IVIV Hope Harlingen: ( spoilers)

[alice wellintown]

I suspect that one reason why some readers insist that these works
have traditional characters or heroes and traditional scenes that
readers can view as tender or heart warming is because some readers
have, perhaps without knowing it, embraced the standard critical
antipathy to these kinds of works, postmodern works, or in P's case
postmodern romances /  satires. This because these readers distrust
metafictional humor and comedy and/or refuse to acknowledge that the
joke they cannot get is on them. For example, P makes fun of those
readers who, like Stencil, dig up all the conspiracy theory CIA
allusions and half allusion he has deliberately scattered on the pages
along with a satire of Stencil-like constructors of meaning and
political paranoid zealots. They don't get the joke that P's comedy is
beyond black humor: "a comic representation of the world, which
requires a stripping-away of conventional appearances, the disruption
of our pre-established expectations, and a representation of the world
than conforms to one or another accepted version of realism."

In Fables of Subversion, Steven Weisenburger discusses  Heller,
Pynchon, Coover, John Hawkes and William Gaddis—as authors of
“degenerative satire,” which is a postmodern satire; its comedy and
humor are beyond the kind of corrective laughter typical of
traditional literary satire and “subvert hierarchies of values and
reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its
own.”