Low-lands is a short story written by Thomas Pynchon. Released in 1960, it tells of a lawyer travelling with several friends of his to a junkyard.
Characters[]
- Dennis Flange - a lawyer
- Rocco Squarcione - a garbage man and one of Flange's friends
- Pig Bodine - one of Flange's friends from the Navy
- Cindy Flange - Flange's wife
- Bolingbroke - the elderly owner of a garbage dump
- Nerissa - a short gypsy woman that Flange meets
Plot[]
While drinking wine with a garbageman named Rocco Squarcione, a lawyer at the somewhat prestigious firm Wasp and Winsome named Dennis Flange thinks over his life. He has been married to a woman named Cindy for several years and lives on a two-story house facing a cliff (which makes him think on his theory about the link between life and the sea). While doing this, Dennis notices that his old Navy friend Pig Bodine has arrived at the house. Remembering the last time that Bodine visited (which ended with Dennis completely broke and lost), Cindy kicks him out of the house. As such, Dennis goes with a trip with Bodine and Rocco to a junkyard whose owner Rocco is friends with.
Once there, Rocco introduces Bodine and Flange to the owner of the junkyard - a somewhat old black named Bolingbroke. Bodine and Flange pick out two mattresses with Bolingbroke, who helps the two of them avoid some traps he leaves behind for something that lurks in the junkyard. Once the two Navy friends have picked out their mattresses, they retire to Bolingbroke's hut with Rocco and recount various tales of their Naval escapades. Once they're finished telling these stories, Bolingbroke reveals that the figures lurking in the junkyard are a group of gypsies and warns his guests to avoid them. Despite this, once Flange hears the voice of a gypsy woman calling out for him in the night, he walks towards it and accidentally gets knocked out by one of the traps.
When he awakens, Flange finds the woman standing over him. He also discovers that she is only three feet tall. The gypsy woman introduces herself as Nerissa and leads Flange to her home in a series of tunnels built by anarchists and now inhabited by her people. Once in her house, Nerissa introduces Flange to her pet rat Hyacinth and tells him that she was fated to marry him. Though Flange thinks about returning to his wife, he agrees to stay with her for a while and become her husband.
| Works of Thomas Pynchon | ||
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Early works (Collected in Slow Learner) | ||