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

[David Brodeur]

> I didn't mean to say the characters *are* concepts. I meant to say (with
> Rodriguez, as I read her) that the ways in which the characters refract 
> and reflect and interact with concepts in the Pynchonverse provides me
> with many of the provocations and satisfactions that many other writers
> deliver via interactions between characters.

I see this as a separate issue from whether the characters are round, flat,
or inflated with hydrogen. Pynchon's characters, however real or engaging,
are neither the subject nor the motive force in his novels. Their lives are
smoke injected into the wind tunnel so you can see the shape of the flow.

The bulk of my fiction reading over the years has been science fiction. I
think I took to Pynchon because his novels, like much of sf, is driven by
concepts. Other fiction may be driven by character, plot, or literary
structure. How "real" the characters is orthogonal to all that.

David