A literary precedent is not identical to a literary influence. Serious writers have universally wrestled with similar problems both thematically and in terms of how to control such matters as time and space. Having said this, one can then observe that James Joyce, particularly in Ulysses (1922), and T. S. Eliot, most notably in The Waste Land (1922), came to grips with the same structural dilemmas that faced Powers as he set out to write one of the most ambitious novels of the last half of the twentieth century.

Certainly Pynchonesque elements also can be detected in Powers's novel, particularly as it seeks to unify related but strongly disparate forces. William Vollmann has dealt with similar structural problems in most of his novels, as has Rolando Hinojosa in a work like Becky and Her Friends (1990), in which a protagonist is presented through the eyes of those who know...