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Thomas Pynchon is known as the most seductively difficult of living novelists. He has the kind of following that only a bearer of esoteric knowledge can attract — not just readers, but disciples, who find in books such as “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973) a cranky, erudite scripture for our time. Such fans love to apply their homemade hermeneutics to the mysteries with which Mr. Pynchon’s novels are carefully seeded. Who or what is V., the multivalent object of desire in “V.” (1963)? Who is behind the Tristero, the ancient conspiracy that ensnares Oedipa Maas in “The Crying of Lot 49” (1966)? Precisely because there are no final answers to these questions, they admit endless interpretation. For Mr. Pynchon, indeed, our world is nothing but a theater of frustrated interpretations, of meanings deferred and clues undeciphered. Yet he always holds out the hope that somehow, to a chosen few in an indefinite future, the mystery will be revealed.
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