The Crying of Lot 49

Oedipa Maas takes leave of her husband, Mucho (groan), to execute the will of her wealthy but slightly unhinged former lover, Pierce Inverarity. Some bathroom graffiti in a bar called the Oscilloscope puts her idle mind on the trail of a centuries-old conspiracy involving rival courier companies. Has she stumbled upon a bonafide postal conspiracy overlooked by modern scholars? Or is this all a hoax dreamed up by Inverarity, with the help of a local theater troupe and a rock group called The Paranoids?

Over the course of her investigation, Oedipa meets many men eager to assist and sleep with her. As she digs more deeply, uncovering more and more evidence, the conspiracy fights back, and the males disappear or lose interest. "They are stripping away, one by one, my men", she notes in despair. Is a secret cabal killing off all possible support? Are the seemingly chance meetings actually an elaborate revenge by a spurned ex-lover, intended to leave her seduced and abandoned? Is her increasing paranoia simply making her more and more unattractive?


Perhaps the most important detail of the novel is the Jacobean play, The Courier's Tragedy, whose performance starts Oedipa on the trail of the conspiracy. This play provides an excuse, of sorts, for the ridiculous character names: Oedipa, Mucho Maas, Dr Hilarius, Mike Fallopian, Genghis Cohen. Ben Jonson was fond of such character names in his own satires: Lovewit, Littlewit, Dapper, Epicure Mammon, Winwife, Purecraft, and Justice Overdo are examples. Jonson, however, uses such names as thumbnail sketches of the characters themselves; for Pynchon, they are simply throwaway gags.

The play itself seems to be a stand-in for Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Revenge Tragedy, judging both by its plot and by its grouping in a modern edition with plays by Ford, Webster, and Tourneur. I found some elements of the plot to be unconvincing for a Jacobean play, and the quoted verse even more so -- but I realize that I'm a tough audience for this sort of thing, and Pynchon's effort is certainly well-informed. His familiarity with, and perhaps disdain for, the period is shown when Oedipa is exposed to Jacobean writing, which "was full of words ending in e's, s's that looked like f's, capitalized nouns, y's where i's should've been." Oedipa's reaction? "I can't read this." Chaucer shakes his head sadly and mopes his way to Cantebury.


The book ends with the 'crying', or auctioning, of Lot 49, a stamp collection from Inverarity's estate which contains proof of the existence of the conspiracy. As Oedipa waits for the hammer to fall, she has come to accept that, hoax or not, her investigation has provided her "A real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody american you know."


Ultimately, does it work? As a masterpiece of conspiracy and paranoia, it does not hold a candle to The Illuminatus Trilogy or Sewer, Gas, and Electric, let alone Foucault's Pendulum. It works well as a novel, and turns out to be quite entertaining for a post-modern novel. Pynchon himself seems eager to disown the work, though, so perhaps one should be wary about applying too much analysis to it.

