VL-IV Chap 3 & 4 Overview pgs 25, 26, 55
Robin Landseadel
robinlandseadel at comcast.net
Tue Dec 16 11:42:31 CST 2008
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.
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