Nixon & GR

[alice wellintown]

One could write a book on this subject, and perhaps some ambitious
young scholar will do so....as we wait for this we might consider how
Nixon fits into the networks that GR explores, and how the old
network, the setting of the romance, the War, functions as the Puritan
American period does in The Scarlet Letter or in the Cruciable, but
the novel is about, its contemporaries and the lives in the balance,
and so the new network, and, of course, the new money; yes,  P's
concern is with new money and the Nixon period, not with the old
money, though readers have often focused on the Nazis and the Standard
Oil, ICI, and IG Farben Octopus, but just as P explains how Orwell has
been misread as saying something about the past, or as a propher, he
is neither, and neither is P prescient, but only writing about his
world, the new money world of Nixon, so of aerospace and defense
contracting, of oil, and natural gas, and of the alliances, yes, the
military industrial complex alliance,  formed around these domestic
opperations, in contrast with the international IG Farben and Standard
Oil and so on of the War Period...of the setting of the novel's
historical events, so we need to look, to a zone actually, but that
zone is not European History, but American Expereince circa 1970, and
so, as TSI and CL49 suggest, we need to look at real-estate operations
during the postwar period, and the new money invested there, in the
sunbelt, where the population explodes and so....Nixon.

To argue that the book declines as it brings this into focus, or
foregrounds it, is to engage in a selective misreading, as the
evidence of the theater that is America circa 1970, as aopposed to the
theatre that is the War in Europe is there from the very first
page....and when we meet Malcolm X, or Little, and as we read on into
the post-Invisible Man Nixonian  American Experience, there can be no
mistake as to where we are: in Nixonland.