The first time I read this novel, I was 18, a very naive and, frankly, stupid freshman. Stupid because I didn't take the time to think things through and would spout my opinion based on nothing substantial. I hated, no -- that's too strong a word, I was annoyed by this book, and I can't even remember why, even though there were scenes from the book that stuck in my head: the scene where Oedipa puts on every piece of clothing she has before she plays strip poker with the probate lawyer, the scene at the Deaf convention where everyone is dancing, but to different music, unheard by anybody and the final scene that instantly came to mind when I got to the end of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, where a the protagonist is similarly sitting and awaiting an answer. By the end of the quarter I became aware of how truly prescient this book was to my own life. I've reread the book now, 40 years later, and have reassessed my first impressions. This is not so much of a review as much as it is an anecdote of how a book, read at the right time, can change your perspective on the world. There may be a spoiler or two, so be warned.In my freshman English class, at the University of Riverside (a place I never wanted to be, but turned out to have many advantages for someone like me) we read various contemporary works from the 60-70s. The professor [or maybe he was a TA, he was probably under 30] was a thin, British man with a wispy beard, thinning hair and steel-rimmed glasses. The discussion one day was on "The Crying of Lot 49" and Oedipa Maas' dilemma. After listening to the discussion for a while, I gave my opinion that I thought she was ridiculous, and why was she obsessing about a supposed secret parallel mail system called 'Trystero'. Students and the teacher tried to make me see this as something mysterious, dangerous and subversive, but I insisted it was silly. One student whom I did not know, actually I didn't know anyone in the class, then asked me what I would think if I discovered somehow that everyone in this classroom were only pretending to be in this class just to make me think it were a real class, wouldn't that freak me out? I paused a half second and answered that it wouldn't bother me, it wasn't doing me any harm so, no I would not be 'freaked out.' The discussion of the book pretty much ended there.That quarter I was also taking a Soviet History class because of my interest in Russia and all things Russian. The class was a bore. I knew no one in this class either, except for one guy whom I recognized from my Russian language class. He was a odd guy, as so many of my classmates in Russian class were, and I certainly never spoke with him or could remember his name. My roommate and I called him "Nanook of the North" for reasons that escape me now. Anyway, this class was torture, it was all lectures and dry readings about the Bolsheviks versus the Mensheviks versus the SRs and the Kadets. I could barely stay awake. I remember working on a required paper for this class and thinking how bad a grade I'd get on the paper, but, no worries, I would make it up on the final.Finals week finally came, I had 3 finals on Monday and the last final, Soviet History, was on Thursday. Most people were done with all their finals by Wednesday night, so the dorm was almost empty, as was the campus. I had nothing to do but study for that final. It was supposed to start at 8am. I show up in the designated room and ... nothing. No one was there. I picked a seat and waited ... and waited. Time seemed to go so slowly. When the clock pointed to 8:15 I started to feel uneasy. Where was everyone? Am I in the wrong room? There was no one in any of the rooms in that hallway. I walked rather hurriedly to the history department. I asked the woman at the front desk if there had been a change of rooms for the Soviet history final. She said she didn't think so, and that I was probably just early. I should go back and wait for people to show up. I did so. No one was there, no one had been there. After about 10 minutes I went back to the history department. The secretary looked up and could see my concern. She said, that if the professor changed the time or the room for the final, he would have to inform the dean's office (or some such official office) of the change. She made a phone call. Then she said that no, the professor made no changes, just go back -- he may have told everyone to come a half hour to an hour later. So back I go, but feeling bewildered and slightly scared. I sat there for 20 minutes and thought about that Soviet class. I had been to every lecture, not missing a single one. How could the professor have announced a change in the time of the final and I not know about it? True, I hadn't been the most alert person in that class, but still... How could everyone know but me!? I remembered that student's question in English class about how I would feel if everyone was just pretending to be in class just to fool me and my heart sunk. Is that even possible? How could that be organized? and why?! I began to sweat. Did that student do this just to prove to me how inane my opinion was? But how? There was no crossover between the students in the English class and the students in Soviet History, how would they organize something like this? The only person that I recognized from either class was "Nanook" from Russian class, but he never seemed to notice me at all, certainly never spoke to me and why? why? why? I began to think everything I ever thought was true, was merely conjecture; that I was not living life, but was merely part of some vast experiment. I began to panic. I ran to the History Department. By this time, the other secretary had arrived. The first woman took a look at my face, and explained how I'd been to the office 3 times now looking for the final classroom. The second secretary looked at me and said, "They've already had their final." My face blanched. "Did you miss some of the sessions?" "No! I was at all the lectures!" (I was almost crying by then.) "Well, it was last week." "How is that possible?!" "Did you turn in your paper?" "Yes!" "Well, that WAS the final." My jaw dropped. I was utterly stunned. I walked back to the dorm in a daze. I looked through my notebook and found the syllabus for the class, and there it was at the bottom of the sheet. --NO Final Exam. The term paper is the final.--I always felt that I needed to apologize to that student in English class, to the entire class and the teacher for being so sure of myself, of being such an ass, of not being open to the possibility of multiple worlds all around us. For that realization I thank "The Crying of Lot 49". I don't know why I waited so long to reread this book, it is not long. I enjoyed every bit of it this time and recommend you approach with an open mind.

This is the first Pynchon book I've ever read, and I cannot wait to get my hands on more. The Crying of Lot 49 was phenomenal - really a spectacular book. Reading it was like an extraordinarily vivid dream, all logically-ordered nonsense and utterly gripping unreal reality, resplendent with the features and culture of 60s-70s California. It is a fantastic book.

