what go around come around

[Terrance]

pynchon uses the mutual sexual obsession between Brock Vond and Frenesi
Gates as an emblem for a startling suggestion: that the struggles of the
1960s were really a form of foreplay between the political Left and the
political Right and that the conservative repressiveness of the Nixon
and Reagan years was, in fact, the natural--even the desired--result of
the radical expressiveness of the 1960s. 


magic realism 

with their addiction to junk food and television and their feelings of
resentment (and the need for deadly karmic revenge), the Thanatoids are
simply an extreme version of the ordinary person in the era of "Nixonian
repression." 



Behind pynchon's reformulation of the relation between the human and the
divine, find the promise of reunion and redemption, and this promise
becomes the end point at which all the narrative lines converge. VL
marks the reinstatement of God in heaven and the return of the
miraculous to Pynchon's world. 

using magic realism to de-emphasize race brings Morrison closer to
pynchon's use of this form as a way of destabilizing our reliance on
reason. For both writers, a story based on "numbers", "balance", and
"ratio" ... leaves out the "richer" view that Martha nussbaum finds in
the world of the novel. for Morrison and pynchon, achieving that richer
view requires more than simply the realism of the nineteenth century
novels that nussbaum admires; it requires the magical realism that
resurrects the women of the convent, that thwarts brock vond, that
enables the hyperrational Mason to have conversations with his dead
wife. for both writers, the invocation of the miraculous is one way of
constructing a counternarrative that reveals the limitations and indeed
the oppressiveness of the ENlightenment rationalism that looms so large
within Emersonian liberalism. 

both writers demonstrate that racism, one of the corrosive by-products
of western social life, can render the ideal of community useless as an
antidote to the negative effects of the negative conception of freedom.
racism, however, is simply one manifestation of a larger cultural
pathology, in which intolerance breeds narcissism, not just among
individuals, but among social groups. many of Morrison's and Pynchon's
characters long for community, but, ... but all communities and all
communitarianisms are not created equal. 

from chapter 3 and 4 of _Negative Liabilities_  Cyrus R. K. Patell