For half a century, Thomas Pynchon has been America's preeminent novelist of paranoia, the writer who sees patterns and connections where others find only the random detritus of history. His emblem could be the spiral horn that Oedipa Maas, the heroine of The Crying of Lot 49, begins to notice emblazoned everywhere, on walls and in corners: The horn is the logo of the Tristero, an ancient, underground mail-delivery service that remains invisible precisely because it is so omnipresent. Secrets remain secret, Pynchon suggests, only because we refuse to notice them.
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