Rue du Départ: Everybody Now--

Well, here it is. The last section of the book. What a long strange yeah okay. It actually starts with Dally talking into the ether but convinced that her dad is hearing her, which he is. So that's nice.

She and Kit are married and move to Torino in 1915. That's nice. What's, uh, less nice is that she meets Clive Crouchmas again:

She knew that Clive's demands would be as minimal as a girl could ask. Conjugal bliss? Flings with other men? no problem for Clive. There was that awkward business of his having once tried to shop her into white slavery, but both understood that it was perhaps his one moment of genuine blind passion, everybody deserves at least one of those, doesn't he, and at the end of the day Clive was grateful for it and Dally was semi-sweetly amused. (1067)

I can't fucking EVEN with this. I'd go so far as to say that I literally can't even. I mean, like, what the hell is this? Is she getting paid for this? Going with her old sugar daddy for extra pocket money? I mean, if she and Kit have a super-open relationship then she can do what she wants, but it becomes clear that this is not something he's cool with, and yet it seems like we're supposed to think it's a...reasonable thing? That his being upset is unreasonable. This is all just too much. BAD JOB, PYNCHON.

Kit gets a job at an airplane factory--you may remember that he'd been given an address by Viktor Mulciber back in Constantinople. He spends time hanging out with an airplane-obsessed dude named Renzo, who wants him to customize his plane so it can make "a very steep dive, not like when you go down in a spin, here you'd be controlling it all the way (1070). Kit has its doubts, but he ends up going along with this, and then going along in the plane for this rather dangerous lark:

They were soon going so fast that something happened to time, and maybe they'd slipped for a short interval into the Future, the Future known to Italian Futurists, with events superimposed on one another, and geometry straining irrationally away in all directions including a couple of extra dimensions as they continued hellward, a Hell that could never contain Kit's abducted young wife, to which he could never go to rescue her, which was actually Hell-of-the-future, taken on into its emotional equations, stripped and fire-blasted of everything emotional of accidental...(1070)

CF the cover of the paperback edition:

All this past-future, events superimposed on each other stuff may possibly make you think of other things in the novel. It's just possible! Is this good? Bad? Well...

Renzo's picchiata had been perhaps the first and purest expression in northern Italy of a Certain Word that would not quite exist for another year or two. But somehow like a precognitive murmur, a dreamed voice, it had already provisionally entered Time. "You saw how they broke apart," Renzo said later. "But we did not. We remained single, aimed, unbreakable. (1071)

The word, of course, is "fascism," which the Italian futurists, sorry to say, were really into. The future's gonna have its problems.

Reef, Yashmeen, and Ljubica show up at Kit and Dally's place in Italy to stay for a while. Kit meets his ol' roomie Colfax Vibe, who has joined the war effort and starts a baseball league in Torino. He seems to have come to terms with his dad's demise. Dally and Kit seem to have broken up, though that will remain ambiguous to the end.

Meanwhile, Reef, Yashmeen, and Ljubica are back in the states. There's this kind of odd thing where they're going through immigration, pretending to be Italian immigrants. Is that really necessary? Wouldn't Reef's American citizenship be enough to get his wife and daughter in? Whatever. Anyway, Reef, "thinking both his English and Italian could get him in trouble whichever he spoke" (1074) remains silent and has an "I" for "idiot" chalked on his back. And this could stop him from getting in, but then some other guy comes and washes it off, saving him. Who is this? "They call me 'The Obliterator'" (1074). Dunno what to make of that.

Things aren't too good in the US for anarchists right now, what with the Palmer Raids and Red Scare and all. So "they headed west, Reef propelled by his old faith in the westward vector, in finding someplace, some deep penultimate town the capitalist/Christer gridwork hadn't got to quite yet" (1075). And I have to ask: is...Pynchon misusing "penultimate" the way some people do to mean "super, ultra-ultimate?" I mean, I suppose you could make an argument that the actual meaning works here, but I dunno.

They meet Frank and Stray. Some slight family awkwardness, as you'd expect, kids all around, Yashmeen pregnant again. Jesse has to write an essay on "What It Means To Be An American," and he just writes "it means do what they tell you and take what they give you and don't go on strike or their soldiers will shoot you down." That's all. And he gets an A+ on it on the basis that his teacher had done labor work at Coeur d'Alene back in the day. Come on, man. Shitty work is shitty work; if I assigned students to write an essay and one of them just wrote T**** SUX, sure I'd agree, and I'd still give them an F because they didn't do the work and it's LAZY. Bah. Bah, I say!

Yashmeen and Stray may end up having a fling, which I sort of don't want to think about because yeah yeah performative, utopian sexuality etc, but when it's in the family like that there are probably good reasons for it to be taboo. Even if it is a popular porn category. But maybe I'm just one of the forces of oppression. Sure.

Back in Europe, Kit meets Policarpe, one of the Belgian nihilists he knew back in the day. Policarpe asserts that "The world came to an end in 1914. Like the mindless dead, who don't know they're dead, we are as little aware as they of having been in Hell ever since that terrible August" (1077). This accords with what the trespasser Ryder Thorn told Miles: "This world you take to be 'the' world will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell." Well...maybe. You could make that argument. But if there's one thing this book has shown us, it's that the future is contingent and doesn't always work in that straightforward, linear, cause-and-effect kind of way. So we can maybe do our best to be optimistic. Indeed--he meets various eccentric mathematicians at this "Scottish Café:" "the world we think we know can be dissected and reassembled into any number of worlds, each as 'real' as this one" (1078). Oh, hey, and he also meets Professor Vanderjuice, now looking younger, time clearly not being the same for all characters. We know that by now.

Last section of Kit is very odd; "he began to be visited by a sort of framed shadow suspended in the empty air, a transparent doorway" (1080). He goes through this and he's in a Parisian hotel room, where he meets a guy called Lord Overlunch. Jesus, how am I supposed to remember these names? This was a guy at whose manor Dally visited a party a few hundred pages ago. He now invited Kit to same, where he can meet his "delightful American friend Miss Rideout" whose husband, supposedly, is still in the picture--"very much so indeed, I'm told" (1082). So does that mean something positive for their relationship? Maybe. But that is the last we shall see of them.

And we end the novel with the Chums of Chance, of course. They've been invited to an annual convention in Paris by the Garçons de '71, whom you may recall as the group that first gave up ground-based life out of disgust, that inspired the Chums. And hey, they even meet Penny, the girl Darby had a crush on, "recently promoted to admiral of a fleet of skyships" (1083). Good for her.

The Inconvenience is now a kind of sky city: "there are neighborhoods, there are parks. There are slum conditions" (1084). That "slum conditions" suggests that there are still problems, but it's nonetheless a utopian vision, or on the way to being such. The Chums' wives are pregnant, so they've clearly entered some kind of world of time at this point, though not, one assumes, quite the same as that of the ground-based people. Well, I'll just quote the end of the book:

Never sleeping, clamorous as a nonstop feast day, Inconvenience, once a vehicle of sky-pilgrimage, has transformed into its own destination, where any wish that can be made is at least addressed, if not always granted. For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. No one aboard Inconvenience has yet observed any sign of this. They know--Miles is certain--it is there, like an approaching rainstorm, but invisible. Soon they will see the pressure-gauge begin to fall. They will feel the turn in the wind. They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky. They fly toward grace. (1085)

I'm not misty-eyed! You're misty-eyed!