Name: Jack Baty's review of The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Item: The Crying of Lot 49
Rating: 4
Author: Jack Baty

Thomas Pynchon

After learning that she is the executor of her ex-lover's will, Oedipa Maas starts a strange journey through Southern California in the 1960s.

The Crying of Lot 49

Jack Baty

When Oedipa Maas is named as the executor of her late lover's will, she discovers that his estate is mysteriously connected with an underground organization

It’s always fun reading an author that stands alone in their field. Though I knew a little about Thomas Pynchon before picking this up—for example, how he is highly regarded for his unique, idiosyncratic, weird and complex style; or about his mystery, the low-profile, practically anonymous idiosyncratic author who wrote the bro-lit tome Gravity’s Rainbow, who never does promotional tours, readings, or public appearances, who probably only has ten or so pictures of him taken in his entire life—and I knew he is probably (as the breadth of choice has narrowed, sadly) considered one of the best living American authors right now, if not the best—though I knew all of that, I still had yet to read him. 

And so I went into this book with a kind of trepidation, unsure of both my ability to understand the supposed complexity of Pynchon’s writing, and also unsure about how much of his mythologised status is due to a kind of interbreeding of the drivers of difficulty and mystique. I didn’t want to jump therefore into Gravity’s Rainbow’s because the idea of not immediately being hooked on Pynchon’s style and then having to bear with it for 800 pages was too scary for me, so I compromised with The Crying of Lot 49, which is debated as to whether it matches the level of GR, but, whatever, I’ll get to GR at some point regardless (because, spoiler alert, I really enjoyed this novel).

The Crying of Lot 49 follows Oedipa Maas, a California housewife who’s been named the executrix of the will of her ex-boyfriend Pierce Inverarity, a mysterious, mega-wealthy investor-speculator-type who she hadn’t been in contact with for years. The handling of his stupidly large and intricate estate provides the frame for the narrative, with Oedipa visiting the town of San Narciso, a small, specialised Californian town built around the Inverarity-backed aerospace and defense company Yoyodyne—alongside various other Inverarity-linked locations—all to investigate the life left behind in the assets of her ex-boyfriend, hoping that somewhere in the tangle of effects she can discover the true him. But her plans go awry as she innocently stumbles upon a mysterious conspiracy related to an alternate mail courier system centred around the acronym ‘W.A.S.T.E’, and an insidious word constantly reappearing that links all of Inverarity’s assets, W.A.S.T.E, and seemingly all of California, America, and the Earth, together: the word ‘Tristero.’

Through this we join Oedipa as she interacts with used car salesmen turned DJs, actors-turned-lawyers, lawyers-turned-actors, a fake Beatles band, a highly intricate Jacobean play and the director behind it, secret societies, crazed engineers breaking the laws of thermodynamics, and a whole bunch more of wacky, unique characters all caught up in the typhoon of Tristero.

The first thing you will notice in the novel is that it is so incredibly funny. While it can seem a bit of an easy formula—Oedipa playing the ‘straight woman’ as she goes into small town America to meet a bunch of highly unique and satirical characters, many of which having very funny names, and many of whom break into literal musical interludes with song lyrics dotted around the text—Pynchon plays his satire with a special kind of ingenuity, putting no malice behind his depictions of oddballs, instead giving each and every character the kind of depth not often seen in satirical fiction. It helps that Pynchon’s prose style is beautiful, fluid, and a bit sardonic—a lot less complicated than I was expecting, though it does at times delve into passages you’ve got to read multiple times to understand. There’s just a complexity and depth to everything in the novel, Pynchon never plays things off for ‘just laughs’, and it’s one of those books you can probably read 100 times, finding something new every readthrough.

It’s also an intelligently constructed book. Often times when reading books, the readers sole preoccupation is the search for ‘meaning’, and Pynchon plays with this impulse throughout, leaving breadcrumbs of the conspiracy in every chapter, but deliberately not allowing the reader (who is also Oedipa) from seeing the full picture. If Pynchon were a conventional author, you would expect at some point for the mystery of Tristero to unravel itself, but Pynchon keeps things deliberately vague on both the extent of Tristero and the reliability of Oedipa’s mental state. But things do ‘come together’ in a way, at least in my experience. After a long diatribe into thermodynamics and entropy and ‘Maxwell’s Demon’, you realise Oedipa and the reader themselves become kind of Maxwell’s Demons, reducing the entropy in the world, turning complexity into something simple. But can such an entity really exist?

