in the viewer’s memory as an adventure. e city is also studied in terms of its governance and planning. Some of Pynchon’s work, as Mogultay shows, sets up the city as the new frontier, and Pynchon makes use of popular frontier novel tropes both in themselves and as they morphed into detective plots, first about the Pinkerton men, then in London with the Sherlock Holmes style of operator, and then as the focal figure of hard-boiled noir fiction. All three phases of detection are undertaken by Lew Basnight in his quest to understand himself morally. He must in the end admit his...