IVIV (1) "She came along the alley and up the back steps ..."

[John Carvill]

WELL SURE, THE SNOWBALLS FLYTING their arcs [oops CAPS Lock] opening
in M&D - a very, very beautiful sentence - was hugely evocative of GR.
And as you say, ATD begins with the flight of a sort of state of the
art piece of technology (ever notice, though, how many ATD reviews
claimed that book began in 'mid air'?).

Shasta does come up the stairs, as did Pirate ascend that spiral ladder.

ATD was chock full of resonances from Pynchon's other books, too many
to enumerate. IV may seem to have less of them, but they're there
alright. There are echoes of Vineland's opening in the 'light through
the window' phrasing of the opening of IV. As mentioned on the wiki:

Like Vineland, and httGravity's Rainbow, here a Pynchon book begins
with light coming through a window. Also like Vineland, the sentence
structure and rhythm is just slightly jarring - that '...in the street
light through the kitchen window...' seeming to echo Vineland: "Later
than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in
sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a
squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof." In both cases,
it's just a little odd that Pynchon doesn't refer to the light 'that
shone' through the window. And that creeping fig makes an appearance
on page 33 of Inherent Vice.

http://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_1




2009/8/18 Jim Gilbert <posthorn at gmail.com>:
> Speaking of the balloon going up (or not)....
>
> Is it just me, or does Pynchon, since GR, have a thing about opening
> his books with things going UP, or otherwise flying? Rockets in GR,
> blue jays in VL, snowballs in M&D, the Inconvenience in AtD, now
> Shasta ascending the stairs....
>