Against the Day, still.

[Mark Kohut]

Merle's comment comes right after the characterization of Erlys' reaction. Which comes right after the q & a.

Merle watches her reaction to Zamboni and sees what happens to her. He doesn't get it but he does. 

She leaves him and Dally for Zamboni then. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 5, 2019, at 12:14 PM, Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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