Pynchon's sentence structure

[John Bailey]

I've been reading a recent essay by one of Australia's pre-eminent
novelists, Gerald Murnane, an extremely private man (the more common
description is 'reclusive') only two years younger than Thomas Pynchon
and whose work is characterised by obscenely long sentences that are
nonetheless grammatically correct. His great obsession is Proust and
most would say he is the Antipodean answer to Proust. The essay is on
the long sentence's profound potential to produce meaning - which he
associates with 'connections' - that short, descriptive, declarative
sentences can't access. But as an obsessive grammarian, he begins the
work decrying Kermode's review of Vineland, in which is quoted the
following loooong sentence. Murnane says it isn't a sentence, but a 66
word sentence followed by a bunch of unconnected clauses. He goes on
to call Pynchon and Kermode 'pretenders' as a result (did I mention
Murnane is a serious grammar freak?) but eventually produces quite an
interesting essay.

My question is: I can see how he can't parse the following as a
classically correct sentence past "another motel room" but I can also
see how it does work. I don't know how to argue for it, however. A
puzzle fit for a P-list.

The 'after a while her visits to Sasha' clause is where things get hairy.

"By the time she began to see that she might, nonetheless, have gone
through with it, Brock Vond had reentered the picture, at the head of
a small motorcade of unmarked Buicks, forcing her over near Pico and
Fairfax, ordering her up against her car, kicking apart her legs and
frisking her himself, and before she knew it there they were in
another motel room, after a while her visits to Sasha dropped off and
when she made them she came in reeking with Vond sweat, Vond semen —
couldn't Sasha smell what was going on? — and his erect penis had
become the joystick with which, hurtling into the future, she would
keep trying to steer among the hazards and obstacles, the swooping
monsters and alien projectiles of each game she would come, year by
year, to stand before, once again out long after curfew, calls home
forgotten, supply of coins dwindling, leaning over the bright display
among the back aisles of a forbidden arcade, rows of other players
silent, unnoticed, closing time never announced, playing for nothing
but the score itself, the row of numbers, a chance of entering her
initials among those of other strangers for a brief time, no longer
the time the world observed but game time, underground time, time that
could take her nowhere outside its own tight and falsely deathless
perimeter."
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l