Pynchon’s classic postmodern narrative examines themes of personal fragmentation, and disintegration, paranoia and confusion within a classically postmodern backdrop of the unattainability of a stable, collective, definable reality within the post-war social and cultural milieu.

66 – “She could, at this stage, recognise signals like that, as an epileptic is said to – an odour, colour, pure piercing grace note sounding his seizure.  Afterwards it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers.  Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this  (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself”

117-118 – “Either way they’ll call it paranoia. They. Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of a dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating while reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe as a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too sweetie.  Or you are hallucinating it.  Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books […] Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut Oedipa, out of your skull”.