Clunky Syntax?

[alice wellintown]

Frank was to spend months that seemed like years traipsing to no
purpose around an empty shadowmap, a dime novel of Old Mexico
featuring gringo evildoers in exile, sudden deaths, a government that
had already fallen but did not yet know it, a revolution that would
never begin though thousands were already dying and suffering in its
name (AtD.374).

Now, how can anyone new to Pynchon accept the advice of a Pynchon
reader, quoted to comfort the Newbies, "difficult, schmifficult!" ?

It doesn't help that we've not seen nor heard Frank in an hundred
pages. It doesn't help that we are about to meet dozens of new
characters--all with three warped and wacky names that Pynchon will
mix and match and echo in the text-- some of them, apparently,
crossing boarders that include the boarders of dime novels, history,
dream and non-dream--though most often in an altered state owing to
some intoxicating substance or paranoid insomnia-- not to mention the
boarder between life and death. The rabbit's hole? Down we go into
prison holes and up we come through portals into a Western Film set
overlapped with Escher staircases to Relativity as described, not by
Escher's drawing hands drawing but by Bertrand Russell in his
beautiful ABC of Relativity balloon analogy. Chum or Chump? Chum. But
the sentences that hang and fade or chunk along compound this very
difficult reading.  It's more of a rhetorical issue and not so much a
syntactic one, but some of the sentences in AtD are better left
un-read.