TPR & The Marriage Plot - Eugenides

[Bekah]

I think Eugenides may be a fan -  maybe even currently present amongst us:   However,  The Marriage Plot is set in the 1980s,  the characters are college seniors and going into their next year.  It's a social satire and I'm put in mind of Jonathan Franzen -   (I'm not necessarily recommending anything  -  just reporting a Pynchon sighting) :

snips re TPR:  

Every week Zipperstein assigned one daunting book of theory and one literary selection. The pairings were eccentric if not downright arbitrary. (What did Saussure’s Writings in General Linguistics, for instance, have to do with Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49?)
Eugenides, Jeffrey (2011-10-11). The Marriage Plot: A Novel (p. 26). Macmillan. Kindle Edition. 

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“Ish is terrible all around. There’s Joycean, Shakespearean, Faulknerian. But ish? Who is there who’s an ish?”

 “Thomas Mannish?” “Kafkaesque,” Leonard said. “Pynchonesque! See, Pynchon’s already an adjective. Gaddis. What would Gaddis be? Gaddisesque? Gaddisy?”

 “You can’t really do it with Gaddis,” Madeleine said.
(p. 57)
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Mitchell had tried to travel as light as possible, packing two of everything, shirts, pants, socks, underwear, plus a sweater. But when it came time to winnow the stack of reading material, he’d failed to be stringent, bringing with him a cache that included The Imitation of Christ, The Confessions of St. Augustine, Saint Teresa’s Interior Castle, Merton’s Seeds of Temptation, Tolstoy’s A Confession and Other Religious Writings, and a sizeable paperback of Pynchon’s V., along with a hardback edition of God Biology: Toward a Theistic Understanding of Evolution. Finally, before leaving New York, Mitchell picked up a copy of A Moveable Feast at St. Mark’s Bookshop. His plan was to send each book back home when he finished it, or to give it away to anyone who was interested.
(p. 140)

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Mitchell culled his Saint Teresa, his Saint Augustine, his Thomas Merton, his Pynchon, relieving himself of everything but the thin paperback of Something Beautiful for God.
(p. 222)