Overwhelming Detail
There are times in Lot 49 when you think you're just reading a clever book by an above-average American satirist. There's crisp deadpan dialogue, clearly articulated action, and here and there: a telling detail. And then Pynchon stretches his arms, leans back over his typewriter and rips out a half-page long sentence so densely packed with concrete detail and soaring ideas that you have to reread it five times before nodding and acknowledging that you are in the presence of greatness.
Early in the book, we learn that Mucho Maas hated being a used car salesman and decided to become a disk jockey instead. A simple enough biographical detail. But here's why:
He had believed in cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust—and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10 cents, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes—it made him sick to look, but he had to look. (1.12)
One reason this sentence is so remarkable (aside from its length) is that it allows Pynchon to interweave concrete description and introspection. For example, early in the sentence we learn that Mucho thinks of the trade-ins people bring in as "metal extensions of themselves." It's a fascinating idea, but then he makes it even more so by describing the physical form of this idea before moving back into the realm of Mucho's thoughts: "frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself."
You can see Pynchon threading the sentence, moving effortlessly between mind and physical world, between Mucho, the cars that he hates, and (later in the sentence) the imagined lives of the people who owned them.
The sentence concludes that each of these cars is: "a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash." It's a beautiful metaphor, but it's important to realize that it just wouldn't work in a less grandiose sentence. Pynchon doesn't simply turn the phrase. He makes himself earn it by working up to it, detail by detail, from repainted fenders to rags made from old underwear, until we know exactly what he means when he says "a salad of despair."