The Crying of Lot 49
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Let me preface my review with the fact that I was not in the mood to read this book. It reads like a fever dream and I was craving an intelligible plot. Yet, I stuck with it, because I knew that if I put it down, I wouldn’t ever return. I sacrificed my sanity in honor of the blog.
It seems that the appeal of The Crying of Lot 49 is that it’s stuffed with symbolism. In my opinion, it is wayyyy over-stuffed. And maybe that’s also Thomas Pynchon (the author)’s point? Maybe he’s mocking other authors who emphasize wordplay? Or maybe he’s legitimately packing his novel with symbols, becoming every English teacher’s wet dream? As a reader, it was difficult to differentiate between sincerity and satire, literal action and metaphor, etc. So, I really had no idea wtf was going on.
After I accepted that there were too many characters with (maybe?) symbolic names and too many references with (maybe?) underlying connections, I said to myself, Fine, Pynchon, I’ll see where the story takes me without analyzing it too much. But that wasn’t fun either because, while there was an occasional beautifully written existential quote, I had to trudge through pages and pages of nonsense to get there.
The “story” of The Crying of Lot 49 is: Oedipa Maas mysteriously inherits the estate of an ex-lover. While trying to tie up loose ends, she’s exposed to a conspiracy theory involving a multi-century underground rival to the federal postage system. It’s unclear if there’s an actual network, if she has gone mad, or if she’s over-analyzing stuff that innocently exists. Sure, mail symbolizes connecting and conversing, so maybe Pynchon is trying to comment on our inability to meaningfully connect. But...mail? Not that interesting, honey. I don’t want to deep-dive into the intricacies of a postal system and then have 50+ random names and companies thrown at me.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate deeper meaning. I’m smart, I promise!! I love the wordplay in books like Lolita (Pynchon was actually a student of Nabokov’s at Cornell), but it’s all about *balance* for me. I like when symbols serve a large purpose, whereas here, they seem to be the only point. The Crying of Lot 49 receives 1 out of 5 flames.
