IVIV: Nothing personal

[John Bailey]

Penny brings up the two stewardii Doc hangs with on and off - Lourdes
and Motella. Like her grilling regarding Shasta, this might seem like
a lover's jealousy, and Doc's response is defensive in this way ("I
told you, man, it was just that Jacuzzi, the pumps were on too high,
those bikinis just kind of mysteriously came undone..."

But, again like the Shasta reference, Penny turns out to be
professionally interested. The stewardii's new beaus are of interest
the DDA (and their later revealed connection to the Golden Fang
explains this). This lunch is a work meeting for Penny. She gives Doc
nothing of herself, except for a cute nose-wrinkling of embarrassment,
and even that could easily be faked - we're informed of weekend
seminars in greasiness held by lawyers.

I've always been struck by Pynchon's judicious use of character
description. IV, more than any of his other works, offers physical
descriptions of characters. It starts by creating an image of Shasta,
her dress and hair. In many other works, Pynchon completely avoids any
detailing of a character's appearance. To me that is a challenge to
the conventions of realist 'literary fiction' which aims to create a
credible world by building up a *picture* of characters - an image
that we take to be real. It's based on the visual. Physical
descriptors in P's writing always seem to be carefully deployed, since
they don't actually contribute to depth and in fact can act as a
distraction that creates an illusion of depth where there is none.

But IV is oddly littered with physical description, including Penny's
dress style, Shasta's various haircuts, Riggs' size, Sloane's widowy
get-up, Puck's shaven-headed tattoos, etc etc etc. Do these replace
'character'? Or have reviewers said that IV has 'characters' because
we get visual descriptions of its population?

Note: during my first reading, I for some reason imagined Penny as
Asian-American. I have no idea why now, and there are no indicators
that this is the case. No indicators otherwise, too. Same with Lourdes
and Motella and Spike and Cookie, who on second reading seem to be
african-american or latino/a, though not in that order. Pynchon
doesn't always give us racial markers, and when he does it's for a
reason. Tariq is explicitly described as black, and that matters.
There's a heavy subtext of race in IV, or so I began to think early on
as I googled the various LA locations mentioned and found that many
were linked to racial displacement, ghettoisation and ethnic
segregation. Which of course soon came up explicitly in the novel.