CoL49 Group Reading - Week 1 Summary & Questions

[Mark Kohut]

I am not sure if I sent this or a revised version of this. I can not find
that I did but the looking was fast.
If I did, sorry, and you don't need to read it again. You don't need to
read it at all actually.

"One summer afternoon" coming home from a suburban fondue party--remember
fondue?-- high on Kirsch begins Pynchon's first California work, a sunny
tipsy beginning not found again until *Vineland. *A beginning as casual as
a Ross MacDonald California
mystery---he with birds---often jays--to start a novel. (we know Tom liked
MacDonald,
Ross exploring dark Freudian family dramas in his mysteries.).

Then the complexities complexify. A sudden unenviable duty: Executrix. A
door slammed long ago, ending something. A sunrise nobody can see: that dry
disconsolate tune about homesickness; and a dangerous bust above their bed.
Relationship memories. Man, can Tom do it so compactly.
As he can reduce the prolixity of a good realistic novelist--Lewis;
Dreiser---to lists!. Maas's of the insides of cars.

I think the bust of Jay Gould, by the way, stands for the bust of Jay
Gould, unlike some.


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