Rolling westward

With Pynchon in Against the Day

After the closing of the Columbian Fair, once out of Chicago and into the land again, Dally and Merle…

As his characters range far and wide across what many of us snidely refer to as flyover country, and some of us call home, let’s listen to the range of voices in a single paragraph (p.70):

Planted rows went turning past like giant spokes one by one as they ranged the roads. The skies were interrupted by dark gray storm clouds with a flow like molten stone, swept and liquid, and light that found its way through them was lost in the dark fields but gathered shining along the pale road, so that sometimes all you could see was the road, and the horizon it ran to.

The establishing shot, detailed and dramatic as Muir or McPhee, animated by metaphor poetic and precise, wheels within wheels, gears engaging to drive the motion forward, photographer Merle Rideout’s sense of light and shadow washing the scene in grayscale, brings us to a specific technicolor POV (Rideout’s young daughter Dally):

Sometimes she was overwhelmed by the green life passing in such high turbulence, too much to see, all clamoring to have its way. Leaves sawtooth, spade-shaped, long and thin, blunt-fingered, downy and veined, oiled and dusty with the day—flowers in bells and clusters, purple and white or yellow as butter, star-shaped ferns in the wet and dark places, millions of green veilings before the bridal secrets in the moss and under the deadfalls, went on by the wheels creaking and struck by rocks in the ruts, sparks visible only in what shadow it might pass over, a busy development of small trailside shapes tumbling in what had to be deliberately arranged precision, herbs the wild-crafters knew the names and market prices of and which the silent women up in the foothills, counterparts whom they most often never got even to meet, knew magic uses for.

Anchored by that amazing 123-word sentence, worthy of Proust. I love the introduction/disclaimer “too much to see”, echoed at the end by the “counterparts whom they most often never got even to meet”, which sets up the purely Pynchonian conclusion:

They lived for different futures, but they were each other’s unrecognized halves, and what fascination between them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace.

Proust is specifically invoked by the dialog which follows, dialog Proust could never have written (but not because he was at all unfamiliar with the complex and crosswise longings underlying it):

“There. Smell that?”
A sense at the edge of her memory, ghostly as if a presence from a former life had just passed through. . . [her lost mother] Erlys. “Lily of the valley. Sort of.”
“It’s ‘seng. Fetches top dollar, so we’re gonna eat for a while. Look. Little red berries there?”
“Why are we whispering?” Peering up from under her flowered bonnet-brim.
“Chinese believe the root is a small person, who can hear you coming and so forth.”
“We’re Chinese?”
He shrugged as if he wasn’t sure. “Don’t mean it ain’t the truth.”
“And cash crop here or whatever, we still aren’t going to use the money to try and find Mama, are we?”
Should’ve seen that coming. “No.”
“When then?”
“You’ll get your turn, Trooper. Sooner than you think.”
“Promise?”
“Ain’t mine to promise. Just how it works.”
“Well don’t sound so happy about it.”

Reading these two passages together is like finding a Dürer next to a Warhol, in the same hand. Astonishing. I don’t even know how you get those rhythms, but he does. Page by page, day by day. I doubt that Tom was idle, these ten years.

While I can’t place bets with the big dogs who are rounding page 700, I imagine this is tending toward that most American of vistas, heading west: the first glimpse of the Rockies rising improbably, yet undeniably from the endless prairie plain.