This novel is Pynchon's bittersweet look at the idealism of the sixties as seen from the cynicism of the eighties. One key character from the sixties is the mathematician Weed Atman, first seen studying a paper on group theory when he absent-mindedly wanders into a demonstration and gets made a leader because of his height. Atman ends up radicalized, declines suggestions that he return to proving theorems, and ends up killed.