SLPAD - 93 - Low-Lands - 6

[Michael Bailey]

“You keep that weird crew down in the rumpus
room,” she would yell, brandishing a cocktail shaker. "You are a damned
ASPCA, is what you are. I doubt if even they would take some of the animals
you bring home.” What Flange should have answered but didn’t was something
like, “Rocco Squarcione is not an animal, he is a garbage man with a
fondness, among other things, for Vivaldi.”
               It was Vivaldi they were listening to now, Sixth Concerto
for Violin, sub-titled Il Piacere, while Cindy stomped around upstairs.
Flange got the impression she was throwing things. He wondered every once
in a while what life would be like without a second story and how it was
people managed to get along in ranch-style or split-level houses without
running amok once a year or so.



Il Piacere is a fairly well-known piece, at least I recognized it. It runs
about 9 minutes, so they may have run through a lot of repertoire before
getting to this piece.

8 hours of drinking wine and listening to music, wow, he must be pretty
sick of his job if this is his preference. (A little bit of Bartleby the
scrivener preferring not, although Flange may possess slightly more
volition...and at least he has a drinking companion - a little bit of
peripheral Huck and Jim)

And it seems reasonable to impute an inebriated "yeah, that's what I
should've said," state of mind - so that this is still Flange speaking, not
the omniscient narrator chiming in with an unimpressive normative
rejoinder. (That entity, I choose to believe, has a clearer vision, a
higher purpose, and manifests through choice of details & vocabulary rather
than intervening directly.)

Suburban misery chronicles were familiar territory - John Cheever? - so
could Pynchon be upping the ante by making Flange a wealthy denizen of a
beyond-prosperous exurbia, and exaggerating the marital disharmony?

Gratuitous author-state-of-mind speculation: at time of writing, his
description of a 7 year  marriage gone stale could not reflect personal
experience but rather observation - of people in his circle of family and
friends, also stories of Cheever, maybe John Updike, and other media such
as "The Seven Year Itch" (1955)



Then this:

He wondered every once in a while what life would be like without a second
story and how it was people managed to get along in ranch-style or
split-level houses without running amok once a year or so.


Meanwhile, Cindy is in fact running amok upstairs, which he's able to
ignore because of the spatial separation provided by both his stereo system
and the generous dimensions of their house.

Again a glimpse into the mind of Flange as the thought of living with less
of wealth's cushioning  briefly enters his mind, but only as something
other people experience.