As with a lot of stories focusing on drugs and crime, It is such a struggle to find something captivating about both the Voice, as well as the unfolding story. Fundamentally, I just do not care, nor do I personally know about (so could liken or empathize) with characters who are on drugs—and on top of that, I wasn’t even alive during the 60s, so this glittering nostalgia nugget and its subsequent snuffing out as the time period progresses, just does nothing for me. It reminds me a lot of watching Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. This preoccupation with how a medium Was and what it means to the writer should be something easily accessed, but instead feels inane to me, simply because none of it makes any sense and there’s no context, nor does the authors of this kind of content ever try to provide anything. The weird sub-genre of post 60s era of love, to me, requires an in-road I just do not have.

Beyond this, though, while it does feel a lot more accessible than I expected my first Pynchon to be, I had high expectations insofar as the intelligence and post modern elements it might have. I didn’t find the elements presents, again, very engaging, either. Much like Savage Detectives, I’m a little baffled as to how lauded this is. The characters don’t feel, or speak, or really negotiate the world naturally. Maybe it’s supposed to be comedic, and was also lost on me, as most comedic elements are. 

But, overall, I suspect it’s just a lack of good onboarding. People complain about this in cyberpunk, which for me has been the smoothest sub genre compatibility in all of lit, for me. This is, I guess, the opposite of that. I think I get what it’s doing, I just didn’t care about it, though I did struggle through to finish it. Even with the, again, hyper sexualization akin to Savage Detectives, that felt like nothing more than window dressing playing for a completely different brain/person than me.