Chronology in IV

[John Bailey]

Yes. Also: the way the narrative almost "resets" itself at a
particular point in the novel is part of this confusion. It seems to
reverse a lot of what's come before. But it's also easy to miss if
you're beach-reading this sucker.

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 3:01 PM, alice
wellintown<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>>
>