Er...
you really have to read it for yourself...
Abruptly change the subject...
A literary precursor to The big Lebowski but with more about the postal systems of renaissance Europe...
The figure of the detective or private investigator merges with the quest tradition, at the end do we find C.G. Jung's Synchronicity? An intricate and cunning plot from beyond the grave? Nothing? Mid sixties American picaresque adventure? It you read it yourself you can make your own mind up, or not.
The investigator can move through the sundered orders of society, passing among criminals, the grotesques, the merely insane, the flotsam and jetsam of other civilisations, in this book too, communing with the underworld as the executrix of a will, leading character Mrs Oedipa Maas is typical, in that her name suggests meanings and associations ("I dreamt of Freud, what does it mean?") but maybe the cigar is just a cigar? Of course cigars, smoking, cigarettes, filters - one can't stray far from the allusions and loose threads that combine to form this...novelette.

Where do you start with a novel like this. There are so many trails and plays with words and their meaning that it is dizzying. There is a central character called Oedipa who becomes co-executor of an ex flames estate and inadvertantly steps into what may or may not be a global conspiracy stretching back through the ages.
Lots of interesting characters turn up and may (or may not) be part of the conspiracy. Oedipa's therapist turns out to be an ex-Nazi who worked in Buchenwald and there is an ongoing Beatles theme in the form of an American group who sing with English accents called the Paranoids. I am not sure if Pynchon knew that that the Beatles called themselves Los Para Noias. There is a nod to Nabakov and contained within the novel is a fictional Jacobean revenge play. There is also a lot about the postal system and stamps. As I am a reformed (I may even say ex) philatelist, all this was interesting and I recognised some of the symbols as watermarks I have known! (Sad, I know).
There are lots of other themes; entropy to name but one; and the conspiracy races away in a pleasing and slightly sinister manner. I enjoy a good conspiracy theory (having been slightly embroiled in a couple in the 80s (a whole other story)).
On the whole it was pleasingly entertaining; if it has an equivalent for children it would keep them quiet in the back of the car for hours.What exactly Pynchon meant by it all I am not entirley sure; possibly like some of its protagonists, a little too much LSD amy have been taken!

Sign me in for more Thomas Pynchon, please. This was my first reading of him, and I was honestly blown away. How is it possible that I haven't read him sooner? Well, it's never too late to discover a good writer. I'm actually happy that I dived into this novel blissful unaware of anything regrading the author, the time period it was written in or the novel itself. That made the reading all the more fun. The Crying of Lot 49 has proved to be such an exquisite literary surprise! If this novel is anything to go by, Thomas Pynchon has a really peculiar writing style. The narrative in this novel often felt chaotic, but I absolutely enjoyed its potent mix of wild humour, entertaining characters, delicious sarcasm, social commenting and alternative history! I didn't find it hard to follow at all. Maybe it was because of my mood at the time, but I found myself immersed in the novel.

But first things first. I read this book in the course of one day and night, under circumstances that were a bit strange. My personal state of being went well with the mood of this one. By the end of this novel, I was nearly hallucinating myself, not for the reasons the characters themselves but still it felt appropriate. Recently I have had an operation that went wrong and my recovering was slower that excepted. Yesterday I had 'the bride of Frankenstein' look down, my neck was terribly swollen and I was pale as death. I was able to get a wink of sleep, so I entertained myself with reading this novel and some other works. Around 3 am, my surgical wound has started to bleed. There I was drying to drain my wound, opting not to go to ER, applying the medical alcohol and figuring it is best to wait until the morning and try to catch a decent surgeon (which I did managed to do, I got my wound fully treated and am currently on antibiotics). Still, it was a pretty wild night, no sleep and blood everywhere.


