The Crying of Lot 49: This 60s post-modernist novel doesn't feel relevant today

I’ve always wanted to try Thomas Pynchon’s work. Back in high school I heard that his novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is either one of the greatest American novels ever written, or a completely unreadable and pretentious mess. It won the National Book Award in 1974, and was surprisingly nominated for the Nebula Award in 1973. I have a paperback copy (all gold cover, looks very nice) but it’s a door-stopper, and I suspect like most readers, it’s a book I aspire to read someday but will never get to, like James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan’s Wake (1939), David Foster Wallace’s The Infinite Jest (1966), and Roberto Bolano's 2666 (2008).

I am first and foremost a fan of science fiction and fantasy, and not particularly keen on what is generally categorized as ‘literature’ or ‘modernist fiction’. I don’t disparage those books, I just generally derive no pleasure from reading them.
So it is only from a sense of duty that I decided to try The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), since it is very short and was chosen by David Pringle among his Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels.

It is the story of Oedipa Mass, a woman who is tasked with handling the massive and complex estate of her deceased ex-boyfriend Pierce Inverarity. She encounters a bizzare conspiracy of a secret alternate mail service called The Trystero, that has been battling the real Thurn und Taxis mail service for centuries. She continually encounters signs of the Trystero, specifically its muted post horn symbol and hidden mailboxes labeled W.A.S.T.E ("We Await Silent Tristero's Empire"). There are a host of eccentric and weird characters, dozens of allusions to 1960s pop culture, and a bunch of conspiracy-type elements. The story is very “post-modernist” based on it’s knowing self-references, and could be read as a parody of the need to bury symbolism and meaning in stories which amount to very little but an elaborate game for literary critics and coffeehouse pundits to argue over.

In general I found the characters names quite amusing (Mucho Mass, Dr. Hilarius, Mike Fallopian, Genghis Cohen, Randolf Driblette), and the events of the story were sometimes entertaining, but the references are buried so deeply in the world of the 1960s that it felt completely irrelevant to today’s world (speaking for myself, of course). The entire ‘play within a play’, the Jacobean revenge “The Courier’s Tragedy”, felt like an overlong assignment from college, and overall the story just seemed fairly pointless unless you are literature major who takes pleasure from identifying the various literary and cultural references he sprinkles throughout the text. If this is what Pynchon is about, then I'm pretty comfortable not reading anything further, and sticking to what I can appreciate.

The first and only time that I read Hamlet was in my High School AP english class. The teacher, being by far the best english teacher that I’ve had throughout my oh so illustrious english career, was a wonderfully animated and intelligent fellow. For our reading of the Oresteia, he drew stick figures on the board, highlighting with screaming delight the furious eyebrows of Clytemnestra. Every class was a surefire combination of zaniness and intelligence that I came to love from one day to the next. Although his antics could (and should) be retold in much more depth than here, it is perhaps the subject for another review. But somewhat tangentially relevant to the book in question, his insights into the play were some of the most profound that I’ve heard and most certainly kept me from tossing my copy out the window. One of most intriguing moments of the class came during the famous ‘play within the play’ part of Hamlet, where Hamlet puts on a play to show the king that he knows what had really happened to Hamlet’s father. Although our teacher outlined the importance of the scene and the role it served, when the audiobook got around to the dialogue of that meta-play, our teacher held up a flapping hand, speaking loudly over the recording telling us that there was no need to pay attention to this scene, as it was literal gibberish nonsense, its meaning so obfuscated so as not to even be bothered to be given any thought. This came in the middle of an intense dissection of the play, no verse had been left unanalyzed, no word untouched by the scrutiny of close reading and informed discussion. I found it to be quite funny and especially refreshing to have an entire section of a play written-off by an english teacher as nonsensical. But even more than that, I found it profoundly intriguing. Shakespeare, being as dense and difficult as it is, when descending into a deeper level in the play—the play within the play—becomes that much more difficult to understand, as if the further from reality one gets into its fictional universe, the more tangled and confused it becomes. The meta layers of literature twist meaning and significance the deeper it gets. I have since found this Inception-like increase in difficulty in a few other stories of meta-fictive delight. As were the meta-tales of Goatwriter in Number9dream, I found the play within the book, The Crying of Lot 49 to be completely divorced from comprehension. As evidenced by the fact that I can’t recall a single bit of the play now, I have never felt like such a sloppy reading idiot while navigating the threads of this thing.

