Book of the Week

I finally finished The Crying of Lot 49 after doing all my grading and such.

The plot is a simple one: Opedia Mass, a restless wife and thinker, is married to a somewhat vapid disc jockey. The novel starts off with her getting a letter informing her that she has been made the executor of her ex-boyfriend's will, Pierce Invararity, who is some rich guy in California. She decides to go to (the fictional) town of San Narciso to fullfill her duties. After meeting her lawyer, the once child star, and the Paranoids--she begins to unravel a world-wide postal conspiracy dating back to the 1400's.

The novel then becomes a satirical detective novel as Opedia meets strange characters that all seem to be connected in some way to W.A.S.T.E--it all has to do with the postal conspiracy. She continues to search through Southern California even though she starts to see the people around her crumble into insanity (mostly from using too much LSD), and she wonders, herself, if she is not falling into the same kind of paranoid fantasy.

The actual plot of the novel is almost secondary. It is not so much what Pynchon is saying, but the way in which he says it. And the way that Pynchon tells his story is fascinating. The novel is, first of all, funny. Secondly, the novel deals with all those complex post-structural ideas that make a English Lit. nerd like myself toes tingle.

If we merely look at the name of the town and the hotel Opedia stays at, into account, we see the reference to the Greek myth of Narcisus and Echo. Opedia is an obvious allusion to the odyssey that Opedia takes. There is a motif in those stories that is seen throughout this one: the problem of communication, the problem about how language is never fully present, about how people are disconnected from each other because they can not understand each other through words. The tension in the novel is achieved through this mis-communication.

I will not get into the deeper philosophical issues here as I promised the owner of this blog that I would stay away from the mental masturbation, but feel free to make comments if you would like to discuss these issues and the many others that arise in the book.

I discovered Pynchon through a great short story called Entropy , and I have been meaning to read Crying for a long time. I highly recommend both of these stories to anyone looking to get into Pynchon and the ideal post-modern novel.

You can read an excerpt of the novel here.