…and it should be no surprise that Fourier analysis is mentioned in this vast, extremely complex, astonishingly erudite novel. The author, Thomas Pynchon includes the equation that describes motion under the aspect of yaw control while steering “between Scylla and Charybdis.” In another section, he notes the double integral sign, and compares it to the symbol for the Waffen SS as well as two lovers curled in embrace, back to front. Fourier analysis? In essence, it is the taking of a complex wave, and attempting to break it down into the sum of its trigonometric functions. With Pynchon’s novel, the prose itself requires such analysis. Sometimes slapstick, with barroom ditties, other times with playful or not so playful random associations, and at others, straightforward prose that describes the Russian colonization of Central Asia, the German genocide in Southwest Africa, or the crushing of the gauchos, like Martin Fierro, in the Argentine. He mixes in scathing critiques on the nature of power in society, worthy of C. Wright Mills, with the poetry of Emily Dickson: “Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me.” He mixes in different languages, with German being prominent, but also French, Spanish, and even Middle Dutch. In another novel of his, V. (Perennial Classics) he had a perfect line of Arabic. I recently read C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures (Canto Classics) which decried the abyss between the scientific and literary cultures. Pynchon bridges them perfectly. The protagonist – of sorts – is Tyrone Slothrop, who can trace his Pilgrim ancestors back to 1630. His family never got further west that the Berkshires, where he was raised, and may have been the subject of some youthful clinical experiments. The novel opens with him in London during the German V-2 rocket attacks. He is working in intelligence, and they are trying to predict the pattern of the V-2 targets. Naturally the Poisson distribution is in play, but someone else notices a strong correlation between the targets and Slothrop’s trysts. Hum. Experiments on him follow at “The White Visitation,” worthy of the CIA-sponsored “research” that was a guiding principle at Gitmo. The novel follows Slothrop’s path across Europe at the end of the war, in a wild phantasmagoria, to Pennemunde, the source of so many of those V-2’s. Along the way, many an interesting tangent is taken, like depicting the extinction of the dodos in Mauritius. Did the schwarzkommando (black soldiers from Southwest Africa) really exist, or were they a Pynchon invention? And how did the Russian, Tchitcherine, with his own obsession with the V-2’s, and Enzian (in the schwarzkommando) get to be half-brothers? Pynchon explains, brilliantly. As examples of Pynchon’s C. Wright Mills-like insights, Pynchon posits a snake eating its tail, and says: “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally returning… is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that ‘productivity’ and ‘earnings’ keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity- most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral is laid waste in the process.” On the “1%,” 40 years before the expression was invented: “all the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.” Also some wonderful and memorable aphorisms: “Organization charts are plan views of prison cells.” Primordial instincts and needs? Ah, sweet sex. It too permeates the novel. And Pynchon is definitely a “leg man.” He writes of “…stockings pulled up tight in classic cusps by the suspenders” and the impact that it has had on Western men – hum – for a century, “…to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady’s stocking, this transition from silk to skin and suspender! It’s easy for non-fetishists to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here – there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps and points of osculation, mathematical kisses… singularities! Consider cathedral spires, holy minarets, the crunch of train wheels over the points as you watch peeling away the track you didn’t take…” Whew! Far less erotically, there is the passage about the impact on one survivor of the Battle of Passchendaele, and his visits to Domina Nocturna. The Pulitzer Prize Board found this passage so offensive that they refused to award their prize to this novel in 1974, preferring to make no award at all. It is a rhetorical question to ask: Was the passage itself more offensive than the battle, which spanned more than three months, advanced the front line a distance of less than what we could walk in an hour, with the price being at least 300,000 casualties from one small island nation and its far-flung dominions? This is my second reading of the novel. The first reading was in the 1974, when the novel was first issued, and I lived in an antebellum house in east Atlanta, without air conditioning. It took me most of the summer to read it. I committed then to re-read it, and here it is, some 40 years later, and now I have been to many of the places mentioned in the novel, including Southwest Africa. I remain humbled by Pynchon’s erudition, particularly in the pre-Internet age, and particularly for his age when he wrote it: the early 30’s. On the second time around, with the Internet, and many more years, maybe I “get” only 70-80% of the novel. Can I do it a third time, and wring more pleasure and meaning out of it? Time will tell. In the meantime, I continue to consider it the greatest American novel. 6-stars, plus.