It is, of course, the point of the book and despite being aware of it from the get go, I can’t bring myself to love the book. I will say that the first chapter is brilliant, among the top all time opening chapters. And I was with the story then, despite it being slightly demanding, I breezed through it with an air of self-gratification, quite pleased with my progress. Perhaps this speaks to Pynchon’s genius, but I felt lulled into a sense of false security by my understanding of the opening pages. That beginning promises a roaring good book, equal parts entertaining and profound but most of all, a book that has meaning. Alas, no book was delivered. I was reading pleasantly, assured of my own understanding, as I said, when a hairspray can begins flying around the room of the Pynchon-verse for an extended period of time, shooting off at improbable angles for much longer than anyone is comfortable reading. The what-the-fuck-is-happening-right-now alarm began to warm up. And as I plunged further through the book, it didn’t get any better at all. My incredulity and my anxiety over missing important details mounted. Among all the loose threads of Tristero and W.A.S.T.E. that the protagonist herself is trying to make sense of, I saw not some profound meaning behind it all, but instead the long, protruding middle finger of the author, accompanied by the condescending chuckle of a man much smarter than myself, scorning my foolish attempts at making sense of it all.

IMEANYEAHIGUESSTHAT’SHOWLIFEISBUTCOMEONDUDE,ISITTOOMUCHTOASKFORALITTLEBITOFMEANINGINASTORY??????

Thomas Pynchon is no doubt a genius and I completely envy his ability to create masterful sentences but damn, his books sure are frustrating to read.

*****Everything else aside, ya'll should check out this lecture on the book. I may have enjoyed it more than the book itself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dtqt0...************

Imagine taking lots of LSD and waking up in an episode of the Monkees. Then imagine how banal this is. 

A woman named Oedipa (everyone has a wacky name) is informed that she is the executor of the estate of a past lover (Pierce Invararity... see, wacky) and so she travels to L.A and meets a lawyer called Metzger (a former child star) and they watch a movie that happens to be on TV which starred the young Metzger. Then they have sex. I don't know why. She's married but hey, it's the sixties. Oh, and there's a band called The Paranoids who constantly turn up (hey, hey, we're the Paranoids, and people say we Paranoid around). Have I mentioned that it's the sixties? You'd never guess from reading this book that it's the sixties. Wanna smoke some dope and take some LSD and watch a documentary about Timothy Leary?

Sadly, after a while, I completely lost interest in all of this cartoonish nonsense. I was suddenly reminded of A Confederacy of Dunces and had that awful feeling that I was supposed to find this book immensely funny (certainly funnier than it actually is). To be fair, I enjoyed the first two chapters and thought the writing was inventive and fluid. But the story is just so dull and gradually becomes more (deliberately) obscure and incoherent. We start to delve into secret societies and perpetual motion devices and insane, screeching therapists. None of this was entertaining to me. It was just zany, psychedelic paranoia... of a very 1960s brand. You'd be better off just listening to Lucy in the sky with Diamonds. Or sniffing glue and staring at a picture of Mickey Dolenz.

