Pynchon's sentence structure

[Joseph Tracy]

 I think there just needs to be a semicolon after motel room for the whole to work as a single classically correct sentence.
> On Mar 19, 2016, at 9:31 AM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I would say those are two long sentences, or one with an "and" missing between "motel room" and "after". No real problem for a grammar freak and no pretending that I can see. (Although I'd have to say that Kermode could have seen that.)
> 
> 2016-03-19 11:15 GMT+01:00 John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com>:
> 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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