Rating: 
Summary: Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn
Review: Conspiracy buffs, look no further than "The Crying of Lot 49" -- a book that indulges in paranoia so much, you almost expect to see your own name mentioned somewhere in the text. There is an incredible amount of narrative inventiveness on every page, employing a wild concoction of dry humor, non sequiturs, bizarre characters with puns for names, and an endless barrage of references to a wide variety of pop culture, science, and technology. This is the first novel I've read that has introduced the concept of entropy as a narrative device. The protagonist is a woman named Oedipa Maas who, when the novel begins, learns that her former boyfriend, the wealthy Pierce Inverarity, has died and designated her to be the executor of his enormous estate. Inverarity's assets include vast stretches of property, a significant stamp collection, and many shares in an aerospace corporation called Yoyodyne. As Oedipa goes through her late boyfriend's will, aided by a lawyer named Metzger who works for Inverarity's law firm, she learns about a series of secret societies and strange groups of people involved in a sort of renegade postal system called Tristero. She starts seeing ubiquitous cryptic diagrams of a simple horn, a symbol with a seemingly infinite number of meanings. Every clue she uncovers about Tristero and the horn leads haphazardly to another, like a brainstorm, or a free association of ideas. This is a novel that demands analysis but defies explanation. My initial interpretation was that it's an anarchistic satire of the military-industrial-government complex, but it's deeper than that. Like Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire," it establishes a very complicated relationship between the author and the reader, where Pynchon seems to be tricking the reader in the same way that Oedipa is unsure if she is witnessing a worldwide conspiracy or if she is merely the victim of an elaborate prank. By presenting Oedipa's investigation to be either circular, aimless, or inconsequential, the novel seems to satirize the efforts of people who try to find order in the universe. Pynchon uses the concept of entropy to illustrate that the more effort (physical and mental) we put into controlling the universe, the more random it becomes.
Rating:
Summary: Stylish, nightmarish, wonderfully weird and paranoid
Review: Decades before THE X-FILES made paranoia about conspiracies standard fare for popular culture, there was Thomas Pynchon's THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (it is not a coincident that man X-FILES websites also feature forums discussing Pynchon's books). The notion that there might be a "World inside the world" (in Don Delillo's memorable phrase) had never before truly been explored in either high or popular culture, in pulp or serious fiction, in movies or TV. Or almost. THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE in both novel and film had presented a haunting image of a government conspiracy, and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS was the great fifties classic of justified paranoia, but no work before had ever envisioned conspiracy on such a grand, international, and all pervasive scale. What is even more distrubing about this book is that the conspiracy it presents is hidden in plain sight. The protagonist of the novel, Oedipa Maas, is utterly unaware of the existence of the Tristero, yet as the book gains force she realizes that its marks can be found in every corner of society.
This short novel is the perfect introduction to Thomas Pynchon. Although I thoroughly enjoy his work, I will be the first to admit that he is not for everyone. His writings contain too many obscure references (sometimes of an academic nature; frequently not), his style can at times be dense, his narrative style not always very transparent. I personally find that he repays the effort, but because I had to struggle through the several pages in GRAVITY'S RAINBOW or V. that are less than obvious in their import I can understand what it is like for those who find most of his pages tough going. THE CRYING OF LOT 49 is, however, not merely his most accessible work (largely because of its short length) but arguably his finest book. I would absolutely recommend that anyone considering exploring Pynchon begin with this.
What is remarkable is how much content is contained in the novel's less than two hundred pages of text. It is one of those books in which almost nothing seems to happen, and yet seems stuffed to the brim. If one sums up the action of the novel, it seems extraordinarily slim: a woman goes to help as executor of the estate of a former lover of hers, inadvertently discovers an international conspiracy to provide an alternate mail delivery system that seems to function anarchistically to undermine the establish order, and attempts to learn all she can of the identity and existence of the mysterious Tristero. Most of the book consists in the pondering of clues. None of it labors over answers. It is also not a book that delves deeply into character analysis. Apart from Oedipa, there is not a single character that could, in E. M. Forster's famous parlance, be described as a "round" character. The novel is populated by what he would describe as "flat" characters (not necessarily a criticism, since as Forster points out all of Dickens's characters are flat). The book doesn't even seem to want to tell a story. What it wants to do is evoke a mood of disassociation, of dislocation. It wants to leave us with a sense of the unreality of our most ingrained assumptions. And it does this brilliantly.
THE CRYING OF LOT 49 is a pivotal modern work of literature for another reason: it was one of the first serious works of literature that seems to be on easy terms with popular culture. Indeed, though I have no evidence for this, I would imagine that one of its major influences may have been THE TWILIGHT ZONE. It could be cited as a direct or indirect influence on a number of subsequent cultural products, including the aforementioned THE X-FILES. But the main reason to read this remarkable short work is that it is one of the finest short novels written in the past half century in English.
Rating: 
Summary: Good things come in small packages, indeed!
