VLVL(7) - I am he as you are he as you are me...

[Doug Millison]

Paul says, "Yet without Frenesi's defection and her dark-night-of-the-soul
degradation, the family which produced Prairie would not have come into
being. (though some would say not much of a family)" and I think Pynchon
has managed to avoid the "Panglossianism" Paul would avoid. Prairie's
family, as we see clearly at the end of the novel, is typically American:
haunted by dark secrets (look at Pynchon's own colonial ancestors and look
particularly at Hawthorne's _House of Seven Gables_), further stressed and
torqued by current dissensions as those old secrets are exhumed, the group
glued together with a few hazy and sentimentalized family memories, meals,
and the Tube plus a healthy dose of forgiveness and love. Not the Christian
Coalition's picture of a family, but despite the dark overtones not without
the power to shine at least a ray of feeble hope:  they may manage, after
all, to pull Frenesi back from the darkness that claimed instead of the
light she sought, or they may fail (the same odds faced by millions of
families who seek reconciliation).  Pynchon has successfully crossed the
high wire in creating an 80s family that feels real, despite all the
surreal high jinx of the story. In my humble opinion, at least.


D O U G  M I L L I S O N  [http://www.online-journalist.com]
"We're lost, but we're making good time." --Yogi Berra