The following two quotes appear within a few paragraphs of each other in Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49," which is about... well, it doesn't matter. Modern urban and suburban life, pop music, restoration plays, paranoia/chaos, secret societies, etc. I kinda forget since it's a difficult book, as all his books are, and I read it over a decade ago. Difficult books, generally, are rarely about anything specific, which is part of what makes them difficult. Aside from feeling dumb while reading a difficult novel--clocking ten pages an hour and resisting the urge to move your lips as you go--you wind up feeling dumb again a decade later when you have trouble saying what it was about.