JUST BEFORE PUBLICATION OF Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon wrote a review of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, in which he says that “to assert the resurrection of the body [is] today as throughout history an unavoidably revolutionary idea” (“Heart's Eternal Vow”). In other essays, such as “Is it OK to be a Luddite?,” Pynchon almost defensively asserts that he is not being “Insufficiently Serious” in his ecomiums to “violations of the laws of nature,” especially “the big one, mortality itself.” Again, in “The Deadly Sins/Sloth,” he risks accusations of naïve historical nostalgia by recalling for us “the long-ago age of faith and miracle, when daily life really was the Holy Ghost visibly at work and time was a story, with a beginning, middle and end. Belief was intense, engagement deep and fatal.”