Drew > Recent Status Updates

Was expecting an intense detailing of claustrophobic madness. Hoping for it. So, a bit disappointed.

A bit fluffier than I’d hoped. Always thought this book would be weird and intense and dense. Still, I like it in the way I like Mysteries of Pittsburgh and catcher in the rye and to kill a mockingbird.

Still hoping one of the characters, hopefully a male, will turn out more interesting. All the dudes are dolts, which I get it from a female perspective in the early sixties, but still wish her ideas challenged.

Warn the duke: this is a fantastic read. So much story packed into relatively few pages.

Highlights aside from the main plot:
Freud and Jung at Coney Island ride the Tunnel of Love together. JP Morgan and Henry Ford discussing reincarnation (Ford is a true believer), Theodore Driesser anxiously adjusting his chair in circles through the night.

Hhhhh

Maybe the most ambitious book I’ve ever read.

We can do whatever we want. Are we not the world to come?

A philosophical novel, though I’m pressed to explain what that philosophy might be.

Hicks mctaggart.

The thought crossed Hicks’ mind - stopped, turns around and actually winked - that….

Finally gets pynchony around page 40.

2 beyond familiarity or indifference, some deep mischief is at work.

393. There are so many ways of taking vengeance one the world. Sometimes literature is simply not enough.

266. There is no such thing as a life that does not return.

Trolsche.
Fackleman
John NR Wayne
Not just Hal and Oren and JOI and Mrs I and Don Gately
Pemulis (I’d read a novel just about this guy.

243. What I recognize in Pym is what I recognize in myself: a spirit so wayward that, even while I am playing a game of scrabble with my kids it can swing between the options of suicide, rape and assassination. “He’s one of us for Christ’s sake!”

278. The moisture in her eyes was shining like steel, not dew, and nothing about her trembled.

170. …”And as he shouted he felt the last bits of worry go out of his chest, and his shoulders settle on his back, and he knew that with a wind like this he could tell anything he wanted to anybody.”

Lots of fun so far. Easy breezy reading compared to other Pynchon books. Loved running into the old Traverse clan that will descend into Vineland.

60 pages in. As a fan of fiction and 19th century physics, I’m loving it.

Nice flow but doesn’t seem to going anywhere.