“Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s called himself a ‘classicist’; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six.”

Dinner with the novelist, the book critic and “Myshkin, a 14-year-old female dachshund who is deaf but decidedly not mute.”

The allure of conclusion-shaping and a wunderkind’s fall.