The Crying of Lot 49

I have just finished reading The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. This strange book is a product of its time and place (1966, California). It was an age of paranoia induced by social issues, assassinations (Kennedy, Kennedy and King), a new war (Viet Nam), marijuana highs, and fear of getting caught being high. LSD was legal and being tested as a therapy for multiple issues including alcoholism. Pynchon rides this wave of paranoia with a book about a possible conspiracy - or more accurately, an anti-conspiracy. As such, in another's hands it might be a deep dark tale. It's not. Think instead of James Bond meets meets Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) meets The Watchman. Lots of sex and booze in a mystery to be unraveled. This could have been a graphic novel.

The experience of reading the book mirrors the experience of dancing to the MC5 at the Grande Ballroom in 1966. The pulsing psychedelic strobe lights illuminate something new each second. Each previous illumination disappears and is quickly forgotten. Oedipa, the book's "heroine" moves from impulse to impulse, rushing into an unknown future ripe with possibilities. And just as with a strobe-lit scene, we don't see much beyond the surface until the music stops and we adjust our eyes to see what is actually there. But we must hurry, because the music will start again soon.One must adjust one's brain to make sense of what is going on in this book, and to focus deeply on the undercurrents.

The story line is deceptively simple: Oedipa Maas, a housewife living in San Francisco with her DJ husband, receives word that her ex-lover, a real-estate tycoon  named Pierce Inverarity, has died and left the job of co-executor of his estate to her. Without giving it a second thought, she takes leave of her husband and drives south to "San Narciso" near L.A, where she finds a sleezy motel room to stay in while she works on inventorying the estate. In a funny scene, Inverarity's very handsome lawyer finds her at the motel, gets her drunk and plays strip poker with her. She puts on multiple layers of clothes to confound him, but after he has fallen asleep, seduces him anyway.  In this fashion, she encounters and plays a part in countless bizarre situations. She accepts the situations at face value until details in events begin to form strange patterns. Clues are everywhere for something big that is hidden. The hidden thing is illuminated and then Oedipa struggles with paranoia, sanity and clarity. As the tale comes to a close, Pynchon suggests that it is America at stake here.

Spoiler Alert: What is hidden is a tale of mistrust of government mail system that reaches back to the 1500s when the company, Thurn & Taxis, had a monopoly on delivering mail in the Holy Roman Empire (parts of Europe and England). As Pynchon's invented tale goes, some people (including William of Orange) mistrusted this service and so a group of rebels headed by a man named Trystero plot to take over the mail. The rebels waylay the mail carriers, kill them, take the mail, and claim the routes, thus preventing the powers-that-be from controlling it. So now move to the 1600s in the USA where immigrant-descendants of Trystero have arrived and brought their underground mail service with them. Somehow the mail service finds its way to California and is embraced by every underground group there: right-wingers, gays, jazz musicians, poets, you-name-it. This is an anti-conspiracy: a mistrust of the government's mail service and of the control over communication. Thinking back to the 1960s and the new underground movement it all fits together and Pynchon is a historian of the day.

"Paranoia strikes deep  
Into your heart it will leap
It starts when you're always afraid 
Step out of line, the man comes and takes you away ..."
 --- Buffalo Springfield

But in fact, Trystero may be an invention and Oedipa is challenged to sort through the facts to find the truth. As she finds evidence of Trystero everywhere she looks, she must decide if it is real, a series of incredible coincidences, a fake (a grand ploy paid for by Inverarity and acted out for her eyes only) or a hallucination. She is not strong enough to do this. The events confound her and she is unable to follow leads to their ends for fear that she will lose her sanity, her friends and perhaps her own life (although she never confesses to this). In the end, she sits and waits for the answer to be given to her, but the reader sees that this wait is futile.

In the pages that end the book, Pynchon tries to make his point about why an underground mail system is inevitable in America. He speaks of an America that is unable to serve those who do not fit in a certain mold. These people - the left-overs of a sort - feel alienated from the country and paranoid about what will happen to them if their true selves are exposed. For their own safety, they opt out of America in the most significant way that they can by going underground with an alternate mail service. As we look back at this bit of history, we can see how well this book illuminates its era: "Turn on, tune in, drop out".  End of Spoiler.

Pynchon was not proud of this book and purportedly called it a "potboiler". Most reviewers recognize it as a great book. It has many of the same themes and is much more accessible then his other tomes. However, it is not a perfect book. In the last few pages, he shifts into a deep think peace on the people who have been left out of America. The essay is dense and hard to follow and in my opinion, does not weave the two stories, Oepedia and Trystero, together smoothly enough for the reader to get the big picture. Oedipa's story is not strong enough to balance the weight of the Trystero tale. The reader has to work hard to fill in the pieces. Having finally "got it", I found it worth the effort.

Pynchon is a very private person and has himself lived "underground" so-to-speak for 30+ years. Whatever must he think about the internet? How interesting it would be if Pynchon were to move his cast of characters and story to the 9/11 era.


Some interesting sites:
Andrew Gordon, now a professor at U Florida, spent an evening with Pynchon in San Fransisco in 1967. Here is his interesting tale.

Also, read the NYT review from 1966.