Oedpia Mass is to be the executor of her ex boyfriend's will. With no legal knowledge, a very shady therapist and a husband that is in his own world, Oedpia starts the task of breaking up Pierce Inverarity's massive state and discovers a postal conspiracy years in the making.Why, oh why, did I think this was a good idea? Pynchon is the king of the run on sentence. Sometimes going on for two pages! In a book that is only 152 pages, sentences like that become a problem. There is also the issue of the names. While I liked Oedpia as a name, everyone else had weird names like Dr. Hilarious and Mike Fallopian that I couldn't take seriously and had a hard time processing. This all pales to how little I liked the story. I had a really hard time following what was happening with the Trystero stuff. I'm still not entirely sure if everything about the postal system was real or not, or if it was an elaborate joke or Oedpia going crazy or what. Regardless, I have never had such a hard time finishing 150 odd pages. I was really tempted to just set it aside and never come back, but the year is still young, so hopefully I'll be able to make up for the lost week I spent staring at the stupid cover and wishing it would burst into flames, or magically turn into Harry Potter.

Classic Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 involves a fictitious mail delivery system and a quest, with overtones of paranoia. A great way to get introduced to Pynchon in a short novel.

So much information, so little clarity.

My first Pynchon. I figured diving straight into Gravity's Rainbow might not be the smartest thing to do and decided to instead read a shorter work.The Crying of Lot 49 is a strange book with parts that made me laugh out loud. Most of it feels like being high on LSD (not that I know what that feels like, but that's how I imagine those experiments in the 60s to look like) and the absurdity surprised me.Pynchon's writing is filled with visuals and highly enjoyable. I found it easy to read and it flowed with a nice rhythm.So far, I wasn't a fan of postmodernism, but this one convinced me to explore it further.

Studying "The Crying of Lot 49" was the highlight of my O-level English Literature. Despite being a short book (127 pages), very few people felt that they got it, I was one of the few but of course I may have been wrong.

“I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”Oedipa Maas discovers one day that she has been made executor of a former lover's estate. She decides to carry out her duties diligently and so sets off on a strange trail of detection in which bizarre characters seem set on confusing rather than helping her meeting all sorts of supposed members of secretive organisations along the way. Gradually death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oedipa feeling desolate and very alone sat in an auction room awaiting The Crying of Lot 49.This is my first Pynchon book that I've read and although it is only a novella I found it both hard work and confusing. The first 50 pages or so I found very enjoyable and even made me smile at times but after that it went too far into the realms of fantasy. I must admit that I'm not a great fan of conspiracy theory books and the likes of Dan Brown are just over-hyped bunkum IMHO and as the central theme of this book seemed to be communication, in particular the US postal system, felt that it was on the whole poorly communicated but then perhaps I'm just too obtuse to grasp the full satire and irony within.Whilst it did not hold me riveted it did keep me intrigued enough to want to finish it and will have to think seriously about whether or not to read any more of the author's offerings especially as this is regarded as being one of the more accessible. I'm just not sure how keen I am on Pynchon's idea of post-modernism.

Neither the characters nor the plot are interesting. My guess is that much of it was meant to be humorous, but since none of the comedy worked for me, I can't be sure. I can also guess that it is trying to make a statement about society, but it gets too caught up in its own cuteness or pseudo-cleverness much for me to take any point it makes seriously, or even care what point the book is trying to get across. Perhaps the only thing interesting in the novel is that it attempts to end with some uncertainty, but even that is so convoluted that it fails as well.

Still can't get into this book. I've had it for years--can't even remember where or when I got it--and I've tried to read it several times, but I swear it's impossible to get into. People say how great it is, but ech.

I finally read this because I’ve never yet managed to complete a Thomas Pynchon story. I managed to finish this novel only because it’s short. I’m left confused about many things, but not about this: I enjoy interesting and different books, but books loaded with pretentious intellectualism bore me to death. There’s story-telling (which entertains and moves its readers) and there’s word play. ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ clearly falls in the last category and, while it might provide many readers with a satisfying read, I find the weirdness too weird, the “cleverness” too clever for its own good and the deliberate manipulation of names, references and language constructs silly. Is Pynchon actually laughing at us, the readers, who swoon at his “brilliance”? Either that or, like Sacha Baron Cohen of the dreadful movie “Borat” fame, Pynchon is a sad man with a rather warped and gloomy view of the world. As a reader, I want more to a novel than pretentious intellectualism posing as literature. I enjoy reading a wide variety of genres and styles, fiction and non-fiction. I don’t care what I read – as long as it’s good writing and keeps me engaged. Despite the occasional glimpse of what could attract people to this story (for example, Mucho & Oedipa’s obsessions apparently suggesting ordinary folks’ obsessive need to believe in some kind of reality and order – I say “apparently,” because I’m not entirely sure I “got it”), Pynchon’s writing required too much effort to make any sort of sense to me. Perhaps that was the point of the difficult, delirious writing style: that, despite modern technology supposedly assisting mankind in communicating, Mucho & Oedipa (representing the average human) were still unable to communicate with each other. This novel, far from solving this dilemma, exacerbated it!It does have its moments of post-modernist epiphany (modern life is uncertain; there is no guarantee of a happy ending), but I’m a reader who prefers a more traditional (and optimistic!) form of story-telling and will leave Pynchon’s existential explorations of an entropic society to those readers who prefer ‘high literature.’

