Book Review: The Crying of Lot 49

(Borrowed from the NY Public Library on 40th St.) Back in the mid-70s when I was in my teens, I tried to read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, a massive best-seller in paperback. It was a big, important book that got a bunch of glowing reviews and I thought I should read it. I couldn't finish it or make head or tail out of it. There was something about missiles and Nazis, but I can't recall any characters or why I should care about them. But Pynchon is a highly regarded author and now 50 years later, I needed something short to read until the next session of my online book club when they assign us another novel. So while scanning the Fiction section of the NY Public Library at 40th Street, I found this work which is only about 150 pages. Just as confusing as Gravity's Rainbow, but at least I finished it. The heroine Oedipa Maas goes on a wild goose chase once she becomes executrix of her millionaire ex-lover's estate. She finds a weird symbol on a ladies' room wall and somehow it's connected to an ancient independent mail system. Somehow this secret society of mail carriers is important, but it's not clear why. They're killing or threatening all the men in Oedipa's life. Why or what it has to do with an auction of a set of rare stamps is not sufficently explained. And how is Oedipa like the Greek tragic figure Oedipus? Well, the ex-lover was older, so is it because she had sex with a father figure? Did she metaphorically blind herself?

There are several well-written and intriguing passages such as Oedipa's drunken seduction with Metzger, the estate's handsome lawyer where she dons several layers of clothing so she won't lose in strip poker. I also like the Paranoids, a teen garage band Oedipa encounters. But the conspiracy Oedipa investigates didn't seem particularly dangerous or vital to expose. What was she after, what made her journey one I wanted to follow? It didn't make me want to return to Gravity's Rainbow or pick up Pynchon's later novel Vineland, which Paul Thomas Anderson filmed as the Oscar-winning One Battle After Another.

This cover from a paperback edition was groovier than the book itself.