Let's talk a bit more about the novel. The Crying of Lot 49 features a female protagonist, Oedipa Maas. Her name, filled with Freudian and other references, is as symbolic as everything she notices around herself. As Oedipa's story opens, she is a married housewife who, all of the sudden, becomes the executor of will of her ex (dirty rich) lover. Her husband Mucho, the disk jockey, is having an identity crisis of some sort. Mucho is beaten by years of selling cars, of seeing dirty vehicles of failed individuals and/or families being sold to other equally dysfunctional individuals and/or families. That 'incest car circle', as Mucho likes to call it, has driven him mad. It seems that his previous job as a car seller has mucho traumatized Mucho. He wakes in terror at night, and Oedipa struggles to comfort him.

“Yet at least he had believed in the cars, maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bring with them the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopeless of children, of supermarket booze, or two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust--and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the market, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a grey dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes--it nauseated him to look, but he had to look.”



Anyhow, when Oedipa shows her husband the letter, he seems indifferent. Perhaps that is why Oedipa accepts the job. There is a catch naturally. Almost immediately, Oedipa realized that she is in over her head. She gets involves with the lawyer who is to help her execute the will. The lawyer, once a child movie star know as Baby Ivan, is working on a series where an ex lawyer turn a movie star is supposed to play him, but that 'pilot' will probably live in some drawer internally. Oedipa and lawyer get drunk watching some old film of his. Oedipa tries to get as much information of him as she can, and when they agree to play strip poker she excuses herself and puts as many of items of clothing as possible. When Oedipa sees herself in the mirror, she laughs so hard she knows down a hair spray and causes an explosion, which draws in the attention of a young band that will soon accompany them in their 'search'. The description of Oedipa's and Baby Ivan's 'hooking up' is comical, but still strangely erotic. Oddly enough, this is how I would describe much of the novel's prose. There is nothing juicy about it except its humour, in other words, there are no erotic descriptions but there is a fair share of erotic references & jokes.


The novel progresses rapidly from that point. Once Oedipa learns of a secret sign and copies it into her notebook, she becomes obsessed with it. What does this have to do with the will? It is uncertain. The will is full of mysteries but so it life. Maybe her ex is playing tricks on her? Oedipa sees a brilliantly morbid play dating back to Puritan times, and she is haunted by it. She storms into the wardrobe of the direct and the principal actor, who refuses her the original version of the play, but treats her to a strong mystical passage. Through this play, and some other occurrences, Oedipa find out about Renaissance postal system. It seems that a similar, underground postal system still exists in USA! As Oedipa becomes increasingly obsessed with it, learning about various underground groups, the term Triestero keeps to haunt her. At times it seems that Oedipa sets to explore, not just her soul, or the USA social mysteries, but the human condition itself.


“In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in the tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she’d wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had take her away from nothing, there’d been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”

As Oedipa encounters marginal groups that use the alternative postal service, things move from strange to stranger. There are engineers that believe in demons, AA society that is about stopping people from falling in love or forming meaningful relationships and all sorts of groups unknown to a common men. Oedipa goes to meet a man who will believes in a demon. When she arrives at his home, he is watching some kind of dance, saying there is something about girls that age. Oedipa says she understand, because her husband, shares a passion for underage girl. The novel is full of disturbing sentences like that, sentences that are just thrown at the reader. Deeply ironic, this novel is soaked with social satire. The characters are not free from paradox. Sometimes they seem to act as symbols, but despite all of the insanity or perhaps because of it, they seem human enough. Not long into novel, some readers might feel like the are almost hallucinating. Everything seems to be happening so fast- most of the time. There is a lot of information thrown around. Alternative history plays a big part of this novel. For some people, it might be hard to follow, but for me it was an absolute delight.

i read this because of the song San Narciso by Faded Paper Figures and wow. i have never been this disappointed

i took notes for the bae while reading and i’m too lazy to write a review so i’ll just post those. some of them are in german - tough luck. also some of them are irrelevant to the plot because it’s complaints about a political tv show that was on while i was listening to this at the gym but i will keep those in cause once again - tough luck


• very sexually charged - not in a good way

• rape??? it’s 7am???

• also isn’t that dude a lawyer?? when will he do lawyer things??? is raping your client a lawyer thing???