I think I would have gotten a lot more out of this if I had been in popular culture at the time it was written. Still, it was fascinating and every so often I draw a little muted post horn on a bathroom wall somewhere.

More accessible than other Pynchon works, but still mind-blowing in places! Not necessarily to everyone's taste, but to a devotee like myself, a masterpiece! Nobody else writes like this!

An excellent introduction into the writing and mind of the Jonathan Swift of our day. For such a small work, it is full of interesting characters and settings, and is very funny at times. Pynchon isn't for everybody, but his use of language and imagination is second to none.

After reading this, I can see why Helene Hanff could never feel passionate about people and places that never existed. ...Once you get into the rythm the reading is not so hard, but at a certain point, maybe half way through the good parts are gone and you wonder why you are still reading, other than to find out what happens. The good parts are on pages 10, 12 and 32(?) (whatever I wrote in the progress part), these little descriptions are gems that I wish had been fleshed out a bit more into a little vinegrette or prose. ...What the other commentators have written is true and the book does date itself; but I wonder about the style of writing, how it has changed since this was written and about people's choice of reading material, and the availability of books in remote small towns, where Walmart (if you are lucky) or the local library is the only place to pick up books immediately. Sign of the times...

Are you old enough to remember the sixties? I certainly remember them very well but sometimes I wonder if I was living in some sort of parallel universe because the sixties I was a part of wasn’t nearly as chaotic and drug-fueled as the one that is most often portrayed in books and movies. This book, which was written in 1965, is all about one of the most politically and socially turbulent decades in U.S. history: the rise of the drug culture, the Vietnam War, the rock revolution, as well as the birth of numerous social welfare programs, John F. Kennedy's assassination, Martin Luther King's assassination, Robert kennedy’s assassination, Civil Rights, and, to some extent, women's rights. The novel uses this explosion of cultural occurrences, depicting a dramatically fragmented society. But of course, being a post modern novel, it doesn’t come right out and say this in any way. No it’s all done through symbolism, substitution, puns and plays on words, and smoke and mirrors. After a few pages the reader is left to wonder, ”Is the protagonist on drugs? Are all the other characters on drugs? Maybe I’m on drugs, because none of this is making any sense.Oedipa Maas comes home from a Tupperware Party (remember those?) one day to find a letter naming her executor of the will left by a former lover, Pierce Inverarity (don’t underestimate the power of names in this novel). In the course of fulfilling her duties in this regard, she discovers what appears to be another functioning postal system, known as Tristero, unknown to her (really to any of us) prior to this time. (Here, Pynchon was foretelling the rise of UPS, Fed-Ex and DLS.) Part of the use of the postal system is the requirement that anyone using it is required to mail a letter once a week even if they have nothing to say. (Perhaps this requirement could save our present postal system.) Oedipa seems to go about completing her task mostly in a drug-fueled haze. Not that it matters. Everyone around her is in the same state. At least, that’s the only plausible explanation for all the things happening that, otherwise, made no sense at all. At any rate, her world systematically falls apart as she goes about resolving the issues involved with the will.Along the way she meets Randolph Dribbelette, Dr. Hilarity, her husband Mucho (a disk jockey at radio station KCUF!), Tony Jaguar, Mike Fallopian----on and on, names with other names, names with other meanings. OK enough. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the narrative. This is not the kind of straight forward story that I enjoy. Who wants to work so hard to understand what the author is trying to say? I like to lay back and sink into a deeply satisfying novel and this wasn’t it.

This is the first book I've read by Pynchon. I felt...underwhelmed. I'm still going to go on and read Gravity's Rainbow to make sure I'm not missing something, but overall, I felt like this was similar to a Tom Robbin's novel - which I'm also mostly over after reading a few of his. Hopefully, I just missed a lot in this novel since I was reading it on my usual work commute (bus, subway, office, reverse).

