FYI, there is a nice section in Peter Cooper's _Signs and Symptoms: TP and the Contemporary World_--Chapter Five, if I remember, "Pynchon in Context"(?)--in which he reads TRP's first three books against texts TRP has "blurbed" for (by Piercy, Sale, Matthiessen et al.), and makes some useful claims concerning the mixing of politics and art in TRP's novels.