My colleague Michael Harris, a distinguished number theorist at the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu in Paris, has a theory that three of Thomas Pynchon’s major novels are governed by the three conic sections: Gravity’s Rainbow is about parabolas (all those rockets, launching and dropping!), Mason & Dixon about ellipses, and Against the Day about hyperbolas. This seems as good to me as any other organizing theory of these novels I’ve encountered; certainly Pynchon, a former physics major who likes to drop references to Möbius strips and the quaternions in his novels, knows very well what
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