More on Mucho & Oedipa

[Mark Kohut]

Michael Bailey asks: 
"how about this {Mucho's sad nihilism] , that it's both a commentary on the relative ease of
their lives (even compared with the lot's customers, but poignantly
easier than veterans', yet they are to some extent palpably miserable
even so) and also some kind of notional imputation of Oedipa's
acceptance of the nurturing, comforting role.

Yes.....their tower is 50s-60s suburban anomie......despite their ease they ARE miserable, Mucho more palpably
than Oedipa, who is realizing she is too? 

Michael Bailey asks: 
She on the rebound from PI, yet for some reason she had not availed
herself of a lucrative settlement -- or had she?  Not having to talk
or worry about money, which she doesn't, does she? - is a sign of
having some...

True. but as with some of my questions perhaps asking the too-literal about what IS NOT a realistic novel
but a fable or allegory of a kind, perhaps we just have to accept that money was not a problem for her. My first reading
back when, I must confess I thought Mucho must be a nice, absentee kind of husband as she had her adventures
on his salary...then we learn where his interests had moved---to the teens whose 'fraudulent dream of teenage appetites'
the music he DJed fed.    (Oedipa thought the music 'buffered' him from memories of the lot...so soon teen girls buffered him.)

MB repeats:
She on the rebound from PI,.......Oedipa, to understand the "malicious" magic that held her says she has 4 options:
1) fall back on superstition       2) take up a hobby like embroidery     3) go mad      or 4) marry a disc jockey.....
bit o' wit from Oedipa and/or the fact of a rebound relationship with Mucho? Remember when she expresses, mistakenly, to
Mucho that "it--she and Pierce---ended a year before they married?....musta come up when they started, the usual, she has
to convince him she no longer has feelings for his predecessor.......

Yea, Mucho was a rebound.....but she and he are still in the tower which is everywhere. Chap 2 starts: "no idea she was moving toward anything new".  

But, finally, she is.