All the way through, you get the impression that Pynchon himself is deliriously paranoid and drowning in the (heavily dated, my groovy cat) conspiracy theories of the day. Some of this is interesting, the investigation of whether your life is in you hands or influenced, even controlled, by outside forces, this particular anxiety ridden notion very much present in the idea of the secret mail service that works in opposition to the actual mail service. But honestly, no philosophical debate can be adequately explored in such a disposable form of art. Not for me, anyway. And the biggest issue I had, as always, is that it just isn't very fun to read (the story more so than the prose). There's something interesting at the heart of the piece but it feels exaggerated, malformed, and extremely dated. I can imagine hippies and counter culture liberals loving this (oh God, is that why Pynchon is such a hipster's wet dream?). But I found most of it overwrought and contrived, almost like an inadvertent parody of postmodern literature. It's just not that good, kids. I don't care how groovy this cat is. It's well-written gibberish, like that acid infused episode of the Monkees. Reading this has convinced me to put Gravity's Rainbow on the back burner indefinitely. I don't care how groovy you dig on this guy, I ain't no square and this just ain't outta sight

La miracolosa morte di Pierce Inverarity

“Che né burrasca né conflitti, né belve feroci né la solitudine del deserto, e nemmanco i felloni usurpatori della terra che di diritto ci appartiene intimidiranno i nostri corrieri -. E i banditi, lasciando incolumi loro e le loro borse, disparvero di nuovo fra i loro monti crepuscolari in un crepitio di mantelli simili a vele nere”.

Non so come esprimere con esattezza cosa si nasconda nell'esperienza di leggere questo straordinario e fantastico romanzo; la prospettiva piena di stupore e sorpresa nell'incontro con un'invenzione così originale, divertente e coinvolgente. Mi sono addentrato con curiosità in un delirio gotico e demenziale, in un entusiasmante disegno apocalittico e comico; seguendo l'esilarante investigazione di Oedipa dentro l'ignoto e l'oblio, ho affrontato l'emergere di una logica altra, immaginaria, nel segno di una ridicola follia: il regno ombra di Tristero. La fantascienza e la storia vengono riscoperte tramite la forza surreale degli eventi, la geometrica moltiplicazione della trama in episodi laterali, personaggi grotteschi e epifanie romantiche. Pynchon è perfetto nel ribaltare le micronarrazioni richiamando a sé l'essenza carnevalesca dello scherzo. Dietro le quinte del teatro, la natura prepotente della cospirazione, la precisione architettonica del complotto e la crudele verità della paranoia ripetono le battute e si impongono come le sole forme di conoscenza e di rappresentazione possibile.

“Si ribattezzò El Desheredado, Il Diseredato, e impose ai suoi seguaci una livrea nera simbolo dell'unica cosa che nell'esilio appartenesse loro veramente: la notte”.

Quite fittingly, I'm sitting down to write this review after having just checked the mail. Nothing today but junk and bills. Save for my paltry royalty checks and the occasional bit of fan mail here and there (fans, you know who you are), that's about all I get most days, but this still doesn't stop me from checking the box two, three, or even four times until something shows up. On the odd day there's no mail before suppertime, I'm usually left somewhat disconcerted. What, no catalogs? No supermarket flyers? Not even anything for that chick who lived here three tenants ago? I start to worry that the postman fell ill, or had an accident somewhere along the way.

That's how reliable the mail is.

Sure, we've all had mail arrive late, if ever at all. Things get lost from time to time, but whatever our complaints against the various couriers, what we forget in those moments of frustration is that 99.99% of the mail addressed to us in our lifetime does eventually make its way into our hands, and usually right on time!

It's simply astounding. Sometimes I wonder whether UPS, FedEx, and the United States Postal Service have all colluded to pioneer some new teleportation technology, warping pallets of packages and correspondence from coast to coast, leisurely loading their bags and trucks for their local rounds while the rest of us dupes check their phony tracking numbers.

That's probably even further fetched than the conspiracy postulated by this book, but not by much. Either way, the mail remains quite astonishing nonetheless.

Think about it. If people couldn't send things by mail, they'd have to make every delivery in person. Only the very well connected could ever succeed in harnessing a vast network of others in such a grand endeavor, and I guess that explains why our national/international delivery systems can trace their roots back to the messengers employed by empires of old. Royal European delivery services eventually came to be rivaled by private outfits, subsequently squashed by postal reform in this country, only to return sub rosa in a campaign of guerilla mailings in 1966. Here in 2013, the government service is presently taking its turn on the ropes, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.

This isn't a morality play between big business and big government couriers, people. This is the very heart and soul of communication -- ugly, futile, and absolutely necessary.

