VL-IV (15) Love anyway, pages 323.324

[Robin Landseadel]

      If there’s a protagonist in in Vineland, I vote [still] for  
Prairie, she’s with us from the first page, with her  “Love anyway”  
salutation as her first message and the book ends with Desmond's  
return from his little odyssey, licking Prairie’s face and letting her  
know that she was "home." There's lots of “Love anyway” in latter day— 
Post “Slow Learner”—Pynchon. Prairie’s a good, honest, hardworking  
girl, there are many more cut from the same cloth in “Against the Day.”

      Prairie—Noun. An extensive area of flat or rolling grassland;  
especially the plain of Central North America. It’s French, comes from  
Latin for “meadow” though improvising Romans came up with  
“unattested”. The idea of virgin pasture comes to mind in more than  
one direction, directions where Zoyd shows proper fatherly concern. As  
far as we can tell Prairie’s always got her purity on one level or the  
other [a traverse virtue/vice] and as Prairie alway loves her parents  
anyway this little "Hallmark" movie is headed for a real “Family  
Values” finish.

“THE pasture, just before dawn” reads like an instruction from a movie  
script. It is also anthropomorphizes the pasture:

	THE pasture, just before dawn, saw the first impatient kids
	already out barefoot in the dew, field dogs thinking about
	rabbits, house dogs more with running on their minds, cats in
	off of their night shifts edging, arching and flattening to fit
	inside the shadows they found. The woodland creatures,
	predators and prey, while not exactly gazing Bambilike at the
	intrusions, did remain as aware as they would have to be,
	moment to moment, that there were sure a lot of Traverses
	and Beckers in the close neighborhood
	VL, 323

The pasture “sees.” The woodland creatures are cognizant of the  
situation. It’s all very Gaian and pastoral. “What a serene scene” as  
Bugs Bunny might drawl. But it might as well be a movie set—just like  
the start of the book where the “Cuke” is remodeled for Zoyd’s big  
jump, Shady Creek is being reclaimed as suburban space, the “comfort  
zone” of a made-for-TV-Movie. Even though we start with sentient earth  
and observant wildlife, in just two paragraphs time we find portable  
TVs lashed to bootlegged cable and refrigerators being rolled &  
plugged in. Suddenly, like for so many years running, we’ve got this  
mammoth Traverse/Becker annual family hoe-down and Crazy-Eights  
Tournament in the sylvan woods.