ATDTDA - petroleurs, p.19

[Monte Davis]

 Mark Kohut:
 
> The web (sic) of revenge Webb is caught in, as he traverses moral
boundaries, makes him unable  
>  to live out the day-to-day life of simple (never really simple--in fact I
remember  a line about the  
> "almost infinite" day-to-dayness, I think.) husband and father. 
 
I can't find that specifically, although the idea is certainly all over:
 
95: "...and if it took growing into a stranger to those kids and looking
like some 
kind of screaming fool whenever he did show up at home, and then someday 
sooner or later losing them... that would have to be reckoned into the 
price, too..."
 
105: "He wondered if it would stay this way for the rest of his life-
he had never made it right between him and his Pa, and the same thing now, 
like some damn curse, was happening between him and Kit. . . ."
 
189: It seemed he could get along with everybody these days except the two 
women in his own family, the ones that ought to've mattered most ...
 
That foreshadowing sharpens the irony of his "adoption" of Deuce, followed
by Lake's.
 
Maybe you're thinking of the next-generation version on p. 360, explaining
why Reef and Stray don't settle down?
 
"It put a shade onto things that parlor life would 
just never touch, so whenever she or Reef pulled up and got out, when it 
wasn't, mind, simple getting away in a hurry, it was that one of them had 
heard about a place, some place, one more next-to-last place, that hadn't 
been taken in yet, where you could go live for a time on the edge of that
old 
day-to-day question..."
 
This comes close to the Zone of ambivalence at the heart of all Pynchon's
books. He has an abiding sympathy for the outsider, the anarchist, the
oddball, the utopian, the revolutionary. But he also has a painfully clear
eye -- from the family scale to the historical scale -- for every trait that
ensures they will *stay* marginal, and *not* change the world closer to
their hearts' desire. For me, that's why he can get away with the pasteboard
villains: because the deepest fault, dear reader, is not in our Scarsdales
but in ourselves. 
   
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