As any meeting of literature and literary criticism is time- and site-specific, a critical literature review, especially when it concerns the work of a living author, will not only be about that work in its various phases, but also about literary criticism at the different moments of its intersection with that work. This text, for instance, is written from within the deep political shadow of the inauguration of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States. For the now eighty-year-old Pynchon, the moment when a real estate mogul turned reality TV star turned president takes his oath must be both painful and disillusioning beyond belief. What must be especially disheartening for Pynchon is that in Donald Trump, capitalism and politics have finally become one and the same thing: a literally undifferentiable superposition of money and political power is smeared across American reality.