V-2nd - Chapter 10 drove the little Triumph to the party...

[alice wellintown]

V. is a remarkable book. I like it.  P-the-younger is an impressive
author and, obviously, works his ass off to produce a great first
novel. It's a fun book, even after 40 plus years. What's not that
impressive is the style, the diction, the syntax, the grammar, the
sentences, the dialogue, is often flat and lumpy, not the the prose we
find in the works P writes later on. I think P writes better when he
follows Hawthorne's advice (given in those famous prefaces and the
custom house chapter) and gets what Hawthorne calls the "atmospherical
medium" working on an historisized moral message that aims at the
truth of the human heart. He does this in Mondaugen and it works. He
tries it in TSI with mixed results. Sphere is a mixed bag. He not
post-war cool, he does care about the people he sees suffering in
their relationships and he sufferes. He reminds us that Pynchon is
never far from Christ.

On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 8:00 PM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> Robin Landseadel wrote:
>> alice wellintown wrote:
>
>
> one thing that strikes me in Chapter 10 is at that party where the
> girl takes Sphere's eye.  "Give me back my eye," he says.  This seems
> at first to be an interruption of uncontrollable, almost
> unconscionable levity on the author's part.
>
> But then Sphere turns down a tryst, goes running back to Ruby, and
> before that, Sphere's buddy remarks on him having eyes for the
> kitchen, or something like that - so one gets a picture of somebody
> being turned on, noticeably, and resisting it, for a reason.  And it
> also refers back to Shakespeare, "tell me where is fancy bred?"
>
> I have this harmless contrarian theory that V. is actually pretty cool...
>
>
>
> --
> "Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respects a
> violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural
> liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the
> whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all
> governments, of the most free as well as of the most despotical." -
> Adam Smith
>