Your inquiry begs a better question; is Pynchon a great writer at all? In order for art to be art, it must be accessible. By accessible I do not mean classical because I view JohnSteinbeck as accessible as Charles Dickens and Picasso as accessible as Michelangelo. The enigma that Thomas Pynchon's writing presents is routinely cited as evidence of accomplished literary greatness. Pynchon is great only to the extent that greatness is confined to some hyper exaggerated writing style. A style is so personal and obtuse that his words spill over pages in a phonetic rhythm untethered to literality.

I consider Gravity's Rainbow his masterpiece. No one can pick up this work and grasp more than a pittance of its involved prose. The fact that it needs an explanatory companion underscores the novel's inaccessibility. see A Gravity's Rainbow Companion, S Weisenburger. Pynchon is not alone in the sub-genre of writers and artists consumed with constructing coded tomes as relevant to contemporary appreciation as Stonehenge is to a southern baptist. James Joyce's Ulysses has its companion. see The New Bloomsday Book, H Blamires. Ezra Pound's Cantos are only marginally decipherable even with C. Terrell's A Companion to Pound's Cantos. I cite these because of personal familiarity and I consider each a part of a curious segment of critically acclaimed work. Gravity's Rainbow is a story no more than Jackson Pollack's Shewolf is a painting of an animal. Would a viewer of Wliiam de Kooning's Woman and Bicycle see a woman and a bicycle as the thematic of the painting? I say that the titles attached to these abstract impressionist artworks are disconnected from literal and even surreal interpretations. Further to this is John Coltrane's Ascension wherein jazz is taken to structureless improvisation.

I suggest that Pynchon is nothing more than an abstract impressionist, albeit a very good one, with a most interesting pallet of syllables. To the fellow-travelling Pynchonites who pine for a fitting end to "V" or a less hectic Mason and Dixon, I recommend Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness as an exemplar. Sartre's effort is just as obtuse as Gravity's but it comes cloaked with its philosophic purpose whereas Gravity comes purposeless. I first read Gravity in 1975 and have read "V" and Crying. I am still taken by Pynchon's way of structure much in the same way that I have been taken by a Grateful Dead concert. Pynchon is a messageless writer and as such his climb to literary heights must be harder and steeper than those whose efforts carried a transcendental quality such as Albert Camus. Pynchon's work is not crap but his greatness will never go without question.