ATD stars above, abyssal plain below

[Monte Davis]

> I'm pretty sure I'm not looking for what "really"
> happens, ambiguity is absolutely fine with me. What I
> seek is shape...

The quest-for-shape that GR satisfied for me (at 23, when it came out) had
grown out of a Cold War childhood. There was pervasive anxiety about bombs
and missiles, feeding an insistent question: can the grown-ups really be as
crazy as the headlines suggest? How did we get here? I didn't think those
weapons could be un-invented, but it seemed stone obvious that going from
tens to hundreds to thousands of them added risk faster than it added
security.

There was some weird *automatism* at work. I had tried to make sense of it
via reading history/geopolitics, Freud & Norman O. Brown & co, game theory,
lotsa other approaches -- and then GR pulled it all together with metaphor
and magic and magnificent indirection. It leaps from a scrap of newspaper in
the Zone to Richard M. Zhlubb on the freeways in 1973 L.A., but every damn
event and plot twist and Wagner-vs-Rossini squabble in it was intensely
*about* how 1945 would lead to 1973. Pynchon had tied a knot that seemed to
draw in every thread of history before its opening, and (like Tyrone) ravel
out into every thread of history thereafter. And it wasn't all front-brain
abstractions, but characters too: there was a piece of me I recognized, a
piece of the answer to "what kind of people are we to bring ourselves to
this pass?", in everyone from Blicero and Pointsman to the refugee kids on
the DP trains.

So I looked back at V. and CoL49, and have looked at every Pynchon book
since, for that pattern of knotting-into and implication-out-of, and have
yet to be disappointed. It will take me years to really get a handle on AtD,
because the Chumps of Choice framing (like the Philadelphia parlor framing
in M&D) ties questions about the storytelling itself more deeply into the
knot than he used to do. 

Parents and children, grudges and grace, a psychologically teen-aged US
encountering a wider world, "real life" <heh> vs dime novels and photos and
movies and proto-TV, scary Moslems plotting god-knows-what in Central Asia
-- it *does* feel like a grab-bag at first. But he's been proving to me for
40 years that for all the silly names and doggerel songs and bad puns and
Groucho Marx cameos, the more I put into his work the less anything in it
will prove to be  whimsical or arbitrary or pointless.