M&D filling the subjunctive space in American literature

[Terrance]

Why the Rev? Why straddle this time (this Revolution) in American
history? 
What IF America had written this novel about America? 

This is after all, another Pynchon  novel about America. It's not DQ or
TS, but an American novel: a novel written by an American about America.
Moreover, it seem to me, that **IF** Pynchon is the inheritor of
Melville's Broken Estate (se Wood), it is worth considering what exactly
that estate is or was as much as whence it came. "Some Revolution."  And
the Americans defeated the mighty Brits on land and at sea, it was a
world war, a modern war of liberation against a great colonial power.
The triumph of America, the new world that held so much Destiny to be 
Manifested, so much Paradise and Apocalypse for dreamers Romantic and
Democratic, from Milton to Blake. America was the promised land and its
people were destined to be great. What they did not posses, history,
time-capital, the West, an identity, they would forge in the great
furnace of American Faith in the Divine and the Divine Right  plucked
free from the crowns of despots. What Britannia Dreams!  But would they
possess a great literature? 

 Has Wicks Cherrycoke, an immigrant outlaw and outcast, written the
great American novel? How fitting that he should show and tell the tale
with only scraps of his old scarred notebook, his unpublished sermons
and spiritual day book, the narratives of Englishmen like Mason, Etc., 
for at the time of his telling, the oral tradition (later, for Melville,
Whitman & Co.-American Renaissance, Native American Oral tradition,
Black Church Sermon, Popular Sermon and Hymn,  will fill the void and
lay the foundation for America's great literature) is all that fills the
vast and near empty spaces of literature. How ironic that Melville would
be read and loved (and understood best, I believe) by the Brits and
would be scorned by his American audience, but for a few short days when
he was the darling of the NY literary scene. As Wicks tells his tale,
American books are being harshly reviewed in England. And the Americans
were painfully aware that they were still the servants (not quite the
broken looking glass servants that the Irish were)  of their literary
and Aesthetic Masters.