The world is full of signs and symbols and emblems and omens… One just should learn to read them…

Beneath the notice, faintly in pencil, was a symbol she'd never seen before, a loop, triangle and trapezoid.

“The seventh angel sounded his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven…” Revelation 11:15
Thomas Pynchon is a cognoscente of all sorts of conspiracies and The Crying of Lot 49, a somewhat sad post-noir burlesque, set amidst trashy cultural and behavioural patterns, concerns itself with a weird global postal conspiracy.

Decorating each alienation, each species of withdrawal, as cufflink, decal, aimless doodling, there was somehow always the post horn. She grew so to expect it that perhaps she did not see it quite as often as she later was to remember seeing it.

Conspiracy theories exist in the heads of those who are afraid to face the complex and, quite often, inimical reality.

When those kids sing about ‘She loves you,’ yeah well, you know, she does, she’s any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the ‘you’ is everybody.

Only the simplest things ring unambiguous and true in the multifarious world.

He who controls the means of communication can control not only the content of the message, but the world as well.

The start was really promising. Although the rest wasn’t bad I felt like the beginning was the best part. Or maybe I got tired of the quirkiness?

Y'know I feel sorry for Pynchon. He's gained a reputation as a 'difficult writer'. This problem plagues Faulkner as well. People go into Pynchon's and Faulkner's novels and quickly realise that things happen very differently in here and thus, unnerved by the shock of the new, hastily retreat. It's a pity. My best advice for reading Pynchon? Stop trying to understand everything. If a passage, or a page, or hell, even a whole chapter doesn't make any sense, don't bother yourself over it. Just move on. The only person who's ever fully understood a Pynchon novel is Pynchon.

There's a couple of ways to read The Crying of Lot 49. You can read it as a mystery novel, you can read it as a meditation on 1960s post-war America (à la Breakfast of Champions) and you can also read it as a great satire on the postmodernist novel. I read it as the latter. If you stand back from this novel and try to see it as Pynchon essentially taking the piss out of all the tropes and plots and characters often found in postmodernist literature, then I think it starts making the most sense.

The novel follows Oedipa Maas who, after discovering a strange trumpet-like symbol on the wall of a bathroom, goes on an incredibly convoluted and complex journey to unmask the symbol's true meaning. Despite the novel's brevity (only 142 pages), Pynchon's trademark dense but intricate prose turns what is essentially a long short story into a fully-fledged novel, packed with a vast cast of characters and an equal amount of plots.

Pynchon has a lot of fun with The Crying of Lot 49. You can almost hear him sniggering as he types out names such as Genghis Cohen and Dr. Hilarius and Mike Fallopian. He isn't exactly being subtle about the inherent ridiculousness of this novel. His comical names are mirrored in the novel's many comic moments.

A stand-out scene from early on in the novel describes Oedipa's attempt to glean answers from the lawyer, Metzger. He suggests that for every question she asks she must take off an item of clothing. Oedipa excuses herself to use the bathroom, where she proceeds in donning every item of clothing she can find. She then traipses back into Metzger's office looking like, as Pynchon brilliantly puts it, 'a beach ball with feet'.

There are innumerable scenes like that in Lot 49. However, whilst this is a fantastic comical satire, I found myself somewhat longing for more. The narrative is incredibly episodic. Oedipa trundles along from scene to scene, meeting a new character at every stop and unlocking a small part of the novel's greater mystery, like a sort of postmodernist Canterbury Tales. Pynchon also just adores digression, which I know is something of his trademark, but when the novel is 142 pages long, you'd think that he would have reigned it in slightly.

Overall I found The Crying of Lot 49 to be a fun satirical romp. This novel is often suggested as a good starting place for Pynchon virgins, mainly due to its brevity. And I think that's fairly solid advice. Read it whichever way you want to, or even try to find a new angle to approach it from. But most importantly, have fun, that's what Pynchon would want.

My bro loved this one back in the day!

