Poet L. E. Sissman, in his Gravity's Rainbow review for The New Yorker, said of Pynchon: "He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks. Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat a painful and delicate love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a drudged and drunken orgy."Sissman, L. E. (1973) Hieronymus and Robert Bosch: The Art of Thomas Pynchon. The New Yorker 49, 19 May 1973, pp. 138–40.
