What if we were to start noticing cryptic clues in our lives. subtle indicators that beneath the mundane and random daily events there was a carefully planned pattern engineered by somebody or something? What if we began to believe that the world as we ordinarily experience it-in newspapers and on television. in conversations with friends. in the familiar solidity of our home and work environments-was a sham. an illusion that concealed plots. organizations. conspiracies? What if we suspected that our own minds had been programmed to playa ftlm of delusory sensory phenomena to a captive audience of one. while somewhere else rea/life was going on?
The characters in Thomas Pynchon's novels are obsessed with questions like these. They arc paranoids and have good reason to be. They quest for a transcendent meaning in a chaotic world whose energy seems to be running down: but the more they find out about the conspiracies the less they know. and they finally end in complete indeterminacy. The reader is unsatisfied: the mystery does not resolve itself neatly like a whodunit- it multiplies. And the only remedy for this sense of uncertainty and dis- orientation is-to read more Pynchon.