• it’s been an hour and i can’t get over the child acting scene

• incest theatre play. once again i’m asking when he will start doing lawyer things

• war kurz abgelenkt von einem zdf beitrag zur vier tage woche und boom surprise orgie (im buch nicht im zdf…imagine)

• der typ im zdf von der fdp meint bei der vier tage woche debatte dass leute sollen selbst entscheiden wie viel sie arbeiten, teilzeit zum beispiel, which is not the same?????

• she’s married!!! i keep forgetting

• he’s (idk random dude) watching children dancing and is like “i like watching young stuff, there’s something about chicks that age” ?????

• same dude likes having sex while watching news about china (but vietnam is also fine)

• is every wife in this cheating on their husband

• “despair came over her as it will when noone around you has any sexual relevance to you”

• natürlich ist der psychotherapeut nazi und hat in einem kz gearbeitet “if i had been aa real nazi i would have chosen jung but i chose freud” the fuck does that mean

• “i had a date last night with an 8 year old and she’s a swinger just like me”

• ach die sind alle auf lsd! das erklärts

Captures the psychedelic experience perfectly. Not with colorful descriptions of hallucinations or bright fractals, but rather by exploring a fleeting feeling that the world is deeply, incomprehensibly interconnected and that the act of comparison (or metaphor in Pynchon’s writing) is the only way we can really start to understand what exists outside of us.

I'm if anything a fussy writer. The sort of guy who prefers to come up with excuses why all the factors surrounding the writing of some story or chapter aren't quite right, rather than actually sit down and let the thing get written anyway. I like to worry sentences, and I like to worry about sentences that sound like other sentences I've read so many times before. "She got out of the car and looked searchingly up at the sky." There's some piece in me that could never be satisfied with that sitting on the page.

For a while I thought this was big of me. I thought it meant I cared foremost about language. And maybe in the tiny, fussy domain of the short story it's the sort of thing readers won't like to be given, but in a novel such concern is a little ridiculous. Thinking hard about the ways I read novels I know that if everything's chugging along smoothly and I'm at full engagement with the story when I come across such a sentence all I do is register the information it gives me. Its blandness doesn't stop me in my tracks. And so there's room in novels for these sentences. James called novels shaggy beasts; finessing every god damn line will get nobody anywhere.

Oh, I imagine Pynchon has such sentences in this novel, but what I want to talk about are the other ones, the ones that won't probably ever get written again. Lots of the best sentences in this book spill down their pages. Some of them are "attainable," so to speak, in the challenge I made with myself as I read the book to assess my own ability to craft the sentences he already did. Ones like this one, where you just accumulate well observed details, aren't really that hard to write: "She thought of other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids sat on the floor planking and sang back, happy as fat, whatever came over the mother's pocket radio; of other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman's tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages (149)."

Do-able, right? Well, maybe not "planking" or "swung". Those words would never occur to me in the places they fall. But then look at these, just a page later: "Perhaps she'd be hounded someday as far as joining Tristero itself, if it existed, in its twilight, its aloofness, its waiting. The waiting above all; if not for another set of possibilities to replace those that had conditioned the land to accept any San Narciso among its most tender flesh without a reflex or cry, then at least, at the very least, waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew. She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For now it was like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would be either a transcendent meaning, or only the earth (15)."

The former bit takes merely a good eye, perhaps some experience, and a decent way with words, all of which can be picked up in a short number of years. The latter, though, takes some new kind of mind all together. A nimble, fluid mind, that can make leaps of association that all sort of swell around one another.

Another thing that makes this book so rad is its subject: postal conspiracy. So nice to read something new. It's always very en vogue to write stories about "weird" types. For lots of uninspired writers with little imagination, weird gets translated into the noble rural poor. (I read at least 15 of these stories today for the lit-mag I screen for.) For others, and often for me, it translates to people with nontraditional jobs, the sorts of careers no one goes to school for.

