Somewhere near the beginning of this incisive critical study of perhaps the most elusive and to some minds structurally disordered of living writers Molly Hite notes that the idea of order has always fascinated novelists. She attributes this to the genres being a hybrid committed as it is on the one hand to a rigorous teleology in which events exist for the sake of resolution and on the other to imitating a world that stubbornly refuses to add up. The teleological impetus of narrative she notes reflects a Godordered universe while the mimetic tendency describes a mancentered world. And because the two world views are irreconcilable they pose a dilemmathe dilemma that Pynchon treats satirically in his three novels that the alternative to theology is paranoia. In confronting his characters with evidence that either a transcendent power imposes order on the world or that in the absence of such a power all order is illusory Pynchon parodies a postromantic attitude that takes these extremes as exhaustive. The worlds that Pynchon projects in his three novelsV. The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravitys Rainboware complex and difficult to negotiate but they are not Dr. Hite insists incoherent. And even when they are most bizarre and surreal they are familiar for they evoke a multilayered reality in which multiple means of putting things together manage to coexist without ever resolving into a single definitive system of organization. By placing thematic concerns within the context of Pynchons experiments with narrative structure and voice and in this way helping to correct the imbalance that has tended to minimize such formal features Dr. Hite leads to an increased understanding of Pynchons spectacle of a postreligious society committed to a vision of apocalypse. Molly Hite is assistant professor of English literature at Cornell University.