Can Pynchon write (yet)?

[kelber at mindspring.com]

"Flat" implies not behaving like a real person.  I disagree with some of the comments that merely doing the unexpected makes a character "round."  A well-rounded character should be easy to extrapolate about.  We should be able to make reasonable guesses about how they would behave in situations outside of what the author presents, and even their irrational actions should be believable.   Lots of real people are shallow, with uninteresting lives, goals or viewpoints, but they're still "round, not "flat."  

Don't know if you've seen the Hitchcock movie The 39 Steps, but the protagonist, while exciting and vital comes across as flat, because it doesn't seem credible that a man like him would be able to jump from trains, etc.  He's a  fictional creation: Everyman in an extraordinary situation.  Compare him with the young farmwife he meets.  She's spent her whole life in the middle of nowhere, she's uneducated and limited, but in a couple of short scenes, we learn so much about her hopes and dreams; find it so much easier to understand her and to predict how she'd behave in any number of situations.  

Laura

>From: Tofuman <slowdrop at gmail.com>

>Some real people look very flat to me. Is it possible a flat character
>to be a realistic representation of real person?
>