This is the genius of Pynchon’s mystery in The Crying of Lot 49, it’s a novel focussed less on the mystery itself but our grasping of meaning in a mysterious world—in short, it’s less about the destination than it is about the journey. It’s a hilarious, thermodynamically deconstructed mystery novel. Something which every single person going in will take away something new and different. I highly enjoyed reading this, often with a smile plastered on my face, and I can’t wait to read more of Pynchon’s work.

shain

It’s always fun reading an author that stands alone in their field. Though I knew a little about Thomas Pynchon before picking this up—for example, how he is highly regarded for his unique, idiosyncratic, weird and complex style; or about his mystery, the low-profile, practically anonymous idiosyncratic author who wrote the bro-lit tome Gravity’s Rainbow, who never does promotional tours, readings, or public appearances, who probably only has ten or so pictures of him taken in his entire life—and I knew he is probably (as the breadth of choice has narrowed, sadly) considered one of the best living American authors right now, if not the best—though I knew all of that, I still had yet to read him. 

And so I went into this book with a kind of trepidation, unsure of both my ability to understand the supposed complexity of Pynchon’s writing, and also unsure about how much of his mythologised status is due to a kind of interbreeding of the drivers of difficulty and mystique. I didn’t want to jump therefore into Gravity’s Rainbow’s because the idea of not immediately being hooked on Pynchon’s style and then having to bear with it for 800 pages was too scary for me, so I compromised with The Crying of Lot 49, which is debated as to whether it matches the level of GR, but, whatever, I’ll get to GR at some point regardless (because, spoiler alert, I really enjoyed this novel).

The Crying of Lot 49 follows Oedipa Maas, a California housewife who’s been named the executrix of the will of her ex-boyfriend Pierce Inverarity, a mysterious, mega-wealthy investor-speculator-type who she hadn’t been in contact with for years. The handling of his stupidly large and intricate estate provides the frame for the narrative, with Oedipa visiting the town of San Narciso, a small, specialised Californian town built around the Inverarity-backed aerospace and defense company Yoyodyne—alongside various other Inverarity-linked locations—all to investigate the life left behind in the assets of her ex-boyfriend, hoping that somewhere in the tangle of effects she can discover the true him. But her plans go awry as she innocently stumbles upon a mysterious conspiracy related to an alternate mail courier system centred around the acronym ‘W.A.S.T.E’, and an insidious word constantly reappearing that links all of Inverarity’s assets, W.A.S.T.E, and seemingly all of California, America, and the Earth, together: the word ‘Tristero.’

Through this we join Oedipa as she interacts with used car salesmen turned DJs, actors-turned-lawyers, lawyers-turned-actors, a fake Beatles band, a highly intricate Jacobean play and the director behind it, secret societies, crazed engineers breaking the laws of thermodynamics, and a whole bunch more of wacky, unique characters all caught up in the typhoon of Tristero.

The first thing you will notice in the novel is that it is so incredibly funny. While it can seem a bit of an easy formula—Oedipa playing the ‘straight woman’ as she goes into small town America to meet a bunch of highly unique and satirical characters, many of which having very funny names, and many of whom break into literal musical interludes with song lyrics dotted around the text—Pynchon plays his satire with a special kind of ingenuity, putting no malice behind his depictions of oddballs, instead giving each and every character the kind of depth not often seen in satirical fiction. It helps that Pynchon’s prose style is beautiful, fluid, and a bit sardonic—a lot less complicated than I was expecting, though it does at times delve into passages you’ve got to read multiple times to understand. There’s just a complexity and depth to everything in the novel, Pynchon never plays things off for ‘just laughs’, and it’s one of those books you can probably read 100 times, finding something new every readthrough.

It’s also an intelligently constructed book. Often times when reading books, the readers sole preoccupation is the search for ‘meaning’, and Pynchon plays with this impulse throughout, leaving breadcrumbs of the conspiracy in every chapter, but deliberately not allowing the reader (who is also Oedipa) from seeing the full picture. If Pynchon were a conventional author, you would expect at some point for the mystery of Tristero to unravel itself, but Pynchon keeps things deliberately vague on both the extent of Tristero and the reliability of Oedipa’s mental state. But things do ‘come together’ in a way, at least in my experience. After a long diatribe into thermodynamics and entropy and ‘Maxwell’s Demon’, you realise Oedipa and the reader themselves become kind of Maxwell’s Demons, reducing the entropy in the world, turning complexity into something simple. But can such an entity really exist?

