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

[Michael Bailey]

> 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 ....
>

gangs and abuse are bad, is the lesson.

P was right to later recoil from blatantly setting
this lesson amongst the Others - Stephen King, say what you will, from
the start of his career,
indicts bloody-minded groupthink among his own race/class/neighborhood
droogies with great aplomb (aplomb?) - verisimilitude
(verisimilitude?) - fidelity (fidelity?) - well, anyway, with a
"sticking to what he knows" that the author of the SL preface I think
would admire.  An underestimated author, in my estimation...for other
reasons besides that as well...

But, I would argue, some of that drive to roam far afield and so forth
serves Pynchon and his readers well.  We're looking for "young blood"
after all, gargle it, use it for a moufwash...unusual perspectives,
after going all around then to arrive home and know the place for the
first time (or something like that)