The Crying of Lot 49: A

I took three months out of my life to wade through Against The Day, and then re-enlisted the very next winter to battle through V., and then Mason & Dixon. And somewhere in there I distinctly re-call getting lost amidst the tangles of Vineland, only to pull myself back out halfway through. I’m a fan of Thomas Pynchon—but I can also recognize a critical fact about him: it’s not necessarily that he’s under-appreciated (those who dismiss his intense postmodernism and knack for writing baroque sentences that span paragraphs aren’t lazy, contrary to the belief of some), but rather that he’s over-wrought. In his a-novel-once-or-twice-every-decade work ethic, there appears time and again the tendency to overwrite, coating the pieces of what are undoubtedly brilliant works with layers of dense academia and imagination that are, at their best, nearly as fulfilling…but that can be, at their worst, more off-putting than some sick love-child of Proust and Joyce. It is then that I, from this unique perspective of a fan in a semi-masochistic love/hate relationship with the author, report that his 1966 novella The Crying of Lot 49 is—all at the same time—his most accessible work, his most piquantly engrossing, and his best.

The period from which Lot 49 emerged was a strange one, in the timeline of Pynchon’s work. It came three years after the publication of his debut novel V., a work justly praised for its dense blending of wit, dramatic meta-construction, and archly-grave sociopolitical commentary, and—reportedly—was released at the very same time the author was putting together the beginning pieces of his most adored novel: Gravity’s Rainbow. So, then, could a reader come to this story of Oedipa Mass’ accidental uncovering of a global postal conspiracy and expect to find intermittent touches of the works that came both before and after? Well, I can’t quite speak to the latter—I have yet to build up the mental stamina for another 700-page trek into Pynchonland—but as to the former: definitely not. Sure, the usually flourishes that mark even his most casual output are seen in both stories (e.g., characters with exceedingly silly names, made-up songs that leap into and out of the central narrative spontaneously) but there the similarities end. V. is a difficult, fascinating mess of a novel; something great was it not so opaque nearly 70% of the time. The Crying of Lot 49 is something else entirely—a mystery compounded by elements of suspense and lurking doom, and written with that rarest of Pynchonisms: clarity of purpose.

In just the 150 pages afforded him between the book’s front and back covers, Pynchon writes something that does so much with so little as to make you, in hindsight (if you’ve had the pain/pleasure), regret the nearly 1000 you spent with the dozens of characters in Against the Day. He’s concise and satirical and stark and descriptive and fanciful and, above all else, entirely certain in what direction the book will lead his readers. Mrs. Mass’ journey is one of tension and self-revelation (she begins as an executor for her old lover’s will, and ends up tracking down the agents for a mysterious continent-spanning cabal), but the author himself seems to have gone through a brief journey (if only to slide back into old ways by the ‘90s). The prose is full of such a grand order of symbolic imagination as to be staggering (a third the way through, the main characters attend the performance of some made-up Jacobean tragedy, and for the next twenty-or-so pages, the entire performance is brought to life, act-by-act, from scratch), were it not so compulsively readable. And if you ever get tired, nestled between every page are the usual wisecracks and inane witticisms, just to remind you: even at his tamest, Thomas Pynchon still sees the American novel as his personal playground. And when he has fun—as he does transcendently, madly, deeply, here—so does the reader.