The Crying of Lot 46

Introduction

The Crying of Lot 49 is Pynchon's briefest book and the one with the least convoluted plot, although it contains plenty of twists and turns. Oedipa Maas, a bored California housewife, is informed that she is the executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a former lover. Oedipa, plunged into an increasingly complicated and increasingly sinister search for the estate, which becomes a search for meaning.

Oedipa Maas, a California housewife, called on to execute the will of her former lover, the tycoon Pierce Inverarity, discovers that the estate seems conscious designed to reveal an extraordinary pattern to her. She discovers a secret: a centuries-old mail delivery system called Trystero that subsumes every conceivable pocket of disaffection in the new world, from disgruntled aerospace workers to Mexican revolutionaries to AC/DC, the Alameda County Death Cult. The more she investigates, the more evidence she finds that Trystero is everywhere, an unnoticed but terrifying presence in a troubled landscape.

In addition to being a metaphor for Oedipa's gathering paranoia, Trystero comes to suggest something more benign: an alternative to “the exitlessness that harrows the head of everyone you know” in affluent America. The Trystero is something that resists the cultural entropy that afflicts modern society, the deadly tendency to seek some level of minimal differentiation (Lord, pp. 3-9).

It is also Pynchon's model of the system, the scheme of significance that humanity always hungers for. The modern world offers fewer and fewer verities, and autonomous systems of value such as those traditionally found in religion have long since been debunked. Yet the world persists in embracing attempts at systematizing human experience, whether in scientific, religious, or cultural terms. The Crying of Lot 49 reveals such systems as merely less obviously severe paranoid delusions. At the same time, it gives expression to a desperate yearning, on the part of modern civilization, for some new revelation, some new ordering principle that will redeem the post-Darwinian wasteland.

Critical Evaluation

Thomas Pynchon's short novel The Crying of Lot 49 puts a comic finger on the tensions that racked modern America in 1964, tensions that continue to be central to the dark comedy that defines America today. On one hand, the novel presents the rich and exotic chaos of the freest country on Earth. On the other hand, the novel probes the psyche of Americans whose longing for meaning extends in the manic directions of over-simplicity, conspiracy, and paranoia in a world that seems to be fragmenting. The story is rendered with richness of comic invention that creates for the reader a jagged border between laughter and terror (Harper, pp. 101-107).

In form, the novel qualifies as a Menippean satire, marked by being loose, digressive, and fairly corrosive. Oedipa Maas wanders through the strangeness of Northern California, and her search for the elusive Tristero and its W.A.S.T.E. postal system, continually interrupted by vignettes of strange lives and bits of history that may or may not be connected to the main narrative. These vignettes sometimes hang on to the main narrative ...