VLVL2 Prairie

[pynchonoid]

[...] Prairie rejects her
> parent's values, including her Mother's bisexuality
( DL & Ché) and her
> father's music, drugs, selfish irresponsibility,
their notion of family.
> After being all familied out she turns to Brock for
some family values.[...]

Whatever thoughts she may have along the way about
what she's learning re her family history, by the end
of the novel Prairie clearly has not rejected her
family, instead she returns (after her brief,
impossible flirtation with Brock, at a moment when
Brock is unavailable to her) to the bosom of her
family, where the sense of community, love, acceptance
is stronger than ever as the novel ends. Brock was the
temptation rejected by Prairie, not Frenesi, Zoyd, and
the rest of her extended California family.  Pynchon
shows this family/community prevailing against Brock's
prosecutorial attack. Shadows still hover -- it's
1984, after all, Reagan-Bush are firmly in control,
the reader in '90 at the moment of Vineland's
publication, or in 2004, knows how the reign of the
Prosecutor has only continued to developed since that
time-- but Pynchon chooses to end the novel with
Prairie's family reunited, affirming its strengths in
the face of the Nixon-Reagan-Bush assault. 

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