VLVL2 (14) A generic longhair, 280-287

[Paul Nightingale]

The meeting of Frenesi and Zoyd is an accident, a cute-meet perhaps, Zoyd
replacing, in the text, both Brock and DL. But he believes he himself might
have been replaced by "anybody ... all's you was lookin' for was some quick
cover" (282), which pre-empts the subsequent (in narrative terms;
chronologically, perhaps earlier) reference to Prairie as "perfect cover"
(292). For Frenesi, Zoyd might not have existed, then; yet he it is who,
described from her pov, "fails to take a false turn", and "[gets] it
basically, mercilessly right ... allowing her no pathways to safety" (282).

The Gordita Beach house offers Frenesi a hippy alternative to her family
home ("continuity", 284), just as Zoyd and Sasha become rivals (another way
of considering the abandonment of Brock and DL) when Prairie's birth
approaches. Yet their rivalry has been signalled at the outset when we're
told she "finally" cares more about her mother's opinion, even as she wanted
him to "come out with a version where she'd look a little better" (282).
That "finally" perhaps measures the distance she has travelled by the end of
the chapter, by which time Zoyd has been overtaken by events, handing on the
baton to Hub, who'd otherwise have remained ignorant (287).

Zoyd fails, then, as a husband, just as he fails to achieve instant
celebrity as a musician (a fantasy that remains out of reach, echoing
Brock's own career frustrations--and see the "recurring fantasy" of Zoyd's
"dream album", 36). Yet he too is "[drawn] ... away from the beaches he was
musically supposed to be representing" (282-283), a narrative career that
runs parallel to Frenesi's, "roof and gutter work during the day, Corvairs
gigs at night" (282-283)--Zoyd is no more workshy here than he was earlier
in the novel. A little later, we're told the band works "pretty steadily,
getting a reputation as a bar band, if not as a 'Surfadelic' one" (284).
This chapter attempts to recover Zoyd, the protagonist the novel had earlier
'abandoned'; yet does so by keeping him marginal, Frenesi engaging with both
parents and Brock rather more extensively. The purpose of the Zoyd passages,
it seems, is to remind us that, even though as readers we're familiar with
much of this territory, we're still covering it for the first time.