Just realised I hadn’t posted my thoughts on these. In truth Chapter 10 is quite short and a bit slight. It was interesting enough but it felt like it was just a setup for Chapter 11 and the details about Frenesi’s past that gives us.
In One Battle After Another I felt like the weakest bit was Perfidia’s quickness to defect. Here, Frenesi isn’t really presented in the same hardline revolutionary way so it works better maybe but I still feel like there’s a certain unkindness in Pynchon’s view of people coming in here, maybe even of women? It’s not terrible I just think we still don’t really get what it is about Brock that allows him to dominate her. There’s that asinine line about her loving a man in uniform but in these early days stuff it’s not even 100% clear if he is in uniform. It also leaves a big hole around why she ever hooked up with Zoyd, but maybe I missed him being in uniform at the time? The chapter gets really grim when Brock is talking about her sleeping with him and Weed. Yup, Brock is a real proper villain and something that absolutely came across in OBAA too so that you really wanted bad things to happen to him. Enjoyed the campus stuff of Weed learning the police were bad…but then we know he’s a snitch by the end unless Brock is really running a number so that’s a big sigh.
Honouring spoilers hopefully. Haven’t read any of his work so I can’t comment for sure but I have heard this sort of thing about his stuff before which is one of the reasons I’m not interested. Life’s too short and I have loads of other books I want to read instead. In the unlikely event I run out of things I want to read I’ll revisit this stance.
That said, I’m really enjoying this thread format.
Yeah all I’d say is this book so far is a long way off the likes of Martin Amis or Murakami, where the misogyny was too much for me to enjoy reading but I’m only a little over halfway through so I guess we’ll see if stuff changes.
Oh yeah Murakami was awful I can’t believe I suffered his work as a teenager lol. Also heard the same about Martin Amis, I wonder if Kingsley was any better?
Read chapter one last night! Really enjoyed it and this is in no way a criticism, but it’s quite silly isn’t it? I think I have this default assumption that A MAJOR WRITER will write in a mode that is quite brow furrowing, but this is very much knock about slapstick. I’m here for it.
Chapter 12 done and I’m not going to lie: I didn’t really enjoy it much. A combo here of the subject matter (we’re kind of in the ‘fall of shit’ bit here) but also just I found it quite tough to keep track of where we were. In fact near the end when Prairie says about how that was when Frenesi went off and met Zoyd I practically wept because I had really been very unsure where we were in the timeline.
While I enjoy the actual prose, the worst thing for me as someone who often snatches reading moments late at night or quickly between chores or in what is left of my lunch break after preparing and dealing with work, is being unsure if I forgot something from earlier or I just failed to really read a passage and either missed an explicit statement or an implicit one went over my head. I’m not great with the latter: the flowery prose begins and I can get a bit lost in it and then I suddenly realise I was meant to actually understand a specific thing…
Much to unpack in this one, then: Frenesi doesn’t really come out of this at all well. I completely lost track of who Rex even was and that’s probably on me (see above) but it didn’t help with the setup for Weed…which I think now was a setup? Was it? Or maybe he was working for Brock? One thing became clear, though, which is that the Thanatoids are actually dead, it wasn’t like a metaphor for them all being depressed Goth types. And in fact I had to wait for them to say explicitly that Weed was dead before I knew that. Did I miss something? Hmm, who knows. There is a god-awful line in this section which is when Frenesi utters the immortal line “you know what happens when my pussy’s runnin’ the show” which is just really…oof.
Out of interest, can I ask if you actually do mentally review individual chapters in that way? Or is this more just to track your overall progress and ongoing thoughts on the story for the great unwashed of DiS
No critique ofc, its just if you did it’s a very different way from how I think of books, and find that sort of thing interesting
Ha, it’s specific for this exercise because of leaving a breadcrumb trail for future readers.
But it’s also true for a lot of books I will keep tabs on stuff mentally, especially if it has a lot of back and forth via flashbacks because I do like to understand what’s going on. And with a book that’s more poetic I have to do that kind of thing more often as I try to keep my mind on top of the prose.
It doesn’t have to be a complicated book for this. I still think the Goldfinch is missing a year. In the opening he says something about it beginning 11 years ago then the book goes back to that point to build back to the finalé taking place where we started. I kept track of each year that was mentioned and so was surprised when I was suddenly back at the opening a year early. I even did a Kindle search for ‘year’ couldn’t find enough references. Dunno. Yes yes, I probably missed a year
Chapter 13: mostly I really enjoyed this one. A lot of Zoyd background which I had been waiting for and I liked it. But at its heart this book has a problem for me, namely that at no point do I really buy Frenesi and Brock. It feels like Pynchon is really showing a fundamental inability to imagine women or else I simply haven’t read the story correctly. Ie it is quite comic so maybe the stupidity of her interest in him is the point. But in that case it feels more like joke is, “women be in love with bad boys,” than a general joke. It was a weak aspect of OBAA too but in a film you have enough going on to still make it fun. Here we have a lot of pages to dwell on how wrong it is.
Chapter 14: not loads to say about this one except it was really great. Zoyd is a fun character to spend time with as is Hector. Absolutely loved the image of a block of dope too large to fit through a door, like a 2001 (1968) monolith.
Right, Chapter 15 and the book done! Overall, 4/5 for me I think. Lots of nice prose and a load of good fun bits. Maybe my favourite is the Vomitones song “I’m a cop”
By the end I didn’t really understand what drove Brock Vond, nor even really the nature of his a Frenesi’s relationship, and this is biggest fault, because it leaves the book without any connecting tissue and more like a collection of short stories in a shared universe.
For example, why is Vond obsessed with keeping Prairie out of Frenesi’s life but then is happy for her to be married with a child to Flash? Why does the shutting down of his department make Vond need to get Prarie? Logically, it seems like Frenesi gets away from Vond and is hiding/working for the govt where he can’t find her but I don’t recall ever actually having that explained.
Then there’s obviously their relationship that never even seems to have beginning. This is the worst part of the story to me, that Frenesi’s relationship with Vond seems to come down to, “Nice girls just love a bad boy, I guess” even the final page is weird as we discover Prairie now wants Brock to take her as part of some sexual fantasy.
What was good was how the final chapter subverted any expectation I had for a big confrontation or series of them: the family just hangs and is civil, and after understanding Charron’s boat’s sinking is why the Thanatoids are here we get that lovely transition to understanding Vond died crashing either his helicopter or a car or both even though he can’t understand it.
Two small fun extra things: Pynchon rendering Sasha’s date’s British accent quite credibly with
“Weww— it’s oow rubbish, i’n’ i’?”
but it also meaning she’s there with Frank Spencer.
And in a made up movie Pynchon has Sean Penn in the cast, who plays the Brock analogue in OBAA.
even the final page is weird as we discover Prairie now wants Brock to take her as part of some sexual fantasy.