the significant American influence on the rest of the world: In addition to Gray’s model of critical multiculturalism, we need a fiction of international relations and extraterritorial citizenship. If Gray’s account tends toward the centripetal – an account of the world’s movement toward America – I propose a complementary centrifugal mapping that charts the outward movement of American power. The most difficult thing for citizens of the US empire to grasp is not the internal difference of their motley multiculture, but the prosthetic reach of that empire into other worlds. (Rothberg, 153) A literature, in other words, that is both capable of addressing the world in the United States and the United States in the world. What is called for here seems to be nothing less than anwe must surely also include Bleeding Edge and the Benny Profane-chapters of V. which are set in New York City where Pynchon lived in the late 1950s and again in the 1990s and 2000s. Not California novels, then, but perhaps novels-of-contemporary-America-as-experienced-at-some-point-or-another-by-Pynchon-himself. This notion, on the other hand, would seem to collapse when we discover that Pynchon himself labels Bleeding Edge “a historical romance” or that the ‘contemporary’ Inherent Vice deals with a period further removed in time than World War II was when the ‘historical’ novel Gravity’s Rainbow was published. Despite these problems of categorization, three of Pynchon’s novels seem to me to stand clearly apart from the rest of his work: not as a result of the period in which they were published, or due to any