Chronology in IV

[alice wellintown]

He quits doing matrimonials because he can't stand pleading with men
younger than himself distraught with what they were so sure was love.
(192 top)


Yet he is obsessed and distraught by what he isn't even sure was ever
anything approaching Love. In fact, Larry isn't sure if Love is real.
Maybe it's just a word on the Tube or in a pop song or on a screen.
Maybe he's so much older now and yet too young to admit what Love is.
Is Love a youthful forever-young under 30-4-sure fad? Is Love a thing
people buy into so they can sell someone on the idea that all we need
is sex. NOW!


We should expect that Larry's past and present are quite an uneven and
even contradictory tale. He's the legendary hero of this Romance. He
is, as he must be, a fantastic distorter of all he encounters and full
of duplicity and mad inanities and insanities and excellent adventures
and explorations.  That P failed to distance himself from the
narrative voice causes some confusion, nut the real loss is to the
poetic language that P is so brillaint with and, obviously, this gift
has only improved with age. AtD has more beautiful passages than any
other he's written.





On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:30 AM, John Bailey<sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have to admit, the particulars of IV's timeline are a bit confusing
> for me. Not most of the novel, just a few details:
>
> Doc hasn't seen Shasta for over a year (p.1)
> They weren't an item for very long (p.11).
> Doc says "You know I have an office now?" to Shasta - he could be
> joking, but if not it sounds like he got the office within the past
> year.
> "A couple of years ago" (p.25) he was doing matrimonials.
> Before that, I guess, he was a skip tracer.
> Shasta and Doc were together before he became a skip tracer,
> presumably not long out of high school (p.11)
> Now he's almost 30.
>
> What I'm not sure about: that's a long time between drinks, Doc. If he
> saw her a bit over a year ago, I'm assuming there was still some kind
> of contact between them all that time? And boy, is he still hankering
> after her, what, up to a decade or more later? And she's still known
> as his ex-old lady? This loser has got it bad.
>