Review: The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I meant to read this years ago and caught it now only very quickly to prep for an honors defense. It’s brilliant, of course, and also very funny.

I read V a long time ago and, while my student Brandon warns me that it can now look a little adolescent, it helped shape my sense of the possibilities of postmodernism. As I read it, every chapter seemed to take place in a differently ordered cosmos. Sometimes we were concerned with alien flying saucers in volcanoes; other times with the metaphor of the sewer system somehow connecting us all. I kept getting the sense that the entire structure of experience would shift.

And I loved that. And I still love that in memory – which makes Brandon’s warning about re-reading it carry a lot of weight. I wouldn’t want to lose that naïve sense I took thirty years ago that it was somehow possible to reinvent the very universe whim after whim.

Anyway, I read The Crying of Lot 49 the same way. At times it’s about the nature of property law. Then it’s intersecting laws of entropy – thermodynamic and informational. And then it’s about the postal system and its mythical Hapsburgian rival, the Trystero.

I have a lot more to think about this one – and I’m grateful to Brandon for framing it for me – but, on a quick reading – it’s given me exactly what I first loved in Pynchon: a wild, funny, and intriguing imagination suggesting that more is possible than I expect and that, with the turn of a page, it can all get turned on its head again.


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