I have to say that reading Pynchon really makes me appreciate Joyce more. I used to think of Joyce as really strange and far-out; compared to Pynchon he is like Charles Dickens. Not that that's a bad thing.
One of my main gripes with Ulysses is that the book purports to embrace the whole of human experience and yet turns its back on the supernatural, and so presents only a maimed and defective sort of humanity. However, for all the faults of being humanistic, it can still be human, and this is where the power and the goodness of the story comes from.
In Gravity's Rainbow, though, I think I am detecting a streak of the anti-humanism which does not stop short of tending towards the anti-human which seems to be common to a great deal of post-modern writing.
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