Deflating Hyperspace

[Monte Davis]

Paul Mackin:

> The talk--the "nervous in the  service" and "don't you know there's a 
> war on" go around-- is  absolutely pitch perfect. When I read the book 
> it was hard for me to  believe that  Pynchon had not been there.

I ran some of the details from GR past my father, who had been a USMC 
recruiter here in late 1941, then in Londonderry 1942, then Hawaii and 
island-hopping as a war correspondent 1943-45. He kept chuckling and 
saying "hey, I'd forgotten that" -- not just about the military stuff, 
but a particular third-tier actor who had a brief vogue in 1944, or a 
certain cover of a swing tune that was all the rage in March 1945 but 
would be quickly eclipsed in memory by another version.  

I admire more than I can express the way P nods to and never loses sight 
of the "received" version of an era -- what you'd get in a magazine 
article or History Channel documentary -- but lavishes research and 
narrative framing on obscure, real or reality-based details that cut 
across, sometimes against that version, yet feel more compelling. He's 
like a brilliant caricaturist who knows just the right visual elements 
of a face to abstract and exaggerate. I don't have any independent 
criterion for "just the right ones" until he's done it -- when I say 
"well, sure, of course."