«How had it ever happened here?»

«How had it ever happened here?», Thomas Pynchon’s protagonist Oedipa Maas asks towards the end of his second novel The Crying of Lot 49 . This question is taken up in this book to explore Pynchon’s novels in the light of constructivist theory. It begins with a detailed reading of The Crying of Lot 49 , which is carried into readings of Pynchon’s other novels ( V., Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against The Day, and Inherent Vice ). All are shown to critically deal with the soci