One Battle After Another has roughly the same plot, certainly thematic elements, just shifted forward in time by about 40 years. Whereas Bill and his French 75 revolutionary buddies are clinging on to vestiges of the revolutionary past (the 80s/90s) and frustrated with problems of modernity (technology, ICE), Zoyd has a nostalgia for the 60s, and is similarly over-encumbered with the culture shock brought about by the 80s. Far more so than in this novel than aforementioned movie, the role of the computer and the tube are looming existential concerns. I don't think Pynchon is a Luddite in this sense (he has written supplementary essays that elucidate his precise stance on the matter), just thematic reference points which motivate the characters.

As with all his other books, there is a prevalent element of the absurd – in the characters' names, the places, their dialogues, vocations, juxtaposed against the precise historic tidbits Pynchon sprinkles in, bringing us back from the land of Douglas Adams towards an encyclopedic alternate history. Where the other novels of his that I've read tended to be more focused on war, or characters who are/were soldiers, this book is a bit more mundane, and as a result the plot feels even more kooky I think? Idk why I was more subconsciously willing to forfeit a "normal" narrative flow to the backdrop of military conflict than I am to the PNW in the 80s, but that's just the case.

Sweet wife, Frenesi, after having her check refused at multiple locations, ponders the binary expression of divine beings names are spelled out in the binary of lives and debts.

We are all digits in God's computer

Hector gets addicted to low-toxicity, small dosages of tube. Pynchon snipes, like Wallace, addiction to short form content well before any such thing (vine, TikTok, ~screen) even exists to be addicted to in the ways they describe.

Not my favorite Pynchon novel, maybe above V. but behind the rest

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