The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon

I liked it better the second time around. Pynchon’s works were too dense for my underdeveloped brain when I first started reading him in my twenties. Like a badge of honor I made my way through this book, Vineland, V and Gravity’s Rainbow back in the early 1990’s. I don’t remember much of any of them and, admittedly, left them at the time a bit confused. If this reading is any indication, I should revisit his others as well. Fun read and crafted with a prose that is sharp and delicious. Conspiratorial, in both content and tone, set against a backdrop of whacky California culture and an odd set of curious characters that dance in and out of the protagonist’s life over a week’s period. Ms. Oedipa Maas (don’t get me started on the funny names throughout, no doubt some with hidden meaning I didn’t perseverate on, that include her husband Mucho, her psychiatrist Dr. Hilarius, the dead lover whose estate she is executing, Pierce Inverarity, Genghis Cohen, Mike Fallopian, you get the gist) is the vehicle for a tightly woven paranoid’s dream. She cannot, nor can the reader, discern the truth from an elaborate hoax. Lurking just beneath the surface of our everyday life is a centuries’ old battle between two postal distribution companies: the real European “Thurn and Taxis” (they did exist, apparently and the Pynchonesque “Tristero” which appears in the guise of a muted postal horn here, there and everywhere along with vague textual references in an obscure play (as an aside, gave me the feel of a “play within a play”) and subtly altered stamps (well, more like weird and deviantly altered stamps…).There’s even an encounter with a group of inventors that are somehow tied to an underground organization (the same Tristero organization?) who purportedly invented a machine that harnesses “Maxwell’s Demon” to create a perpetual motion machine (this “demon” was part of a thought experiment by James Clerk Maxwell, one of the great minds in physics which I won’t get into here but can be searched easily enough) that reminds me too vividly of that subset of Americans who believe in things like this, along with government conspiracies of all types (for starters suppressing new energy technology in order to prop up the oil interests and car manufacturers, faking the moon landing – for a nice rebuttal of this check out Phil Plait’s site “Bad Astronomy,” sanctioning the World Trade Center disaster in 2011, controlling the minds/sedating the public by spraying them with chemicals from jet airplanes – aka “chemtrails”, water fluoridation and all associated evils, and many others...). And the text is more than just this paranoid’s dream. It crackles with beautiful writing: “Either way, they’ll call it paranoia. They. Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it.” But the hoax, if this is a hoax, in The Crying of Lot 49, is woven so tight that Ms. Maas has no escape. She has either uncovered this great conspiracy or is descending into a paranoid’s madness. As readers, we are left to wonder as well, but it is not our world to be stuck in and we are left to reflect on our own propensity to search for conspiracy when there really is none or, perhaps more deeply, to try to find meaning in a sometimes, otherwise, meaningless world. Or, at the very least, try to avoid that “exitlessness” and “absence of surprise” without falling victim to delusional fears.