The Crying of Lot 49

This was from 1966, and it’s really short, you can read it in like half an hour, so it’s the book that people trying to get into Thomas Pynchon first pick up—but that’s a mistake! Because it’s his most difficult of all his books! It seems to be about this woman Oedipa trying to settle the estate of this dead rich guy, and then she travels around California and runs into a lot of weirdo characters, but it’s anything but a simple story. It’s not a story at all, but a long series of paranoid delusions and urban legend that come to life, one inside another, that create an entire hallucinogenic, time warped landscape of a text!!!!!!

Toward the end there’s something about a “smiling billboard” – though I don’t remember the context—and that freaked me out because I had just read something that I wrote long before I read this book which had a reference to a “smiling billboard.” I know I couldn’t have stolen it—not from this book, because I hadn't read it—but maybe we BOTH stole it from the same source. If I could figure that out, maybe it would be a clue into the dude’s psyche!

The weirdest thing for me is that there is virtually no description of the main character, Oedipa, and because of her name I immediately thought of her as kind of old and fat--- the then eventually she starts having sex with everyone and there’s some indication that she’s in her TWENTIES—so it’s really confusing. Which makes you think that this character is really the first person, the Pynchon character, or at least the world is seen by P. thru her eyes. Anyway, the whole story revolves around this alternative, underground mail system, whose symbol has been said to look like a trumpet with a mute in it—that mute being the crucial symbolic element here. The secret here, which I discovered on my own, is that the symbol ALSO looks like a spray can for insecticide. That’s one thing you always have to remember with P’s novels, not only does everything mean something else, but it also means something ELSE completely different, and THAT means, as well, symbolically or metaphorically, something else besides. So good luck with this mess!