Against the Day, still.

[Laura Kelber]

I don't understand the "Merle didn't know, he knew" paragraph out of
context. I don't remember Daly being in a relationship except at the very
end, with the youngest Traverse? Not sure what you want comments on, Mark.
Freedom and/or repression in relationships?

Laura

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019, 7:46 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com wrote:

> Anne Tyler has spent a lot of her career exploring
> this notion with married bourgeois women:
> '''excuse me, signora...but....have you ever felt that you wished to
> suddenly
> disappear, even from a room full of people, just....[makes vanishing signs
> with his hands] ......gone?"
>
> "Me, all the time, why"? ---Erlys.
>
> "Could you stand perfectly still while someone throws knives at you"?
>
> "Then the beauty swept over her ..like a galvanic shadow,,, as her body
> took on a
> "vibrant dark density"...and Merle "did not know what was happening. He did
> know".
>
> There are many other writers too, of course, on this and related aspects
> including that sixties milestone book *The Feminine Mystique. *
>
> Any women on the Plist care to comment on P's presentation of this bit? Esp
> that great phrase, "vibrant dark density" or-- is it great? A few good men
> [care to comment]?
>
> (I will comment only that two women I've known have told me of leaving long
> term relationships, not felt as oppressively unhappy,
> for someone brand-new and hardly known but.....Mr. Right, so to
> mythologize...)
>
>
> PS. Anne Tyler's first husband was an Iranian-American psychiatrist. She
> refused to answer any questions about her marriage EVER when interviewed.
> In fact
> declared such questions out-of-bounds. Full privacy for him and the
> marriage they inhabited. I've thought of it as doing half-a-Pynchon re
> privacy.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>