He's Pynchon My Admiration!

I finished reading Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 about a week ago, truth be told.  Since then, I've been working my head around what happened.  It's not the longest book in the world - at 45,000 words it hardly qualifies as a novel - but it's certainly one of the most gripping and mysterious I've ever read.

For those of you who don't know much about Thomas Pynchon... join the club.  Nobody does.  He's books are published quietly, without much advertising or warning, and nobody's even got a photograph of him since the 60s.  In other words, he's done a pretty good job of making sure everyone pays attention to the books, not the author.  Ironically, it did earn him a cameo on The Simpsons - one of the two times he's made any kind of public vocal appearance.

With that paper bag, I'm amazed nobody's spotted him in the street.

Anyway, on with the novel(la).  It begins when Oedipa Maas, the female protagonist, is asked to execute the will of a recently deceased ex-lover, Pierce Inverarity (read what you will into these names, by the way).  Naturally, there are certain things that stand out as odd in Inverarity's will, and Oedipa is lead down a dark path of conspiracies and treachery, spanning centuries, mapping the intricacies of San Narcisso in eerie detail.

Does that sound creepy?  It isn't - it's hilarious.  In fact, Dr. Hilarius is a character in it.  What does this lurking conspiracy conspire to do?  Assassinate world leaders?  Act as a front for our reptile overlords?  Nah, they're an underground postal system, obviously.  As you might have guessed by now, the plot isn't the only surreal element to the book - the characters are pretty quirky too.  Be prepared for mad directors, ex-Nazi doctors, and moping, mop-haired, teenage imitations of the Beatles, called The Paranoids.

 Say, they sound familiar (minus the Naziness)...

Don't be fooled, mind.  This doesn't take away from the impact of the book at all.  Pynchon's satire is refreshing and welcome, like a drinks stop on a marathon.  Besides, if Catch-22 taught me anything, it's that the best stories about madness drive the characters, not to mention the reader, insane with it.  Everyone and everything in the book has a frantic uncertainty about it, as if they're desperate to put themselves forward as "most important clue", or "best tangential scene", and while that might sound like it spells everything out for you, it really doesn't.

See, uncertainty really is at the heart of this book.  Oedipa discovers about this secret postal organisation, the more she doubts its existance.  Moreover, as a character, Oedipa develops in such away that I couldn't help but find her doubts justifiable - there's a very good chance she's making up the whole thing to piece together her life, which is slowly falling to bits around her, or it's all a laugh-from-beyond-the-grave from Inverarity, or a multitude of other things.

 In other words, imagine rubbing salt into the part of your brain that deals with satisfying conclusions.

 So Pynchon leaves us to draw our own conclusions, and it doesn't feel like a cop-out.  Actually, the opposite's true for me, and I found myself thinking long and hard about the reliability of Oedipa as an investigative mind, because I'm unemployed and desperately lonely.  I even came to the interesting conclusion that all the critical conclusions I've read are wrong.  See, Pynchon offers a series of potential explanations at the end of the book, but I reckon they're to mislead you.  The real solution?  Yes, Oedipa's paranoid and quite probably mad, but she's not the only one.  In fact, the whole secret organisation is sustained by people on the edge, people like Oedipa who half hope it exists and, in doing so, create it.  It's the unspoken yet crucial character in Wainwright's play (invented by Pynchon, watched by Oedipa), a tentative escape from social convention.

Either that, or I've fallen into Pynchon's trap.  After all, that's essentially a recreation of Oedipa's journey - hesitantly stringing together clues to make sense of something nonsensical.  Maybe the silly character names are there just to taunt us, and remind us of that?  In any case, it speaks volumes of the nature of our need for a cohesive plot, well and truly keeping the book in your mind long after you've finished reading it.  So get out there: solve Pynchon's little puzzle if you can, but keep in mind that there might not even be a puzzle in the first place...

TTFN!

P.S.  "Things of the Now!" will be updated shortly after this goes live!