Quail: "You won't even simply *give up* when asked. [...] stop lecturing me"

[MalignD at aol.com]

The Millison:

<<so it comes as no suprise that readers like Quail have got to keep Pynchon 
up there on the bookshelf and deny his work is anything but "fiction", 
unwilling to admit that Pynchon might really mean it when he talks about the 
"the criminally insane who have enjoyed power  since 1945".>>

This is a befuddling sentence.  

Millison says that-- 

[they?]'re "unwilling to admit that Pynchon might really mean it ..."  

--when earlier he said, "They miss Pynchon's irony ..."

It would be one or the other, would it not?  Is he ironic or does he really 
mean it?

And--that the people who have "enjoyed power since 1945" are "criminally 
insane" is hysterical progaganda, out of the pen of Pynchon or not.