Come on, Come on, Lolita, Start the projection machine

[Dave Williams]

Yet another reason why reading, say, _Vineland_, as a novel that features a "protagonist" named Zoyd Wheeler spins the tale around the donkey. Prairie, not Zoyd, is the protagonist. While Zoyd is a fun and interesting character, and his exploits with his partner Hector, some of the best in VL, it is Prairie's story. Prairie knows she's not a piece of meat to be won and eaten by her old man or by her violent boyfriend or by anyone else. Of course, she wants her mommy and when Hector says he can help her connect with Frenesi, she nearly ends up the bait in his mad machinations. It's a wonderful and complex drama, full of humor and so on.  But VL, I think we can agree, is a mature work of art; the subtle, and, one could argue, feminist Prairie & DL episodes are a bit heavy-handed for us Men who got off on that rocket in the pocket finger in the socket Davy Crockett in Gravity's Rainbow, but that's another novel.  Here in V., the short-eyes of Benny & the
Boyz are subjected to young P's C/catholic Love in the Western World critique. Not Lolita by any stretch...not even a peep show in Nabokov's Baedeckerland, but it still works well enough. The gang-bang? Jeeez, well . . . of course P does expose his racist views of Fina and her up-town sistha hood in the hood, and this can't sit any better than a nose job on a cuny Jap, but come on, come on, soon you will be sixteen ....