Here the strangeness of philatelists, underground postmasters, and Jacobean community theatre folk all seems very closely strange, somehow. Maybe this whole entry is longhand for saying I can't find a way to call this book quirky. Is this only because of its age?

I’ve been curious about Thomas Pynchon for some time now. I know his books are held in the highest esteem, they’ve won the biggest awards, and he’s a famously reclusive writer, having not been seen in public for decades now. And I was also informed that his most accessible book is also his shortest: The Crying of Lot 49.

So a while back I attempted reading it - and nearly short-circuited my brain! I read about a dozen pages and gave up, utterly flummoxed by what I’d read, only knowing it was baaaaad. However! I decided to give Pynchon a fair shake and to attempt this book again, this time by reading 4 pages of it per day. It’s only 142 pages, so it wouldn’t take me that long. And this method worked - I finally finished the damn thing and me brain is still more or less in one piece - but I’m none the wiser as to what I read or why in particular Pynchon is revered as a literary master. The Crying of Lot 49 is awful!

The main character is Oedipa Maas (all the characters have stupid names like this: Ghengis Cohen, Peter Pinguid, Mike Fallopian - this must be the “humour” I’m told Pynchon’s books possess?) who is left something in the will of her wealthy friend. She has to learn how to become an executor of the will or something and this leads her on a bizarre and rambling quest where she finds out there’s a secret underground postal service and a lost Elizabethan play. Don’t ask me why these things feature so prominently or what they have to do with anything because I don’t know!

Honestly, Pynchon is such a bad storyteller that you could open up this book and select any random sentence and your understanding of the story would be the same as someone who had read the book up to that point. The characters are just names, the story is only ever vague, the themes (if the book has any) are murky, and the prose is so awkward and flat as to leave no impression or connection to the reader. This is the easiest book to put down because you never know what the hell you’re reading so you don’t care - and this is the state of play for the entire thing. It doesn’t get better!

The title is a reference to auctioneers (their blather is called “crying”) and lot 49 is an auction for - something. I have no idea. Have I mentioned how little I knew was going on in this mess of a novel?

I’m glad I can say I’ve read a Thomas Pynchon novel but I know for sure now that I will never read another one again - he is most certainly not a writer for me. The Crying of Lot 49 was nothing more than an exercise in patience, like waiting for a bore to finish their tedious prattling before they stagger away. You would probably have an easier (and more entertaining) time reading fish entrails than Pynchon’s prose.

- Ero venuta nella speranza che mi facesse uscire da una mia fantasia.
- E l'accarezzi, invece! - gridò Hilarius con slancio. Sennò cosa vi resta, a tutti voi? La tenga stretta per il suo piccolo tentacolo, non lasci che i freudiani gliela portino via con le seduzioni, o i farmacisti con il veleno. L'abbia cara, qualunque cosa sia, perchè quando la perderà finirà come gli altri. Inizierà a smettere di esistere!
Thomas Pynchon - L'incanto del lotto 49

That's what would come to haunt her most, perhaps: the way it fitted, logically, together.
…
Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.
…
“I came,” she said, “hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy.”

“Cherish it!” cried Hilarius, fiercely. “What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it’s little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”

The Crying of Lot 49 follows Oedipa Maas, a married woman who learns one day that she has been named as the executrix of the estate of a wealthy former lover, Pierce Inverarity. Her duties take her to places she’s never been, and introduce her to several new and very strange people. But most of all, Oedipa begins finding clues about the possible existence of a shadowy, underground postal organization called the Tristero that people thought had been believed defeated by Thurn und Taxis in some kind of postal battle in the 1700s. And I say “possible existence” because Oedipa is never sure if the clues she’s following about the Tristero are an elaborate prank by the recently departed Pierce, or if she’s falling for conspiracy theories and slowly going mad ….

