the motif of marriage

[Terrance Flaherty]

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is
unhappy in its own way."

Happy families are Not all alike, but than, Pynchon doesn't
have any happy families in his fiction. Or does he? 

In the Short Stories? Nope, there is not a happy family in
any of the short stories, right?  Lots of unhappy ones,
childless and barren, empty, television mediated, parents
conspiring against children. 

In V.? Nope, not a happy a family or marriage in V., right? 

In The Crying of Lot 49? Nope, not a happy family or
marriage in that one, right?

In GR? Nope, not a happy family or marriage in that one
either, I think? 

In VL? Nope, not a happy family or marriage in VL, right?
(This one is close to home and some may say that there is a
happy family in VL, but I don't think so, more a nostalgia
for something lost, broken and spilled). 

In M&D? 

Pynchon seems to be interested in the unhappy family, the
unhappy marriage. His fiction traces the rapid social
changes that have accompanied the "industrialized" changes
to American social institutions, including the  family and
marriage. Whatever we may think of these changes, they have
increased the stresses on family, marriage, and children in
particular. Pynchon, whatever people may say about facts and
history, studies the facts. And while American literature is
replete with stories about the poor family, the violent,
drug ridden, socially deteriorated inner city family or its
equivalent in the poor rural (primarily white) communities
in the States, Pynchon does not write about these families,
but chooses to write about middle class and upper class
American families living in relatively prosperous
conditions, conditions that in large measure dominate
American life in fact, if not in fiction. In M&D, if your
wife dies and you want to take off and leave the kids with
your father, their grandparent, it's not quite the same as a
child that has been left to the Tube or the Mall. Children
in VL get their ideas of family and marriage from the Tube. 
Urbanization, geographic mobility (even Zoyd can fly),
globalization and world economy, have all contributed to
diminishing personal, familial, and community ties (don't
tell this to United Air, Ma Bell, and those satalite.coms.
Reach out and touch some what? Now this is a 10,000 year old
question--technology and community, but I think it is clear
that Pynchon is a "BadASS" and that in his fiction,
industrialization and the family are in conflict. In any
event, I think it's Kathryn Hume, who starts her essay with
the above and below subtextual perspectives in GR, but ends
up talking about cities, and some day some one will write
about Pynchon, Blake, Dickens, and so on, but in Pynchon's
fiction the city is in the mind and in the street and the
children are often depicted in the streets, in the chaos,
alone, lost, homeless, and most importantly, rootless.