Van Meter

[Mark Kohut]

There is more 'heart', and its tracing to sources in AtD than in any other of Pynchon's novels....

And what is Doc?  

--- On Wed, 8/26/09, Rob Jackson <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:

> From: Rob Jackson <jbor at bigpond.com>
> Subject: Re: Van Meter
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Wednesday, August 26, 2009, 9:38 AM
> > Zoyd is no Van Meter, who, in
> turn, is no Frenesi/Flash
> 
> Yes, this hierarchy seems about right, and even though many
> of Flash's priors aren't spelled out in the narrative, 
> he is probably a notch beyond Frenesi, at least in terms of
> "criminal" activity and the extent/s to which he has been
> "turned". Flash's past is detailed only very vaguely because
> it's the unwritten code in this milieu when referring to
> "miscellaneous folks in out of the night" (8), "politicals
> fleein' from different jurisdictions" (25), and so forth, to
> couch the references to illicit activity in ambiguous terms
> and not name names, which is why Zoyd doesn't ever
> explicitly drop Van Meter's name as a snitch. And which is
> also why "snitching" is such a big deal, breaking that
> code.
> 
> But there does seem to be a little bit of parallelling
> going on as well: Zoyd with wise-cracking Prairie and
> Frenesi and Flash with precocious young Justin. It's a
> typical sit-com conceit: one of VL's themes, underdeveloped
> as many of them are in the novel, seems to be that "the
> child is father of the man". The later descriptions
> recalling the time that Zoyd and VM looked after Prairie as
> a baby after Z had escaped from Brock Vond's clutches are
> also very sympathetic.
> 
> At the end of the novel, even despite Zoyd's hypocrisy and
> complicity, Frenesi's sleeping with and working for the
> enemy, and Flash's shadowy past and present, they're all
> ultimately welcomed back into the family fold of the
> "Traverse-Becker annual reunion". So there is a sense of
> forgiveness there as well, even for Frenesi and Flash. It's
> sentimental and cheesy and akin to the obligatory sit-com
> pay-off, but self-consciously so, and there is a degree of
> "heart" in VL which seems to be absent from the two most
> recent novels.
> 
> all best
>