IVIV amethyst is resilient. There is too much kindness in the room all of a sudden.

[alice wellintown]

Paul Mackin wrote:

>
> Maybe because the book has been labeled a beach read or noir detective
> people begin to forget they are reading Pynchon. They begin to expect at
> least semi realism so that impossibly happy and sentimental outcomes
> feel out of place. Because the world just isn't like that. Amethyst
> wouldn't really recover from her heroin poisoning any more that Poekler
> would give his wedding band to the dying woman or Dixon would turn the
> whip on the slave driver. But wouldn't it be nice to think such things
> could happen. The world would surely be a better place. Reminds one of
> the ending of 3 Penny Opera when Mackie Messer is saved from the gallows
> with a full pardon from the Queen.

Wouldn't It Be Nice (1966).  I agree.  Although the melodrama needn't
have such Disney outcomes. As Tocqueville speculates, in the American
form of the novel, the Romance, the abstractions of the American
democratic imagination fill in where a combination of the paucity of
material and tradition (Hawthorne's three topics--Indians, Puritans,
Revolution) and the drive to declare literary independence and
establish a national literature, and a number of other factors,
including the formation of the American Hero (see Chase The American
Novel and its Tradition, see Colacurcio's Introduction to Hawthorne's
Selected Tales) make the American novel melodramatic and sentimental.
And, it is certainly tiresome, or can be,  because it is, by design,
formulaic, but it needn't be. Of course, Pynchon's IV is more in the
mode of Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore, a parody of melodrama.

But wouldn't it be nice of Voltaire really did hope for the best of
all possible other worlds invisible and not so digital and crowded
with the business of the mundane and dehumanizing? Vampires and
Zombies and Hope for the innocent children of Junkies might all be
possible. But, who sez the children of junkies are innocent?  Doo Doo
Doo Doo Doo (1972) Certainly not those Stones, who, take a page from
Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, introduce the devil
as a man of wealth and taste who lives in a world where every cop is
criminal and all the sinners saints. The Romantic imagination and
Lucifer have a long literary history that runs back from Pynchon to
Hawthorne and Whitman and the European Romantics to Milton.

In any event, as my husband, who claims he got out of the markets at
the top and has been fully invested since the April lows, always sez,
Romantics and Lefties don't read the Wall Street Journal, but maybe
they should.


This was the summer when all the beach reading was atrocious, when all
the best sellers announced that America was going to hell in a
handbasket—Hey! There's an original idea!—and when the long-awaited
new novel by Dan Brown failed to appear. There were no electrifying
new cookbooks, no "Freakonomics," no mystifying reading suggestions by
Oprah. This summer, the entire city of Chicago did not read "To Kill a
Mockingbird," nor did a new translation of "Anna Karenina" win a
surprise summer following among high school dropouts. Instead,
everyone read more stuff about vampires. The book that got the most
attention dealt with a weird frathouse in Arlington, Va., frequented
by people like…Mark Sanford. Once again, South Carolina's plucky,
unpredictable governor was the only one providing any laughs.

The Summer of Our Discontent
Town-hall brawls. Tomato blight. Woodstock nostalgia. Rain. Not hiking
the Appalachian Trail. Joe Queenan says good riddance to the summer of
'09.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204731804574391143289432918.html


>
> There's also the idea of fiction being a comment on its own
> fictionality.
>
> But Pynchon readers know and expect all that.
>
> They expect it but they might also get tired of it, which I suspect I
> may be getting a little.
>
> P
>
>
>