The first sentence announces what kind of ride this will be: a screaming comes across the sky. Pynchon's third novel follows the mysterious correlation between one man's erections and V-2 rocket strikes on London, spiraling outward into a paranoid epic of World War II, technology, entropy, and the shadow network that runs the world. The prose is dazzling, exhausting, and often very funny. The novel famously split the Pulitzer board, winning no prize because one judge called it unreadable and another judged it obscene. It is neither. It is simply uncontainable.