The meaing of mathematics in Against the Day.....

[alice wellintown]

Pynchon is neither Jane Austin sitting in a drawing room hiding her
manuscript (as his ex-friend JS argued here) nor Joseph Conrad on a
journey into the heart of deepest Africa, but is closer to the poet
whose influence is still anxiously present in his prose, T.S. Eliot.
Pynchon, as he admits, and anyone willing to take his word for it
can't fail to see he is telling the truth, is a writer. Sloth is his
mortal and capital and cardinal sin. If this were not the case, he
would not make a great writer of prose fiction; he would make an
average retired science guy who likes to read.