shaved his upper lip every morning three times with, three times against the grain

[alice wellintown]

The fact that we agree to the meaning of the sentence suggests that
the sentnece is not competely botched. Inserting "with" (as in
Joseph's example) to improve an absolute construction is one of the
standard methods given in Warriner's English Grammar, Longknife and
Sullivan's Styling Sentences, Sommers and Morenberg's Writer's
Options. I'm not arguing that Pynchon consulted any of these.
Irrespective of his knowledge of grammar and style, and the rhetorical
terms and so on...more likely to be the stuff of the famous or
infamous Chicago School P mentions in that SL Introduction, Pynchon
used elipses and absolutes and other ommission schemes quite
frequently in CL49. His reflections on his slow learning years support
the argument that Pynchon was influenced by the Beats and others
voices that he says permitted a certain lattitude and allowed him to
experiment with an informal and non-standard prose fiction narrative
style that we recognize as free indirect. Withina few pages we can
discern from the words, the phrases, the diction, the patterns,
syntactic and gramatical, when the narrative voice has shifted into
Oedipa's voice. In the passage we are looking at, Pynchon begins the
paragraph with "You're too senstive." No markers are needed or used.
It is clear that this is Oedipa speaking. The next word is *Yeah* and
the rest of the passage is Pynchon's free indirect narrative with
Oedipa's style and voice and, this is quite important, tone. It's not
Pynchon's tone or attitude, but Oedipa's. This sets up ironies and
creates a distance the implied author needs to keep to make these
ironies work.