He is woke. I'm Christian - but a psychiatric retread - and so am taking it seriously, with a little mischief from my Daemon to add to its pea soup density.

Density AND intensity.

I am like the heroine's affluent husband, Mucho (get it? He’s Too Much). Like him, I thrive on daily Spotify easy listening music to counter the woke subculture's sharp jabs to jar me awake at three AM, as her mad shrink tries to do.

And as Spotify publicly nails my listening habits.

For when her Ex is the first one to call them at that ungodly hour, her hubby tells her to hang up. She does. (Her name, btw, is Oedipa, for like Oedipus, she’s seen it all and done it all.)

But Oedipa’s Ex hears Mucho’s curse, and curses HIM to a life in what amounts to the beginning of The End Times. Then the Ex dies - or at least he disappears, after naming Oedipa his executor. Mucho says, get out of it! Call our lawyer, Metzger.

What Mucho gets, in other words, is the Jungian Shadow. He takes his meds (his cozy music anodyne) but the world doesn’t. The world is infected, he has built up immunity.

Well, Metzger finds Oedipa in her sleazy motel - unwinding under her cone of silence to unravel the will - and comes on to her (after checking every other motel in Frisco) by revealing that his good looks landed him once as a tot in a string of successful movies as the new male Shirley Temple.

Help!

It's like a Pandora's Box, the End Times. Or like COVID.

Apocalypse Now! You see, now the curse has backfired on the Ex.

So the world teeters on the brink, and hubby grooves to the lulling crooning of a solo saxophone and 101 Strings, as a rich radio deejay. And Oedipa untangles the will and her lawyer - though the lawyer, once tangled, is a leech!

Same thing happened to me in 2022! COVID isolation drove me nuts. And now it seems to have taken social media with it. But I relaxed. And I have my solid faith. I appear to be OK.

If I DNF this, my bro won't let me off the hook.

So I'll slog thru its pea soup dutifully till the end:

Or to my own end…

Whichever comes first.

Though, gotta admit the bit about the Confederate Navy’s attack on California was to Die For!

n  n

My first excursion into the Pynchonesque…and it left me disorientated, introspective and utterly confused about how exactly I feel about it. I’m taking the cowards way out and giving it three stars even though that makes me feel like I’m punting the responsibility football and doing my best imitation of an ostrich when trouble walks by.

I am going to have to re-read this. My assumption is that I began this book taking Pynchon a little too lightly. I decided to start my exploration of Pynchon here because it's widely considered his most “accessible” work. I figured even as addled as my brain is with wine sediment and Milk Duds, my big boy education would serve as an adequate navigator on this little journey.

Well, around page 21, I started getting that “I’m lost, have you seen my momma” feeling and there's not a single character in this story trustworthy enough to ask directions on how to get back to the plot.

This much I think I know:

Oedipa Mass (get used to monikers like that as every character’s name is a play on words) is a clever, self-motivated middle-aged housewife from California who isn’t above shagging the occasional stranger not her husband (hell it’s the 60’s). Oedipa’s ex-shag partner, Pierce Inverarity, dies uber-rich and leaves her as co-executor of his estate. Inverarity is a practical joker extraordinaire and so the idea that everything may not be as it seems is teed up immediately. However, Oedipa is the kind of woman who loves a mystery and she feels compelled to play the part that Inverarity has created for her.

n  If it was really Pierce's attempt to leave an organized something behind after his own annihilation, then it was part of her duty, wasn't it, to bestow life on what had persisted, to try to be what Driblette was, the dark machine in the centre of the planetarium, to bring the estate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning, all in a soaring dome around her.n

Those first 20 pages were cake and I was feeling very much in control.

Then page 21……..through the rest of the novel (about 180 pages) send Oedipa (and the reader) on a fragmented, surreal, allusion-soaked, reality-bent/warped/twisted sojourn that felt a bit like a David Lynch/David Mamet collaboration where nothing and no one is anywhere close to what they seem. Dense, compact, multi-layered prose and some memorable oddball characters make the confusion plenty entertaining, but grasping the central core of the piece was rather elusive (at least for me).

