In Pynchon's novels the plots of wholly imagined fiction are inseparable from the plots of known history or science. More than that, he proposes that any effort to sort out these plots must itself depend on an analytical method which, both in its derivations and in its execution, is probably part of some systematic plot against free forms of life.

The perspectives—literary, analytic, pop cultural, philosophical, scientific—from which Pynchon operates are considerably more numerous than those available to any writer to whom he might be compared, and it is therefore especially impressive that Pynchon insists not on keeping these perspectives discrete but upon the functioning, the tributary, the literally grotesque relationship among them. All systems and technologies, in his view, partake of one another. (p. 157)

We have few ways, for example, of measuring the effect of the media within which we live except by the instrumentalities of the media. Pynchon does not set out to rescue us from this condition, in the manner of Lawrence. He is in fact as partial to technology and to science as he is to Rilke, Zap comics, Glen Gould, Orson Welles or Norman O. Brown. He no longer perpetuates the dream of Wordsworth that poetry or a radical esthetics derived from poetry provides a basis for understanding and resisting any of the other systematic exertions of power over human consciousness. (p. 158)

The Crying of Lot 49 is in many ways a novel about the effort and the consequences of "carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself." (p. 159)

Pynchon is a great novelist of betrayal, and everyone in his books is a betrayer who lets himself or herself be counted, who elects or who has been elected to fit into the scheme of things. But they are the worst betrayers who propose that the schemes are anything more or less than that—an effort to "frame" life in every sense—or who evade the recognition of this by calling it paranoiac. To be included in any plot is to be to that extent excluded from life and freedom. Paradoxically, one is excluded who is chosen, sorted, categorized, schematized, and yet this is the necessary, perpetual activity of life belonging to our very biological and psychic natures.

This is a distinctly American vision, and Pynchon is the epitome of an American writer out of the great classics of the nineteenth century—Hawthorne, Emerson, and Melville especially. The vision is not, as has been argued so often, one of cultural deprivation, but rather of cultural inundation, of being swamped, swept up, counted in before you could count yourself out, pursued by every bookish aspect of life even as you try to get lost in a wilderness, in a randomness where you might hope to find your true self. And it is that at last which is most deeply beautiful about Pynchon and his works. He has survived all the incursions which he documents, and he is, as I hope he will remain, a genius lost and anonymous. (pp. 161-62)