This is the genius of Pynchon’s mystery in The Crying of Lot 49, it’s a novel focussed less on the mystery itself but our grasping of meaning in a mysterious world—in short, it’s less about the destination than it is about the journey. It’s a hilarious, thermodynamically deconstructed mystery novel. Something which every single person going in will take away something new and different. I highly enjoyed reading this, often with a smile plastered on my face, and I can’t wait to read more of Pynchon’s work.

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.

Evan

My first Pynchon. I enjoyed it, I'd probably go for 3.5 stars if I could. I'd say its length is perfect for his style, assuming this is representative of it.
Honestly, I think any sort of "deeper" meaning got lost on me if there even was one, here. Maybe that's just postmodernism, for ya. I mostly found the book humorous, a fireworks show of eclectic characters with comical names living ridiculous lives in an emerging, not-yet-souled city. Characters going on unprompted political tangents, histories that pose little or maybe no relevance to anything. Ultimately, a lot of noise, yet I found it enjoyable.
I thought Pynchon did a good job of balancing absurdity and tensity. Ramblings that begin to feel like fever dreams are soon scary as Oedipa may indeed be stumbling into something grand.
A fun book, maybe something like "razor sharp pulp" would describe it. I look forward to reading more Pynchon in the future.

Don't you hate it when you can't tell whether or not your dead ex is just fucking with your head from beyond the grave?

Nick Whalen

Some of the best sentences and paragraphs, but for me less than the sum of its parts. Maybe GR is more my tastes. 

Luke Pearce

Donald

This is the book I've waited my whole life to read. I read it in one day and will probably read it again tomorrow (and then probably once a year for the rest of my life).

How did Pynchon get so much into such a short book? Dense, hilarious, exciting, crowded, surreal. This is the work of a master.

I decided to reread Lot 49 on a whim. Pynchon is certainly right that it is no good compared to V. and Gravity's Rainbow, but who cares? It's just as much fun as I remembered.

Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she haas been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange

Josephine Lemonade 

i have no idea what i just read but in a good way

John Balek

After reading Inherent Vice a few months ago I felt the need to return to Pynchon. While still not quite ready to dive into Gravity's Rainbow, I was interested in checking out one of Pynchon's earlier works.

As many people have said before, The Crying of Lot 49, while short, is far from simple. I don't think I've read a book that covers so much in so few pages. Mystery and entrigue are the focus of this book and are displayed through a vase background of W.A.S.T.E, an alternative postal delivery service that our main character, Oedipa Maas, comes across while being the executrix of a will. The plot is a typical Pynchon plot, one that moves from scene to scene and character to character without much reason as to why. This leads to a very taxing reading experience as you are constantly being dragged in a direction you aren't necessarily ready to go. For some this could be a huge turnoff but the way that Pynchon writes allows for many to be enthralled in the worlds he creates.

The Crying of Lot 49 really feels like a bridge between the eras of the Beat Generation and the post psychedelic 70's. It offers a lot of great insight into how the world was in the mid 60's through the lense of Pynchon. While I enjoyed the characters in Inherent Vice more I do think that Pynchon offers a more authentic and interesting take on creating a narrative and world in The Crying of Lot 49.

While I enjoyed The Crying of Lot 49 a lot I can't say I wasn't fully enraptured from start to finish. There were definitely moments I wasn't sold on the mystery or intrigue and wanted the plot to move further. I can't say I got everything on this first read (as if anyone really does). After reading the first chapter I reread it a few days later to a greater comprehension. This book definitely would benefit from multiple readings and due to it's length I can easily see myself going back to it.

There were moments while reading that I felt completely lost, completely unable to figure out what what was going on or why it was. While I'm sure some of these moments I'll never understand I do think a revisit would benefit my overall enjoyment of this book; as I did like the mystery of this secret organization. The more I read of Pynchon the more I think Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson of the Illuminatus Trilogy! were influenced by Pynchon, even if they don't want to admit it.

For as many moments that I felt lost I also experienced moments of clarity where I finally clicked with the flow of the writing and everything seemed to start to make sense. These moments are the ones that have me hooked on reading Pynchon and excited to explore his other works. Gravity's Rainbow will be next.

Phil James

Wonderful. I was wary of Pynchon for a long time. A reputation for denseness or difficulty, obscurity, but this was like a burst of light. OK, I couldn't say what the story was about in every detail, but it enjoyable in it's self and also for the gap it filled in my literary education.
Drugged up, psychotic conspiracy theories have never been written so well.

Halsted Mencotti Bernard

I have tried to get through this book three times now, and doubt I will ever succeed.

Jack Baty &
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

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