Of The Minor Characters in Middlemarch

The one that I would most like to write a novel about, set mostly during his dashing early years, is Cpt. Lydgate: “He had, moreover, that sort of high-breeding which consists in being free from the petty solicitudes of middle-class gentility, and he was a great critic of feminine charms” (Ch. LVIII).

Norman Mailer remarked that he couldn’t get past the bananas in Gravity’s Rainbow. I have now passed the equivalent point in Against The Day. We are too accustomed to Pynchon, I think, to appreciate him.