I just finished re-reading the Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Besides a brevity(and implied lack of self-indulgent digression) that his other novels do not possess, I love his character names, middle-school-caliber Spanish jokes, and his decidedly Northern California point of view:
"Somewhere beyond the battening, urged sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across all the dark beige hills, somehow implicit in an arrogance or bite to the smog the more inland somnolence of San Narciso did lack, lurked the sea, the unimaginable Pacific, the one to which all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions, sunned homosexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the moon's tearing-free and monument to her exile...
Oedipa had believed, long before leaving Kinneret, in some principle of the sea as redemption for Southern California(not, of course, for her own section of the state, which seemed to need none), some unvoiced idea that no matter what you did to its edges the true Pacific stayed inviolate and integrated or assumed the ugliness at any edge into some more general truth."
Posted by DV at May 13, 2003 12:45 PMafter I read that, I thought I had graduated to gravity's rainbow. but as it turned out, no.
Posted by: didofoot at May 16, 2003 04:27 PM