By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
Deep breath. Most of what I remember and most of what I love about this novel happens in the first half of the book. Perhaps I will understand and appreciate the balance of the novel reading it in 2025, Thanatoids and all. I did enjoy the bit about Rolls Royces in chapter nine.
The discussion of faces on film on page 195 makes me think of two things. First, I think of the character on Fear the Walking Dead who recorded interviews with people about their experiences during the zombie apocalypse. Second, I think about the documentary Hôtel Terminus. The surviving members of the French Resistance in that film seem full of life, whereas the collaborationists and Nazis seemed, as Pynchon says, “evasive, affectless, cut off from whatever they had once been by promises of what they would never get to collect on?”
Pg. 197, xanthorcroid means, “of, relating to, or designating races having light-coloured hair and a pale complexion” according to Collins Dictionary. That fits with the reference to the sisters’ attitude towards the surfing community in this passage.