Every time I see the description for Mr. Pynchon’s  Gravity’s Rainbow, I think ‘that sounds cool, I should read it sometime.’ But The Crying of Lot 49 is considered Mr. Pynchon’s most accessible novel, which does not bode well for me because I’m still not really sure what this book is supposed to be about. Maybe drug use and alienation, and/or the difficulties people have communicating with each other? It’s definitely a satire, funny in places, and there’s some interesting stuff in here—an elaborate revenge play within the novel, and an exploration of a philosophical thought experiment about entropy called Maxwell’s Demon—but I know I didn’t get everything out of it that was there (why all the odd character names like “Genghis Cohen”?). Then again, later in his career Mr. Pynchon himself criticized this book “in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up until then.” So maybe my struggles with the novel are more forgivable.

The Crying of Lot 49 didn’t really work for me. But If it sounds remotely interesting to you (or if, like me, it’s on a list of the top 100 novels of all time that you’re working your way through), give it a go. It’s short, and you’ll know within 20 pages whether you want to keep reading or not. 2.5 stars rounded up to 3.

This is one of those books – you know, those books where the author would be too clever by half if he wasn’t so clever to be able to get away with it. There is something very ‘adolescent male’ about this book – accept it is probably just too smart to be really understood by your average adolescent male. It is also, at times, very funny.

I was going to write a review that would be just the string of discordant images this book throws at you at machine-gun speed – but instead I am going to put myself on the line and say this is a book about information theory. Okay, I know it’s not only about that, but stay with me. There’s the postal service – which, if anything, is fundamentally about transmitting information. There is the discussion of entropy and Maxwell’s Demon – two central ideas of info theory. There’s all of the stuff at the start about her having sex with her lawyer and all of the ‘mixed signals’ each is sending the other. There is the will she is trying to sort out – and what is a will if not a final message to the world that invariably needs to be interpreted. And there is the story itself, with so many other stories within stories and allusions and self-references that it is impossible to know what is signal and what is noise.

I thought it was clever, for example, that the husband at the start of the book had worked in a used car lot and had hated it. What is it that the crying of lot 49 means? It is all too easy to say it is a reference to how the book ends – but perhaps it is also a reference to how the book starts and maybe it doesn’t really mean at all. Nothing is simply what it is, nothing is clear, everything is up for interpretation and doesn’t the author stress that fact! There is the lovely line (mentioned at least twice) that of all the alternatives that would explain the particularly strange world our heroine has found herself in, she hopes that her own insanity is the actual explanation. “Oh no, it’s fine, I’m just nuts.”

What is message, what is truth, what is fact and what is reality? Any wonder the guys that started this whole information theory thing said information is entropy and patterns so that as long as there is signal and noise and those can be somewhat separated, that’s as good as it gets, don’t ask for more meaning than that.

This is a very clever book – perhaps too clever, hard to say. I found the homosexual humour particularly funny – the next gay bar they were going to go to was called Finocchio’s (Italian for both fennel and gay man – not quite sure why) and when she left the gay bar she did so via ‘The Greek Way’. All of this is presented completely deadpan – as is the stuff about the band at the start that are an American band trying to learn English accents in a kind of mirror of The Beatles singing in American accents. His songs, dross all, are particularly funny. Especially the one about the various companies involved in the military industrial complex.

I haven’t mentioned the play, LSD, the broken mirror, WASTE, Freud, Gallipoli, the actor who had been a lawyer who is acting a lawyer who had been a child actor and who sometimes goes back to acting even though being a lawyer is pretty much the same as acting anyway. But then, I need to leave you some reason to read this book.

The book version of the 1997 movie The Game by Michael Douglas

Imagine spending a quiet evening at home with your significant other when the phone rings informing you that your former love, Pierce Inverarity, has died. He has appointed Y-O-U to gather his assets under the terms of his will. Except (small detail) he was one of the wealthiest people on the planet!

Oedipa Maas obviously doesn’t stay with Inverarity. So is he trying to reward her internal goodness, rubbing it in that she could have had her hands on all of his delicious assets, or something else?

This is a clever, little novel adorned with humor and social justice commentary. While Oedipa is trying to solve the mystery of Trystero, she seemingly flits from one bizarre phenomenon to another.

