In the detective genre, which Pynchon and Anderson exploit, blithely, do we really put plot first? When I think of "The Maltese Falcon," I don't think about the falcon. I think of the faces of those who are after it, and the looks on the faces of Bogart and Mary Astor in their not-long goodbye. Plot, I contend, in every genre, can be deployed in the way T.S. Eliot once wrote about "meaning" in his narrative poems. It's there, he argued, "to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a nice piece of meat for the house-dog." Same with plot. It's the steak you throw over the fence to distract the guard dog while you come up with something more interesting.