The spilled, the broken world (From Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland)

So the bad Ninjamobile swept along on the great Ventura, among Olympic visitors from everywhere who teemed all over the freeway system in midday densities till far into the night, shined-up, screaming black motorcades that could have carried any of several office seekers, cruisers heading for treed and more gently roaring boulevards, huge double and triple trailer rigs that loved to find Volkswagens laboring up grades and go sashaying around them gracefully and at gnat’s-ass tolerances, plus flirters, deserters, wimps and pimps, speeding like bullets, grinning like chimps, above the heads of TV watchers, lovers under the overpasses, movies at malls letting out, bright gas-station oases in pure fluorescent spill, canopied beneath the palm trees, soon wrapped, down the corridors of the surface streets, in nocturnal smog, the adobe air, the smell of distant fireworks, the spilled, the broken world.

A description of the postmodern Preterite world from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. 

1 thought on “The spilled, the broken world (From Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland)”

Your thoughts?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.