NP but bananas and coded realism

[Mark Kohut]

There are bananas in Hopscotch, in a few places,
once used in this way: It--something i don't remember---was like eating
a banana without peeling it.

This is as good an example as any I was going to look for, to describe
the major way to me that Hopscotch is quite like V or GR & Pynchon in
general.

First, as with Pynchon (and other writers, of course) Hopscotch is overtly
a novel of ideas. Often, by the third section, mini-essays
a short chapter long. Sometimes linked to a character there--although by
this section
'character' has been mostly jettisoned conceptually.

But the first parts of the novel, the first 55 chapters--reading option the
first--
with real people and happenings, is like, well, maybe not
an hysterical realism, but an oblique, symbolic realism. If the concept of
non-hysterical off-realism (in tone) makes sense.
A novel combining Pynchon with The Recognitions, I suggest?.
Cortazar's internalized and unique use of surrealism maybe, a stated
influence,
 a light surrealism of the everyday.

Major theme of Hopscotch is a new conception of character in history.
Psychological
realism just mirrors the problem. One kinda connection to a 'character' in
Pynchon
is a scene in which a guy simply becomes, beyond the circumstances of his
ongoing life, which we've been following, suffused with a seemingly acausal
feeling of happiness.

Reminds me of the Cyprian scene in Against the Day.

Since we are enthusiastically recommending today, I repeat myself by
enthusiastically
recommending HOPSCOTCH to all Pynchon fans.

The End.

(but PS, since it has no thematic connection to Pynchon that I, a
connecting stretcher, can see,
I won't leave a spoiler here about one possibly chapter long joke that ends
the first optional way to
read the novel. Thematically hilarious, maybe. You'll have to read the
novel. Worth it)
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