What is it about Thomas Pynchon? I think a good place to start would be the confession of more than a simple smattering of envy, the man writes sentences that simply explode across the page, dipping, turning, weaving and bobbing; tackling so many myriad tangents that it sometimes amazes me that you can even follow it, and truthfully I have talked to a few people who claim that you can’t.
Pynchon’s style is uncompromisingly unique. I swear I could recognize his stuff from a random sampling of sentences, I know I could identify him after a full paragraph. The Crying of Lot 49 is probably Pynchon at his most accessible, it’s certainly his shortest book.
Title: The Crying of Lot 49
Author: Thomas Pynchon
LC Rating:
The story is incredible, the principle character Oedipa Maas (and almost all the characters bear equally alarming names), is chosen as executor of an old boyfriend’s will, and swept away into the discovery of an ancient underground society of alternative mail carriers. The beauty of the book is the way that this (admittedly somewhat silly) idea provides the spring-board for a mind of grand genius to touch on themes of paranoia and outsider culture with breath-taking eloquence.
Along the way we’ll get to touch on entropy, Maxwell’s Demon makes a few guest appearances, and there’s more than a fair smattering of sex, some drugs and even a bit of rock and roll for those of you into that stuff.
Here’s Pynchon on the nature of revelation, from The Crying of Lot 49:
“Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.”
That’s one hell of a sentence. This is one hell of a book. All of Pynchon’s stuff is amazing, but Gravity’s Rainbow is probably his best, I’m reviewing The Crying of Lot 49 because I just read it for the third time, and with it’s short (152 pages) length, it’s a great introduction to an absolutely fantastic author. Pynchon is one of those either you love it, and revel in every word and idea that marches across the page, or you find it unreadable nonsense. I am firmly in the first camp, my humble suggestion would be that you find yourself a copy of The Crying of Lot 49 and see if it doesn’t sing for you.