The Crying of Lot 49 (Perennial Fiction Library) | Thomas Pynchon

The Crying of Lot 49 (Perennial Fiction Library) | Thomas Pynchon | Pynchon is God

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The Crying of Lot ...

	The Crying of Lot 49 (Perennial Fiction Library) Thomas Pynchon Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 179 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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 Beautiful Sad and Funny Book

One day Mrs. Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executor of her ex-lover's will. As she proceeds she discovers that the legacy with which she has been entrusted draws her ever deeper into a complex web of conspiracies. Yet what she has discovered may be no more than her own paranoia, and the novel ends ambiguously with the final revelation still impending like a judgement day forever suspended.

The book walks a careful line between the comic and the tragic. It is a difficult balance and Pynchon maintains it beautifully. Unlike many literary comic novelists Pynchon is genuinely funny. Yet as Oedipa wanders around San Francisco encountering alienation and loss everywhere she turns a genuine pathos creeps into the humor.

I'm sure there are many ways to read the Crying of Lot 49. I think we may approach it as both a social satire of consumerism and as a larger statement about the breakdown of communication in all human communities.

On the whole I consider this to be one of my favorite novels.

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Pynchon is God

Back in the sixties, I remember carrying a well-worn copy of LOT 49 around with me wherever I went, wherever I hung out in Berkeley. Pynchon was God; He knew. He gave us the California landscape, its craziness, its mindscape as no other author had done before. So what if the book was a put-on? So what if it was really about the "selling" or "crying" in real estate terms of the lot that is California, the state created by the 49ers? So what if the characters were straight out of comic books? It was the way he had woven it all so artfully together, a California of one piece, comprehensible for a change, maybe even understandable. I thank Pynchon for doing that. From time to time, I go back to LOT 49, taste the language and descriptions, do a few mental jumps in time back to that bizarre period in American life. Pynchon saw it all so early, so clearly.

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None dare call it conspiracy

You know those really-need-to-give-medication-a-try types who constantly scribble in notebooks using tiny, densely packed letters and nodding knowingly at things that barely penetrate your attention? This is the kind of novel they'd write if they had somehow acquired an English degree with a specialization in Elizabethan England.

I found it not that difficult, at times amusing and a useful tool for understanding the last three decades of post-ironic, post-modern, post-clarity "serious" literature. But I was quite glad it was no longer than it was.

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Mercifully Brief, But Hardly a Modern Classic

The Crying of Lot 49 must have seemed incredibly witty when it first appeared in the mid-60's. This satire, which follows the twists and turns of Oedipa Maas' adventures in being the executor of a dead friend's will is a satire on Southern California culture in the mid-60's.

The back of this book compared it to Joyce's Ulysses; while I won't doom Lot 49 with such unfortunate company, it, like Ulysses, is probably more admired by critics than actually enjoyed by readers. The prose is intentionally dense, and the characters and events, which are set just before the rise of the hippie culture in the late 60s, seem almost quaint in comparison to what the 1960s are remembered for fourty years later.

While the first 30 pages are easily the toughest to get through, the story starts to move along after that following an intereting, if not particularly compelling, conspiracy angle. To Pynchon's credit, I didn't feel that the book was artificially lengthened in order to give the story heft--at 150 pages, Lot 49 is surprisingly brief for a critical darling.

Lot 49 reads like a poor-man's Joseph Heller, and it hasn't aged well. But, underneath it all you can pick up some interesting commentary about California just before flower power.

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