Take a load off Fanny, ain't you gonna miss your best friendnow

[Terrance]

> American adolescence has an early and a late stage. Down in Trasero
> Country we see its early stage, which proves no match for the wily Brock
> Vond. However, in the later stage, of aging hippie adolescence, up in
> Vineland, Brock is undone with aid of local native American mythology,
> and life can go on to the next stage of human development. If there IS a
> next stage.
> 
> I don't think Pynchon is terribly bothered by people not growing up.

Bothered by it? Hell, he's made a living off it. Like Updike and lots of
other American authors he's been writing about the American male's
extended childhood from the start. Updike, just happen to like the
example at the moment, understood what he was up to when he published
his poems in 1958 (Ex-basketball Player & Co.), but Pynchon didn't even
know what he was up to. Once he Learned, however, he ran with it like a
rabbit. 



In his Introduction to SL he says, the Beats and the Hippies placed too
much emphasis on youth, including the eternal variety. Well, DUH! 

His comments on "Small Rain," where men are "dealing with death in
pre-adult ways" and "worst of all" "hook[ing] it up with death" seems to
suggest that although he thought characters like Lardass and Flange
(American men are  "small boys inside") were "pretty cool" when he wrote
the tales, he changed his mind after he wrote them. Note that he wrote
and published "The Secret Integration," a coming of age tale about
American boys confronting their parents on issues like racism and war,
after the novel V. 

V., Henry Adams (Catholic Virgin and Dynamo) was Tommy's Education.