VL-IV Chap 3 & 4 Overview pgs 25, 26, 55

[Robin Landseadel]

There's lots of cars in Vineland, so it should comes as no shock that  
wild things move fast in these parts. We start with Zoyd & Hector at a  
bowling alley, destroying a cali-mex lunch:

	He ordered the Health Food Enchilada Special and Hector had
	the soup of the day, cream of zucchini, and the vegetarian
	tostada, which upon its arrival he began to take apart piece by
	piece and reassemble as something else Zoyd could not
	identify but which seemed to hold meaning for Hector. . .

. . .and end the section with Prairie loading into the Vomitone van,  
on her way to a Mob wedding and her true destiny:

	"Stay out of that joint, ol' pothead," Prairie said.

	"Keep 'em legs together," he replied, "teen bimbo." Somebody
	put a Fascist Toejam cassette, 300 watts of sonic apocalypse,
	on the van stereo, Isaiah gallantly handed Prairie up into the
	lurid fuchsia padding of this rolling orgy room, where she
	became indistinct  among an unreadable pattern of Vomitones
	and their girlfriends, and quickly, in an arc unexpectedly
	graceful, they had all turned outward, tached up, engaged, and
	like a time machine darting for the future, forever too soon for
	Zoyd, boomed away the thin, cloudpressed lane.

In between there are a speedy series of cliffhangers, all in the  
slightly detached tone of a made for TV dramedy. Of course the  
language is prettier, much prettier.

As others have already noted, Hector isn't a villain, really—he's an  
early warning system for bad shit, kind of a karma indicator. He's  
also Zoyd's "good buddy". Hector's something of a stock character—the  
"good" bad guy, like a lot of ethnics on TV cop-dramas—or at least  
that's the end result of all of his Tube-aholism that leads to the  
agents of "Never" storming in on him:

	. . .on these intricately mortised masterpiece alleys, dating back
	to the high tide of the logging business in these parts, when the
	big houses framed all in redwood had gone up and legendary
	carpenters had appeared descending from rain-slick
	stagecoaches, geniuses with wood who could build you
	anything from a bowling alley to a Carpenter Gothic outhouse.
	Balls struck pins, pins struck wood, echoes of collision came
	thundering in from next door along with herds of kids in different
	bowling jackets, each carrying at least one ball in a bag plus
	precarious stacks of sodas and food . . .

. . .quite a setting and very, very "Big Lebowski" before the "Big  
Lebowski" first hit the scene. It's this level of detail—"intricately  
mortised masterpiece alleys", "echoes of collision came thundering in  
from next door along with herds of kids in different bowling jackets"— 
that tells me it's Pynchon's voice, even if the scene before us is  
perhaps a tad more mundane than custard pie fights between hot air  
balloons.