Sugary Pynchon

Today I learned the mighty Pynchon can write real pretty too: Near her battery one night, driving Somewhere in Kent, Roger and Jessica came upon a church, a hummock in the dark upland, lamp-lit, growing out of the earth. It was Sunday evening, and shortly before vespers. Men in greatcoats, in oilskins, in dark berets they slipped off at the entrance, American fliers in leather lined with sheep's wool, a few women in clinking boots and wide-shouldered swagger coats, but no children, not a child in sight, just grownups, trudging in from their bomber fields, balloon-bivouacs, pillboxes over the beach, through the Norman doorway shaggy with wintering vines. Jessica said, "Oh, I remember . . . " but didn't go on. She was remembering other Advents, and hedges snowy as sheep from her window, and the Star ready to be pasted up on the sky again. Yup. Sometimes, during the mentally cavernous exercise of Gravity's Rainbow you get rewarded with sweet narrative buds like this. Bless these little pivotal valves.