ORP: TP: Vineland: disclaimer & another lyric passage

I have this ability (some would say a fault) to compartmentalize when I am reading a book--I had to deal with the fact long ago (maybe 6th grade?) when I would read things that I would either not agree with or violently disagree with. The same is true for literature in the English language in the twentieth century and later. In the Thomas Pynchon novel, "Vineland", that I am almost finished reading is a case in point. There are passages that, as a Christian, I would consider 'downright' obscene in this novel. I don't think it is necessary to go into explicit detail when describing the typical immoral behavior of the common character of a story. So, I give warning that in this novel, as in much modern fare, there are portions that I not only don't endorse, but heartily disavow. As long as these features in a work are not excessive, I can edit them from my consciousness and imagination and still enjoy the work.

I came across this description of a character's journey down the Ventura highway in California that shows why I can still enjoy a novel that unfortunately will have the above mentioned unsavory passages. Here is the description:

...swept along on the great Ventura, among Olympic visitors from everywhere who teemed all over the freeway system in midday densities till far into the night, shined-up, screaming black motorcades that could have carried any of several office seekers, cruisers heading for treed and more gently roaring boulevards, huge double and triple trailer rigs that loved to find Volkswagens laboring up grades and go sashaying around them gracefully and at gnat's-ass tolerances, plus flirters, deserters, wimps and pimps, speeding like bullets, grinning like chimps, above the heads of TV watchers, lovers under the overpasses, movies at malls letting out, bright gas-station oases in pure fluorescent spill, canopied beneath the palm trees, soon wrapped, down the corridors of the surface streets, in nocturnal smog, the adobe air, the smell of distant fireworks, the spilled, the broken world.

:)