CH 15 the hard on

[alice wellintown]

What are the moral limits? While these dark snapshots  & TV episodes &
parodic historicizings seem a critique of the experiment in democracy
we call America (circa 1970 & 2009) and how its corruption by an elite
produces Frankenstein's monsters that turn the "relatively poor and
powerless" people of the United States into dehumanized zombies and
slothful consumers of solipsistic slop, that critique is undermined by
the S&M and homosexual self inflicted imprisonment theme. The People's
History of the United States or Who Built America, and the Whitman &
Thoreau & Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, not to mention Melville
(Typee to Bartleby) themes, evinced on each and every page of
Pynchon's latest tome, seem only present in their absence in this
California Pot Broilier.  While clever readers may construct meaning,
and morals, the text refuses to allow a center that holds--not even
murder, as the discussion of Larry's propensity to kill seems to
prove, is beyond the pale. He's a pacifist, man. But the Dude, try as
he may to avoid violence, can not. Larry is no Dude. He is a man
driven by his romantic notions of heroism; he admires Bigfoot. It is
easier to like Bigfoot than it is to like Larry.  This is not quite
thew case of P's previous California Buddies, Hector and Zoyd. What
are the moral limits if the character we like most is a corrupt cop?
Again, I suggest that these California works are post-modern thumbs in
the eyes of the reader who would attribute a moral meaning to Pynchon.