For example, there's this passage from Gravity's Rainbow, a neo-Luddite's vision of the world devourer -- "The System" -- ringing as true now as when he wrote it thirty years ago:

"Kekule dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, 'The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,' is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that ‘productivity' and 'earnings' keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only humanity--most of the world, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid to waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone other than the system, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when it addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life."

To enter this brand of phantasmagorical literature is to implant a different kind of meme. It's more of a slow-burning code. Pynchon's absurd, saturnine fiction streams by the eyes, sometimes on the fringe of a reader's cognitive abilities. He is elusive, absurd, cryptic, a tough read for anyone but a James Joyce scholar, and impossible to memorize for pithy quotations at coffee house conversations. But the paranoia Pynchon feeds and confirms will keep a Seeker After Truth reading, hungrily, for more clues. His fiction could take weeks, months, years to decipher, but it doesn't stop there.

Well after your hijacked sensibilities are returned home, after you've sworn yourself to stop re-reading that jailbait sex scene in Gravity's Rainbow with the underage girl toy porn star after the German filmmaker's orgy, the Serpent is still unwinding. Even after you have sworn off newspapers to forget, promising to the Lord Jesus a new regime of church attendance, the virus slowly unzips inside your mind. Pynchonalia takes decades to eventually melt off the coating, like a pill, and dissolve. Finally, the host may recognize its effects. By then, it's too late. You are one of them.

A slow burning code, indeed. Some of us haven't quit reading his last book Mason & Dixon (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), but haven't quite finished it, either. A Disney-style release cycle seems to be part of the plan: his previous work of major fiction was Vineland (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1990). If each delivery is an unwieldy tome for subway reading--the Henry Holt hardcover version of Mason & Dixon is thick as a brick, and about as heavy at 773 pages--then, at least, his decade’s worth of profundity suffers less from entropy, a lifetime theme for Pynchon, than any four books by all but Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, John Barth or Don DeLillo. But even they live in the shadow of Gravity's Rainbow.

Pynchon is publicly inconspicuous. Even more than a just-as-shy J.D. Salinger, the phantom Pynchon, the literary icon, converges multiple specters of legend and intrigue within one big mystery. A spy? A sorcerer? Not so much an author, Pynchon is an apparition.

His career as a ghost began in 1963 in Mexico City when, already sniffing out the soul-sapping, appropriating media-image machine on the rise, Pynchon failed to show up for a Time Magazine photo shoot. Lee Harvey Oswald was more photographed in the city after that incident. Pynchon, the story goes, was too self-conscious about his buck teeth and didn't want to be compared to Bugs Bunny. To be an icon as familiar as Mickey Mouse was to be robbed of mystery. "He climbed aboard a bus," wrote Salon's Dwight Garner, "and vanished into the hills, where his furtive manner and wildly overgrown mustache led the locals to dub him, 'Pancho Villa.'"

Pynchon's been a recluse ever since, save for the strange episodes that only add to his legend as the phantom of the bookstore. His sightings are reported, then denied, like a UFO. There are the so-called "Wanda Tinasky" letters, sent to a Northern California newspaper during the approximate time, some Pynchon scholars say, he would have been researching the local scene for material for Vineland. The "Wanda"-as-T.P. theory was denied by his publisher. However, for a true believer, that's only gas on the fire. More recently, there was Pynchon's highly celebrated appearances to see the band, Lotion, as well as his writing of the cover notes for one of its albums, which never lived up to the buzz. His endorsement of that fad rock act seems to have been one case where his philosopher's stone failed him. It must have forced the writer even deeper into the hermetic concealment of his private sphere.

Rarified as his airs certainly are, Pynchon-obsessed scholars keep connecting the dots to his shadowy visage with a wealth of imaginative Web sites. A great deal of the digerati seems so Pychonalian, it's hard to believe he's not a regular contributing member of the club. His take on the snowballing Age of Information more than thirty years ago read as prescient, even prophetic texts; as proof of his uncanny and overabundant sensitivity; and as a fetishist's hunger for the latest news, weather and scientific information. He was a techno-savvy geek hacker before William Gibson and Bruce Sterling took over the job, and foreshadowed Philip K. Dick's postmodern pinup status.

A list of sage swirls of his prophetic prose, collected at one of the best Pynchon sites, demonstrates this in just a few clicks. Strange and surreal when first read in 1970s, such chestnuts now read like a code that's finally been broken, writes the scholar of Spermatikos, Dr. Larry Daw (definitely one of them).

"Like the labyrinthine chains of DNA coiled in the nucleus of life, (Pynchon's work) is often dense and convoluted in structure, but the encoded message is shimmering, elusive and profound."

A quick browse of Pynchon citations on Spermatikos reveals a protean headlight that the author, in his later years, has found difficult to match. One such passage from Gravity's Rainbow morphs the self with a metaphor about telecommunications, a common motif these days:

"Temporal bandwidth," explains Kurt Mandragen like a true Information Theory geek, "Personal density . . . is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth. 'Temporal bandwidth,' is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar '[delta-] t' considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are."

One-hundred and fifty pages later, Pynchon is revealing Luddite-like doubts about the cyborg within that’s waiting to awake at the Gates of Datapocalypse:

"M-maybe there is a Machine to take us away completely, such as through the electrodes out of the skull'n' into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls it's got stored in there. It can decide who it would suck out, a-and when. Dope never gave you immortality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat! But we can live forever, in a clean, honest, purified, Electroworld."