ATD: NO SPOILERS NO PAGE # Re: Rocketmen and Wastelands

[Monte Davis]

Piling on to Tore's points, and then in agreement with Bekah's 

> I don't think that flat characters are necessarily a weakness... 
> Rounded characters are built on their emotions and motives (I think) 
> and Pynchon doesn't usually go there in much depth;  he has other 
> places and things to visit.

1) _Pace_ "The Great Tradition," I don't believe the more or less
naturalistic novel aimed at a particular kind of psychological realism -- in
which the circumstances and settings are bourgeois-normal enough for a large
part of the readership to think "that could be me and the foax I know" --
should be put on a pedestal as what THE Novel must strive for/be judged
against. I don't fault Don Quixote, or Tristram Shandy, or significant
chunks of Dickens, or The Possessed, or Ada, or [add your own long list] for
not being in that line.

2) Re-read "Loonies on Leave" (GR 259): perpetual motion, 200mpg carburetor,
air into diamonds, then:

"If he were sensitive about such things, it'd all be pretty insulting, this
first wave. It passes, gesturing, accusative, pleading. Slothrop manages to
stay calm. There is a pause-then on come the real ones, slowly at first but
gathering, gathering. Synthetic rubber or gasoline, electronic calculators,
aniline dyes, acrylics, perfumes (stolen essences in vials in sample cases),
sexual habits of a hundred selected board members, layouts of plants,
codebooks, connections and payoffs, ask for it, they can get it."

To me that's virtually an author's note: hey, I just changed typeface --
signaling the transition from High Caricature (another zany TRP production
number)...

...to Mid Caricature -- Zurich 1945, an odd and extreme corner of "the real
ones" but not so different in its chiaroscuro from Casablanca, or Vienna in
the Third Man (wasn't that Groast or Grunton in the background diluting
those antibiotics?)...

...and surely you, my glozing readers, can take the next step to the Low
Caricature of what's in your newspaper every day.
 
3) I think I commented back in the first MDMD that the nod to Pat "Euphroes"
O'Brian signifies much more than "thanx for the nautical lingo." Just as the
protagonist of O'Brian's books is neither Aubrey nor Maturin but their
friendship, so for Mason and Dixon, each friendship with its complement of
Running Joaks and Habitual Hypersensitivities. I've reread M&D several times
since then, and the psychological depth and truth of that friendship -- by
any standard the Great Tradition could set -- impresses me more each time.

Should Pynchon have taken me into a Durham pit (a la Germinal) to help me
understand what it means to Jeremiah to be out and away? Should he play
Hardy and give me more Gloucestershire seasons with father and son in the
bakery? Would that really be better than "...Charlie, who'd go along with
it, tho' pulled at, the miller could tell, by something else, pull'd away
from the silent loaves and the rumbling stones, out to London, the stars,
the sea, India."...?

I don't think so.