Mainwaring edged his way to Billy's side.
"We used zorgs," he whispered"
"For what?"
"Identifying the mohole."
"Zorgs are useless."
"We used them," Mainwaring said.
"Practically nobody knows what they even are."
"Softly knows, doesn't he?"
"He's one of the few."
"Softly explained how we might use zorgs. I briefed my sylphing teams. Without zorgs we would never have found the mohole."
"Amazement."
"Except Softly wanted us to use them in tracking back the signal. But we didn't need them for that. We needed them for the mohole."
...
"A hole is an unoccupied negative engergy state," Mainwaring whispered. "Hole theory involves `pair creation' which is the simultaneous ceration of a particle-antiparticle pair. Holes move, just as moholes seem to move, just as a discrete partcile can separate iteself from a continuously dense array, leaving behind its antiparticle or hole. What Softly pointed out was that zorgs provide a perfect working mathematical model of hole theory....We had to learn to view zorgs as events rather than numbers, just as particles are events rather than things. The discrete-continuous quality of zorgs is what really helped us work out the necessary mathematics of Moholean relativity and made mohole indentification practically inevitable."

"This so called book is the worst piece of junk I have ever read. It barely has a plot, instead it repeats the same stupid things over and over again. The main character jumps to completely unfounded conclusions. All in all it is probably one of the worst novels ever written."

One of my all time favourites, for ever and ever. Constituting an almost unremarked break in the history of western narrative, Ratner's Star finds DeLillo freely borrowing and bending the structures of Lewis Carroll, sending little Billy Twillig through and down the post-contemporary Scientific-Industrial looking glass and bunny hole. The language is stunning and exquisitely wrought; so good I sometimes have to put it down to recompose myself, like staring at the sun.

I'm not sure how I stumbled across this book, but I read it in high school, when I was a nerd studying math history for fun. DeLillo had me convinced that he was quite a knowledgeable math afficianado, not only because of the variety of physics- and number-theory-related content, but also because of the way his characters related to and dealt with these issues. Regarding literary sediment, I can't vouch that this book is anything more than a 'typical DeLillo' book, except that it speaks to the scientist in ways seldom found in fiction. Regarding mathematical content, I'm surprised that the title includes no allusion to math (as far as i know..).