Concepts as characters (was: Why don't women read Pynchon?)

[Monte Davis]

> Do P's characters have a core, a being, a consciousness that
> renders them 
> unlike anyone else?... Do they have... deep emontional responses? 

No, nor do those of any other novelist. They are black marks on a white
page; all the rest is what we bring to the party. 

If all we bring to the party is expectations from one thread of European and
American fiction of the last few hundred years, the realistic novel, then we
may be led to ask silly questions about what's inside those magic marks
instead of more interesting questions about what response the author is
trying to evoke in us.

Does Pynchon's writing -- *all* of it, the language and description and
re-imagining of histories and, yes, concepts, as well as the subset of
conventions you've decided to elevate as the be-all and end-all of literary
merit  -- "provoke deep emotional responses?" In this reader, yes. 

I've pointed to the passage on pp. 70-72 before; although it contains just
14 lines of (not very verisimilitudinous) dialogue between Merle and Dahlia,
it tells me volumes about her childhood and the kind of early-20th-century
woman she will grow up to be. What you're looking to find "in their heads"
is there to be found -- but it's in the landscape, in the selection of
observed detail and incident, in the tone and turn of the voice.