I liked parts of this book, but to be honest I'm not really sure what the hell happened.

On the plus side, at least it was short.

I'd meant this as an introduction to Pynchon, being that it's short compared to everything else he's written. It wasn't bad really, and it had plenty of elements that I like in my fictional reading (almost like a precursor to Ellis and Palahniuk), but it just didn't really click as a coherent story.

I read that Pynchon himself didn't really care for this one, so I don't expect that it reflects on his other (much longer) novels.

I had to read this back in college, and I hated it.  I've tried to re-read it again a couple of times, but I've never been able to finish it.  I don't know why I hold onto it, but I just can't seem to get rid of it.

Door zijn compactheid is dit boekje van Pynchon uiteraard beter te verteren dan "V". Maar het lijdt aan dezelfde, bewuste, opeenstapeling van mysterieuze, absurde voorvallen en wendingen. De queeste is herkenbaar: Oedipa (belachelijke naam) moet de erfenis uitklaren van een oudgeliefde en stoot op een geheimzinnige tekens die wijzen in de richting van een alternatief postnetwerk voor het poststaatsbedrijf. Het geheel ademt erg goed de sfeer van Californi? in de jaren zestig uit, inclusief psychedelica. Ik begrijp dat Pynchon heeft willen evoceren hoe we als mens verdrinken in een woud aan symbolen en er voortdurend conflicterende betekenissen aan geven, maar is dit al niet - met meer stijl - gedaan door de eind-19de-eeuwse symbolisten?

Strange, comedic, and oddly compelling: this novel is something I might well read and reread without fully processing, but I'm glad to have read it. It was a curious ride, one exploring hope, hate, and hopelessness in a way that I haven't seen before. Pynchon takes on clear characters here, each on the hopeful side of pathetic and many striving for something more, however doubted it might be. Fictions within fictions within fictions, and each one worth reading. Entertaining, and recommended. Suggestion? Just take it as the ride it is.

Quite simply the best of Pynchon's books, and the most successful in what he called "projecting a world". It's worth mentioning that the Bantam paperback is disfigured by the most incomprehensibly stupid, irrelevant, and just plain ugly cover in recent decades, even surpassing the excrescences on the paperback editions of Dan Pinkwater's LIZARD MUSIC and the Woolf-Sewell collection NEW QUESTS FOR CORVO.

Reads a hell of a lot like G K Chesterton's Man Who Was Thursday, but with less optimism, and the end cut off. Interesting.

somnolent solemnities

I thought Thomas Pynchon only wrote enormous books, so I was delighted to find out that this was a short one giving me a taste of his writing style, and a means to determine if his large books were worth tackling.

I am going to go with a resounding yes. This book is a quirky conspiracy theory themed novel involving the postal system. Leaves me further theorizing about the topic in today's world of email. I also can't get over what a great name "Genghis Cohen" is for a character.

The Crying of Lot 49 gives you every bit as much flavor of Pynchon's remarkable writing style, without the self-indulgent obsessions that makes Gravity's Rainbow such a slog. Pynchon really is remarkable. In a slim novel he creates a mass of characters, a secret society, a conspiracy theory going back hundreds of years, and an arc that leads our heroine from a safe life of mundanity into a whirlwind of paranoia. It's kind of like The Illuminatus trilogy condensed into 140 pages. Pynchon must have taken quite a lot of drugs, but either way, it makes for a wild psychedelic journey. Recommended!

Did not finish this. Just did not enjoy his writing style. Very disappointed. Tried, really wanted to like it, just didn't happen. Read what I did on a plane and in a hotel in Dallas.

I admire it, in some respects, and wanted to like it, but found it boring and hollow.

Basically I finished this book with the feeling, "what was the point of that?" I know Pynchon himself has disowned the novel, but I can't help wonder what possesses someone to create a completely random ridiculous mystery; one that twists some aspects of actual historical organizations or materials and then leaves the protagonist wondering whether she's perhaps just losing her mind. That being said, I was entertained. It's funny to know about Radiohead's merchandise shop being named W.A.S.T.E. in correlation with the underground postal service in this book. At times I also began seeing this book's influence on David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" (which I hated, and could only finish about a fifth of that book). However, when I started seeing some similarities, I also felt reassured that Pynchon never gets as convoluted or pretentious as Wallace's attempt. Anyway, it was a quick, odd little read and perhaps I'm just not picking up on a deeper level. For me it was simply a quirky, but fun mystery.