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

[terrance terrance]

>
>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.

Why doesn't P give them heads full of ideas, hearts full of feeling?
Why doesnlt P make characters?

Concepts are cool, love them, lots of them, more of them,  but a character 
or two or three sure makes the concepts seem like part of a tale told, a 
yarn spun, a story.

Maybe Pynchon's books are not stories, not novels, but .... um ... sketches 
of concepts?

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