"Heaven, hell," cackled Merle Rideout.
* * * * * * * * * *
That is a clever sentence, correct? Sometimes Pynchon will write a sentence which feels like he came up with it to win a bet.
"What's the shortest sentence you can write that involves both heaven and hell?" posited the WASTE employee dropping off a package.
"Oy, that's an easy one!" cackled Pynchon in a terrible Australian accent that sounded more like Dick Van Dyke's Cockney accent from Mary Poppins.
"Our deepest sympathies," Randolph hastily, "yet Heaven, in its inscrutability—"
* * * * * * * * * *
Like the reader, Randolph believes Merle's wife is dead and poor little Dally is half-orphan. Too bad he's interrupted before we discover his theories on Heaven and its inscrutability. I bet whatever he was going to say would have been a good clue to help figure out if the Chums of Chance are angels or the ghosts of dead kids.
He sighed, gazing upward and into the distance.
* * * * * * * * * *
"Gazing upward and into the distance" suggests that Merle is looking towards heaven after mentioning his wife. But what else lies upward and in the distance? Aeronaut balloons! So he's just gazing out toward another place unreachable, or perhaps unknowable, to most of us. Merle's wife is simply out of reach. At least to him! "Gazing upward and into the distance" suggests that she is not out of reach to the Chums of Chance. Will they locate her later?! Only people who have read this book know for sure and I'm not one of them.
"Ha! D'ye hear that, Carrot-head? Thinks I'm your grandpa. Thank you, lad, but this here is my daughter Dahlia, I'm proud to say. Her mother, alas—"
* * * * * * * * * *
I figured Merle Rideout's companion, Chevrolette McAdoo, was Irish but I really didn't have any idea what kind of a surname "Rideout" was. But here he uses "ye" and his daughter has flaming red hair (which we knew already! I'm just putting all the evidence in one place after finding the "ye" clue).
"my daughter Dahlia"
Maybe her mother was Scandinavian and chose the name Dahlia which means "Dahl's Flower" after some botanist named Dahl but then Dahl means dale so it might as well just mean the flower of the dale as well. It could also be from the Hebrew, Dalyah, which means "flowering branch." Those are fairly similar so we'll just assume either of these meanings can be interpreted the same way: she's a kind of flower which suggests she thrives in sunlight and out in the open and is pretty and smells good.
A third possible origin of Dahlia's name is Dalia, the goddess of fate from Baltic mythology. This is my favorite possibility because Dalia oversees the proper distribution of material wealth. Maybe it doesn't add up because of the different spelling and because the popularity of the spelling "Dalia" only came about in the late 20th century. But it fits the themes of this book which was published in 2006 so maybe Pynchon was influenced by the popularity of this name in the previous decade. Whatever the case, she's named after somebody who would probably look down on America and think, "Blasphemers. Look at how they distribute wealth in that country. All wrong! I should smite them."
"Her mother, alas—"
Spoiler: she's not dead. That's not really much of a spoiler because the reader finds out she's not dead in just a few more sentences. It's only a spoiler if you're reading along with me one line at a time so you didn't automatically read the reveal almost instantaneously after reading the hint that she might be dead. I know she's not dead because I've actually read the entire first chapter of this book already. It seems like cheating but when I first started this blog, I thought, "Well, I'm not going to spend nine years actually reading this book for the first time one sentence at a time with constant interruptions by my own rambling brain. I'll just read ahead when I'm not willing to write." But then the smarter part of me said, "Bullshit. If you read ahead and finish this book while doing the blog, you'll never fucking finish the blog. You'd better stop reading, idiot." And since that was a suggestion from the smarter part of my brain, I stopped reading ahead.
