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

[alice wellintown]

Some CH 1 Spoiler Stuff Here and Worse than that some frank criticism
of the novel.


The opening of IV is basic detective genre exposition. Nothing fancy.
Not very good, actually. Would get chucked by a reviewer if it were
not marked, "Pynchon Novel." Lot49 opens in the same manner, only it's
fresh, over-written and working hard to sound literate. But it is
fresh; the consumer culture stuff and the silly way it bounces into
hysterical prose and impossible situations with youthful grace and at
the same time gets the detective genre set up with the letter from the
real estate affair and then the husband come home and he's rather
indifferent to it all, just wants to vent about his bad day at work
...then the tension builds as things get more and more complicated and
we get sucked into the adventure of our questing paranoid projecting
maybe protagonist. This is what made CL49 a college big girl on campus
and a favorite of the critical and theory industry. Of course, P had
done it much better with V.

In the IV opening the thumping ocean almost attacks reader interest,
but it's dropped and the required information is passed on and the
narrator makes stupid lists of whats in the place and who is around,
not imagined observations or meaningful descriptions. The details fall
flat. He looks at her looking his place over. Very weak.  Doc simply
complicates the plot and increases the tension with a phone call and
then runs into a couple-few people or is told about them, all with
frightening names, who pump paranoia into the air. The first scene
that reads like the work of a novelist is the Pipeline Pizza scene.
Not even close to the Sailor's Grave scene Pynchon penned when he was
a real slow learner novice.