Thomas Pynchon is different.
His prose is unlike anything I’ve ever read. In the first four pages, Pynchon devises a diabolical sentence that lasts for almost a full page. It has 38 commas. And that’s the point of that sentence, to describe a certain character’s profession as dizzyingly monotonous. The whole book is not like this; it’s only 150 pages long, too. Pynchon tinkers, experiments, and changes styles throughout his piece. I like a writer who takes risks.
I also like a writer who messes around. The main character is named Oedipa Maas. Oh, and she's married to a man named Mucho Maas. It gets better—Oedipa’s psychiatrist, who tries to prescribe her LSD, is named Dr. Hilarius. Other names include Mike Fallopian, Tony Jaguar, and Genghis Cohen. These characters are all as peculiar as their names lead on. Unfortunately, this book takes place in the 1960s, so there’s a lot of satire in this book I didn’t appreciate on my first read.
The specific satire, like how the “Peter Pinguid Society” is a play on the real life right-wing John Birch Society. I’m not a total recluse, I saw how the adolescent band of “Paranoids” is a reference to the Beatles, but there’s a lot of goofy fun I know I missed out on.
When Pynchon isn’t screwing around, this book is a thrilling mystery.
Oedipa’s former lover, a wealthy real estate mogul named Pierce Inverarity, posthumously entrusts her to be the executor of his will. In Chapter 3, the book takes a huge turn when Oedipa attends a theater production that adapts a fictional, Shakespearean-esque Courier’s Tragedy. The play is an unoriginal, almost cliched tale of revenge and coincidences you might see in any Roman Comedy. It’s a story within a story, and it goes on and on and on. I was tempted to skip pages so I could get back to the actual plotline, but then Pynchon throws a curveball.
The production director, inexplicably, adds in an original scene with three assassins and completely changes a line to reference a strange, enigmatic, haunting name: Trystero.
Oedipa and I became obsessed; she traveled all over California while I turned through the pages at lightning speed. What is Thurn and Taxis? What is W.A.S.T.E.? And that ubiquitous symbol of a horn—why is it everywhere? Pynchon had me on the edge of my seat about a secret postage war between two rival mail companies. Seriously, it’s mostly about mail.
It’s also about Inverarity’s secret enterprise of buying human bones and turning them to charcoal for cigarettes. There’s also an alcoholic anonymous adjacent group of people she meets, all trying to break their addiction to love. There’s even a section about quantum physics in here, described through a fictional invention called “Maxwell’s Demon.” Yes, mail is that serious.
As much as I enjoyed the first two and a half chapters, the story really took off when Pynchon introduced “Trystero.” The comedy was fun but I didn’t feel like the story was going anywhere. Getting to the bottom of the conspiracy was thrilling because I felt like the story was going somewhere.
And then it doesn’t.
The ending is left ambiguous; Oedipa attends a bidding ceremony for a rare collection of postage stamps that have to do with Trystero. She gets word that the bidder will reveal the truth of the entire mystery. And then it ends right before we see the bidder.
I’m torn. I desperately wanted to see who the bidder was. Perhaps this is the mark of a great story: it leaves you wanting more. And while I do believe this is a great story, I think the ambiguous ending sort of opened my eyes to how many dead ends there are in this story. I don’t need everything explained to me, but it makes me question if the Pynchon’s questions really have answers. I can’t stand that; feigning profundity by remaining ambiguous.
However! The questions Pynchon’s story prompts are fascinating, and just because I can’t currently answer them doesn’t take away from the fact that this is an amazing novella. Thomas Pynchon has officially gotten me interested in postmodernism with the Crying of Lot 49. I may come back to reread this—and maybe I’ll have made sense of it by then—but here’s my score for now:
4/5
By Anthony Sharkey