The reader might share Oedipa’s suspicion that the world could be playing a practical joke on her. It is hard to tell which is most absurd: the coincidence that Metzger’s movie happens to be on, the plot of that movie, or the Fangoso Lagoons project that Inverarity has built. (
Fangoso means “muddy,” and the project is so over-the-top that it seems gaudy, cheap, and unsophisticated.) The sense of living through a joke or conspiracy points to people’s tendency to seek meaning in coincidences, even when they rationally know that these coincidences mean nothing at all. In a novel, however, readers usually
do expect coincidences to mean something—and yet, by sticking so many of them together, Pynchon taunts his readers and challenges them to make sense of the book without starting to feel ridiculous or paranoid themselves.