Mr. T. Pynchon, who has done in literature for paranoia what Sacher-Masoch did for whips, [...]
just a funny quote (apparently someone else who checked out the book thought so too--the passage is marked with a pencil)
(referring to Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, Austrian writer and journalist, who gained renown for his romantic stories of Galician life and for whom the term "masochism" was named