Although this book is creatively refreshing, it is a bit overly ambitious and devolves into confusion at times.

This book is like Tom Buchanan forcefully grabbing you by your arm, turning you about while having a roaring good time (albeit things do go off the rails at times).

When was the last time you inventoried your life?

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Softcover Text - $7.69 from Amazon

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This novel is a great introduction to Thomas Pynchon, the sardonic sentimentalist. It opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of the will of Pierce Inverarity, a filthy rich real estate mogul from the fictional Californian city of San Narciso, and a former lover of Oedipa herself. This event catalyzes a leap into the major conspiracy of the Tristero, a secret society that operates through the underground mail-system of W.A.S.T.E.

Oedipa bumps into characters, geographical vistas, symbols of meaning, and grapples with historical fact. She encounters The Paranoids, a group of American rockers who sing with English accents. She meets Metzger, a child prodigy actor turned lawyer turned aspiring actor. She encounters on the freeway of San Narciso the hyperreality of Californian buildings and places; buildings and places that seem to be made for nobody.

Pynchon does many things in this short novel. Most popularly noted, Pynchon makes fun, cracks jokes, and cynically distances the reader from any notion of final revelation. We are never made fully aware of whether the Tristero exists; whether it is a personal construction by bored American housewives and lonely desperados, whether it is fabricated by some nefarious other in high places, or whether it is in fact entirely real, every bit of it. The seminal question at play here seems to be: Who/what is in the world, and who/what constructs it? There is no answer to this question, and Pynchon presents the fruitlessness of an attempt to discover the facts of the world. To couple the chaotic patterns of communication, noise and power into a coherent semiotic symbol of meaning, will inevitably lead nowhere: God is always on the next stop and never the one you walk out on.

That being said, Pynchon nevertheless emphasizes the significance of the social. Under the freeways of San Narciso Oedipa encounters anarchists, crazies, impoverished and lonely people, who all seem to communicate by the Tristero mail-system and who all seem to be aware of the symbol of the muted post-horn. These people, although they may be as bonkers as Oedipa, are also characterized by a shared system of communication. Within this system are experiences and dreams and longings and despairs, that make up their shared fantasies. The shared fantasies and dreams and desires of those under the freeway, coupled with the hyperreality of everything above it, of advertising and skyscrapers and controlled lines of travel and communication, make up the dual reality of San Narciso, and also, as Pynchon notes, of America itself.

In Deleuzian terms, Pynchon has constructed a minor literature of minor characters. Characters that stutter and stumble with passion and paranoia against the conservative humdrum of traditional American life, and for Oedipa, in particular the American family unit. Pynchon's characters are almost always outsiders, weirdos, geeks, lunatics and radicals, who nomadically move through life in revelatory ways.

Pynchon has also constructed a minor literature within the constructs of postmodernism. While Lot 49, and all Pynchon novels for that matter, are clearly major postmodern works of fiction, they are also a parody of the genre itself, and more importantly, offer routes of escape. Pynchon wrestles against some of postmodernisms main tenets: of sardonicism, meta-cynicism and irreverence, by also tendentially presenting its antithesis: sincerity and compassion and sentimentality. Pynchon did the whole new-sincerity schtick long before the Wallace’s of the world had dreamed it.

Pynchon’s novel is a clusterfuck of hilarious, weird, cynical and funny goodness, coupled with real tearjerker moments. It is written gorgeously, with Pynchon’s long sentences weaved with meaning and references and inter-references. It is incredibly funny. It is incredibly sad. It is also enticing, with its mysterious landscapes and symbols. Everything that is good and annoying about Pynchon is found here, to a lesser or larger extent. It is better than Inherent Vice and V. It is not as good as Against the Day, Mason & Dixon and Gravity’s Rainbow. In writing this novel, Pynchon has, in usual Pynchon fashion, projected a world that is very much our own, a world that both reveals and utterly confuses.