Moody and DF Wallace Reading in TO

[David Casseres]

Paul sez

>Wonder why Pynchon doesn't also write about family life? A family more 
>nuclear than Vineland's.

Ah.  Pynchon doesn't write about family life because it doesn't allow him 
the distance he needs to work his narrative magic.  And in Vineland he 
was getting closer to his characters, making them more fleshy and 
intimate than the schematized* people of the earlier novels, and that is 
the weakness of Vineland.

*Schematized, but always with some glimpse of a whole, real person hidden 
behind the schema; a person Pynchon allows us to sense, but about whom he 
chooses not to write directly.  This distancing is a key to Pynchon's 
power as a writer.  It allows him that universality, the multiple 
viewpoints and modalities.


Cheers,
David