The framing, edgework of the story is as historical mystery centered on an alleged vast conspiracy involving a secret, underground postal carrier network known as Trystero. The calling card/icon of this shadowy organization is:

n  n

Which is a mockery of the horn symbolizing the real life postal carrier known as Thurn and Taxis.

Eventually, I gathered that the major theme being explored by Pynchon is the untrustworthiness of communication and that it’s impossible to verify information because the source is always distorted from the standpoint of the observer. Thus communication, when filtered through the lens of the recipient, often brings more confusion than enlightenment and more questions than answers. “Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.”

At least I think that is what Pynchon was getting at in this book. My problem was that I didn’t clue into that until late into the story and by that time I was simply riding the crest of the enjoyable language and mini-scenes into the finish line. Having now read the book, I feel like if I were to go back and read it again knowing what I now know, I will be able to get far more out of it. I guess I might also realize that I am reading too much into it and the emperor really has no clothes.

For now, I will give Pynchon the benefit of the doubt. Based on his reputation, he has certainly earned it.

Even given my less than perfect understanding of the nuances moving through the narrative, there is much to enjoy. There are some wonderful scenes and character interactions that I loved For example, the The Courier’s Tragedy is a play that Oedipa sees that actually touches on the themes of the wider novel. I thought it was fascinating.

There is also some magnificent passages that I could read simply to enjoy the language.

n   Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person's time line sideways till they all coincide. Then you'd have this big, God, maybe a couple hundred million chorus saying 'rich, chocolaty goodness' together, and it would all be the same voice.n

Language like that is always a pleasure to read. However, without the glue of understanding all that Pynchon was attempting to say, my enjoyment was somewhat muted.

That’s just me.

I enjoyed the experience of reading this and, as I mentioned to a GR friend the other day, I have thought better of this book during the days since I finished this than I did while I was actually reading it. That tells me that the book affected me and seeped into my brain more than I was able to consciously detect. Maybe that’s how Pynchon works, I’m not sure. However, it is a question I plan to investigate by visiting his other works as well as returning to this one.

3.0. Recommended (though a bit confused).

The description of this book is: "The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not-inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge." A better description would be: "The highly incomprehensible satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy the reader will never have a chance of understanding, meets some extremely dull characters whose behavior makes no sense, and supposedly attains a not-inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge, though the reader will never be able to know what this self-knowledge is, because the reader won't understand why she ever behaves the way she does."

Imagine a book in which you can't understand what the hell any of the characters are thinking. You don't know who the characters are, they are rarely developed (or, if so, the developments are so sudden that it's almost nonsensical), you don't know why they are going to the places they're going to, you don't know why this character is fucking that character--none of it makes any sense. The narrator never tells you anything that'll give you an idea of why he's telling his story the way he is. Further imagine that, adding to the confusion, there are no line breaks between completely different scenes; so suddenly they'll be in a completely different time and place and unless you're paying the closest of attention, you won't notice it. It's filled with unfunny, uncreative puns, the "plot" (if there is one) makes little sense--rarely is it clear if the scene you're reading has any significance. Usually, the significance is symbolic at best. Characters are introduced, then dropped, and you'll never know why their behavior was so nonsensical. It's like reading a book in which every character is on drugs.

After trying to read Virginia Woolf's awful "Mrs. Dalloway" (for the same class), I never thought I'd be more confused by a book. This book proved me wrong. If you're a fan of that, you may enjoy this. Myself, I find modernism unbearable.

I'll admit that there are some mildly funny parts, and I'm sure that a fan of this book will simply tell me that I'm "not getting it," or that I'm not reading carefully enough. That may be true, but I shouldn't have to reread every fucking page of this book five or six times to understand what the fuck is going on or why any characters are behaving the way they do. If I could just understand the characters, it would make all the difference. But none of the characters in this book make any freaking sense!

I couldn't believe it when I read, in another review, that this is one of Pynchon's more "approachable" books.

Maybe I'll edit/update this when I'm done reading the book, if my views change. I doubt they will.