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One cannot overstate the centrality of historical questions in the work of Thomas Pynchon. What makes his fictions so compelling—more, perhaps, than any other quality—is the variety and complexity of historical rethinking they invite and perform. Tiina Käkelä-Puumala, in a recent dissertation, locates ‘‘Pynchon’s historic interest’’ in ‘‘the era of modernization we have been living in since the 17th century. . . . Puritanism, the Enlightenment, industrialism, scientific revolutions, global economy, information explosion, simulation—throughout his fiction Pynchon is very much a writer of modernization, of its historical preconditions, aims, and limits.’’ Shawn Smith characterizes Pynchon as ‘‘the pre-eminent American postmodernist writer’’ and ‘‘an innovative and profound historical novelist as well.’’ Replying to critics of Ian McEwan in a letter to the Daily Telegraph in 2006, Pynchon casually affirms that, whatever the license creative artists enjoy, ‘‘most of us who write historical fiction . . . feel some obligation to accuracy.’’ Accuracy, however, may present itself in curious ways, and Pynchon proves, as one might expect, something of an unconventional historian. In a career one might describe as ‘‘a progressive knotting into’’ the problematics of historiography, Pynchon reconceptualizes history as

Pynchon, Genealogy, History: Against the Day