Pynchon's verbal complexities astound and confound, amaze and bewilder, because his mixed modes concern the ultimate formlessness of a world that for a decade now he has urged as much as described. Everything bears, and bears on, everything else in Pynchon's coming world; everything discovers some grosser or more petite example of itself; everything leads simultaneously to hope and despair….

How can Pynchon be persuaded of entropy's irreversibility and simultaneously of a second coming? How can he claim a winding down of the world and its winding up to spirit?

He manages these, in fact, by slipping beyond simple apocalyptic themes to a reimagining for these days of Apocalyptic as a literary genre—which he also parodies, as he parodies everything. V. and the rest of Pynchon's novels "behave" as if the End were past and most of the world didn't even know it, so needed an exemplary...