After resigning from Boeing, Pynchon spent some time in New York and Mexico before moving to California, where he was reportedly based for much of the 1960s and early 1970s, most notably in a small downstairs apartment at 217 33rd St. in Manhattan Beach[25] [26] where he lived as he was composing what would become Gravity's Rainbow.

For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall’s to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall.

[31][32] Although more concise and linear in its structure than Pynchon's other novels, its labyrinthine plot features an ancient, underground mail service known as "The Tristero" or "Trystero", a parody of a Jacobean revenge drama called The Courier's Tragedy, and a corporate conspiracy involving the bones of World War II American GIs being used as charcoal cigarette filters.

An example of both can be seen in allusion to the narrator of Nabokov's Lolita in the lyric of a love lament sung by a member of "The Paranoids", an American teenage band who deliberately sing their songs with British accents (p. 17).

"[43] The major portion of Gravity's Rainbow takes place in Europe in the final months of World War II and the weeks immediately following VE Day, and is narrated for the most part from within the historical moment in which it is set.

In an overt incitement to eco-activism, Pynchon's narrative agency then has it that "a medium-sized pine nearby nods its top and suggests, 'Next time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn't being guarded, and take its oil filter with you.

(p. 553) Encyclopedic in scope and often self-conscious in style, the novel displays erudition in its treatment of an array of material drawn from the fields of psychology, chemistry, mathematics, history, religion, music, literature, human sexuality, and film.

[46] Along with Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow was included on Time's list of the 100 greatest English-language novels published since the magazine's founding, with Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayao commenting on its "fantastic multitude of meditations upon the human need to build systems of intellectual order even as we use the same powers of intellect to hasten our destruction.

It did, however, receive a positive review from Salman Rushdie, who called it "free-flowing and light and funny and maybe the most readily accessible piece of writing the old Invisible Man ever came up with ... the entropy's still flowing, but there is something new to report, some faint possibility of redemption, some fleeting hints of happiness and grace.

DeLillo takes us on a breathtaking journey, beyond all the official versions of our daily history, behind all the easy assumptions about who we're supposed to be, with a vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing.

"[58] Michiko Kakutani called Mason and Dixon Pynchon's most human characters, writing that they "become fully fleshed-out people, their feelings, hopes and yearnings made as palpably real as their outrageously comic high jinks.

[61][62] For The Independent feature Book Of A Lifetime, Marek Kohn chose Mason & Dixon "precisely because my own teens were long gone by the time it came out: it showed me that being exhilarated by prose is not just an effect of youthful overexcitement.

Most specific of these were comments made by the former German minister of culture Michael Naumann, who stated that he assisted Pynchon in his research about "a Russian mathematician [who] studied for David Hilbert in Göttingen", and that the new novel would trace the life and loves of Sofia Kovalevskaya.

[64] In July 2006, a new, untitled novel by Pynchon was announced along with a description written by Pynchon himself: "Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the times of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

"[67] Other reviewers described Against the Day as "lengthy and rambling"[68] and "a baggy monster of a book",[69] while negative appraisals condemned the novel for its "silliness"[70] or characterized its action as "fairly pointless" and remained unimpressed by its "grab bag of themes".

The book was advertised by the publisher as "part-noir, part-psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a cannabis haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A.

Poet L. E. Sissman wrote in The New Yorker: "He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks.

His memory seems, as ever, not only to have gorged itself on facts and figures but to have kept the whole lot down ... On the other hand, this book could have been conceived in the fumes of inhalation: it has a dreamed quality, an eagerness to be haunted ... Pynchon is furiously clever, but more important and, I suspect, more enduring, is his anatomy of melancholy, his conjuring of a doleful burlesque ... Good luck, and G-dspeed.

[77][78][79] Pynchon makes frequent allusions to other authors; in the introduction to Slow Learner, a collection of his early short stories, he acknowledges his debts to the modernists, especially T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and to the Beats, particularly Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

"[80] In her review of Mason & Dixon, Michiko Kakutani writes: "The Great Big Theme in all of Thomas Pynchon's novels, from V. (1963) through Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and Vineland (1990) has been: Is the world dominated by conspiracy or chaos?

His writings demonstrate a strong affinity with the practitioners and artifacts of low culture, including comic books and cartoons, pulp fiction, popular films, television programs, cookery, urban myths, conspiracy theories, and folk art.

In the closing pages of Gravity's Rainbow, there is an apocryphal report that Tyrone Slothrop, the novel's protagonist, played kazoo and harmonica as a guest musician on a record released by The Fool in the 1960s (having magically recovered the latter instrument, his "harp", in a German stream in 1945, after losing it down the toilet in 1939 at the Roseland Ballroom in Roxbury, Boston, to the strains of the jazz standard "Cherokee", upon which tune Charlie Parker was simultaneously inventing bebop in New York, as Pynchon describes).

Gravity's Rainbow describes many varieties of sexual fetishism (including sado-masochism, coprophilia and a borderline case of tentacle erotica), and features numerous episodes of drug use, most notably cannabis but also cocaine, naturally occurring hallucinogens, and the mushroom Amanita muscaria.

Mason & Dixon explores the scientific, theological, and socio-cultural foundations of the Age of Reason while also depicting the relationships between actual historical figures and fictional characters in intricate detail and, like Gravity's Rainbow, is an archetypal example of the genre of historiographic metafiction.

[87][88][89][90] Critics have made comparisons of Pynchon's writing with works by Rabelais,[91][92] Cervantes,[91][93] Laurence Sterne,[94][95] Edgar Allan Poe,[96][97] Nathaniel Hawthorne,[98][99] Herman Melville,[91][100] Charles Dickens,[101][102] Joseph Conrad,[103][104] Thomas Mann,[105][106] William S. Burroughs,[107][108] Ralph Ellison,[108][109] Patrick White,[110][111] and Toni Morrison.

[89][112] Pynchon's work also has similarities with modernist writers who wrote long novels dealing with large metaphysical or political issues, such as James Joyce's Ulysses, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and John Dos Passos's U.S.A.

At the 1974 National Book Awards ceremony, the president of Viking Press, Tom Guinzberg, arranged for double-talking comedian "Professor" Irwin Corey to accept the prize on Pynchon's behalf.

"[115][124] Thereafter, the first piece to provide substantial information about Pynchon's personal life was a biographical account written by a former Cornell University friend, Jules Siegel, and published in Playboy magazine.

[110]More recently, book critic Arthur Salm has written that the man simply chooses not to be a public figure, an attitude that resonates on a frequency so out of phase with that of the prevailing culture that if Pynchon and Paris Hilton were ever to meet—the circumstances, I admit, are beyond imagining—the resulting matter/antimatter explosion would vaporize everything from here to Tau Ceti IV.

"Literary detective" Donald Foster subsequently showed that the Letters were in fact written by an obscure Beat writer, Tom Hawkins, who had murdered his wife and then committed suicide in 1988.