Review: I got this book as a winter break project and unfortuantely finished it after summer break. It's small, less then 200 pages but it was just so detailed and so complex that it rattled my brain. I couldn't put it down but realized that I wasn't grasping what was being said. The story moves like an epic. I kept expecting something bad to happen, to have the plot peak but it wouldn't. This book held me in it's grasp for over 6 months as I read and re-read it. I now understand how this is considered a classic and recommend it to all serious readers. Be warned however, there is more to the story then you think and if you're looking for an easy read then this is not the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: Understanding "The Crying of Lot 49"
Review: This is a relatively easy book to read given the complexities of the Pynchonian oeuvre, but as some people have noticed it is not an easy book to understand. In it, I believe that Thomas Pynchon is challenging both the classical notion of a hidden structure and the modernist notion of a self-created structure. This is the first book in which Thomas Pynchon tries to articulate a coordinated human response to being thrown into an apparently indifferent, degenerate Copernican acosmos, a universe without intrinsic values. Because of the book's compact size, nearly linear plot and concentration on a single, central protagonist, 28 year old Oedipa Maas, we are compelled to view her imagined discovery of the dystopian structure, the Tristero, as one way of giving meaning to the entropic disintegration of human life, of finding "a reason that mattered to the world," (p. 150).
Oedipa Maas becomes trapped between the two idealizations of (i) existential power to create, and (ii) gnostic ability to establish values. Oedipa's existential state is exemplified by a painting in the book (p. 11) by Remedios Varo, which inverts the Christian creation and tries to construct an independent self; but this only leads to solipsism and narcissism: with the anthropological fear of non-existence, of there being only "the void" (p. 141). Through another metaphor, that of a slow "whirlwind," (pp. 14, 16) we cannot hear the words of revelation because the wind is rotating too slowly (God spoke to Job out of a whirlwind), and so Oedipa tries to construct an alternative source of gnostic value, "the languid, sinister blooming of The Tristero," (pp. 39-40) with its symbol of the muted post horn, to mute the trumpets of the Apocalypse through bureaucratic waste; but this only leads her into deeper gnostic paranoia and the self-construction of projected revelation: with the cosmological fear of becoming a machine, "a great digital computer" (p. 150).
By showing how Oedipa can neither become an independent self, nor can realize her own personal revelation, Thomas Pynchon indirectly re-establishes a route back to reality: "the reality principle" (p. 111). Oedipa's failure is the failure of her mystical search for charisma, the gift of tongues, but without the necessary and corresponding rational order of tradition. This one-sidedness provokes us, in the final auction, into a choice between truth and self-centering, between the spiritual and the material: thus, Loren Passerine is "the finest auctioneer in the West," (p. 151) but also, maybe "a descending angel" (p. 152); an indirect positing of the choice between God and idolatry.
Rating:
Summary: Top of the line
Review: THE CRYING OF LOT 49 has to be one of the most intricate books ever written. The good news is this: It's beyond anything out there today on the market. The bad news? Few will "get" this book since you need to be hyper-educated-the same way you need to be educated to "get" THE SIMPSONS or MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, which, by the way, if you enjoy, then you'll love this book. The story surrounds Oedipa Maas and the adventure she begins when she is called upon as executrix of the estate of her deceased ex-lover Pierce Invererity. There is level upon level upon level in this story. You can read it ten times and still see new things and make new connections. The only other book I've read that came anywhere close to this was Jackson McCrae's BARK OF THE DOGWOOD with its anagrams, puzzles, weird characters, and mixture of light and dark. But CRYING surpasses even that. Kudos to the author.
Rating:
Summary: A Cynical, Scathing, Absurdist Brew
Review: The novel's protagonist, Oedipa Mass, starts out as a housewife in a "ticky-tacky" little suburb and gradually and seemingly randomly starts noticing things in her daily life that seem to be evidence of a secret society. Its purpose is to conduct a secret alternative mail system. She starts investigating this secret society and becomes engrossed in the belief that it actually exists, though in the end she's not sure whether it's for real or, as a few people she meets claim, an elaborate hoax.
As far as I can tell, The Crying of Lot 49 is basically an allegory about the nascent stages in the growth of various subcultures (the New Left, Reaganism, etc.) in Southern California during the early sixties (represented by the secret mail society) and mainstream America's slow realization of their existence and its subsequent fascination with them (represented by Oedipa).
Interestingly, this secret society seems to have adherents from both the cold warriors of the libertarian right and The New Left (or rather allegorical equivalents of these movements), suggesting some deeper similarity between these opposites - namely, their dissatisfaction with various (though mostly different) aspects of the anti-individualistic rigidity and staidness of middle-class post-war America.
Characters who submit to the shallow satisfactions of conventional society - such as Oedipa's husband, who becomes a sort of middle-aged teeny-bopper - come to look like freakish zombies. Yet the alternative doesn't look so nice either. Feeling pressed upon on all sides, the characters who don't submit want to escape into some sort of freedom but have little idea of what sort of freedom they want or what to do with it.
The only thing that unites all the people in this secret society is their unwillingness to participate in a generally accepted institution, the US mail system. Yet they don't have much of a good reason for not participating considering that it's not as if the US mail system was corrupt or broken at the time. In practice, this secret mail system is useless and absurd, so it's almost like they're not participating merely for the sake of not participating, as if they didn't know what to do with their willingness to drop out of conventional society.
What's interesting about Pynchon's book is that while we generally remember the more purposeful, driven radical elements of sixties culture (everything from the yippies to Goldwater), Pynchon reminds us how much of that dissatisfaction with Post-War America was just a vague, general ennui or anomie. Of course, the book leaves open the possibility that the secret society doesn't exist at all, in which case it's all an illusion projected out of Oedipa's head, a fantasy generated by Oedipa's own wish for escape.
Considering how shallow and conformist America still is, it's easy to see the continuing relevance of this book even though so many things treated in the book have changed since then, such as the ascendancy of the radical right into the mainstream and the utter disappearance of the New Left.
Yet I have to admit that the book's critique of bureaucracy rings a little hollow these days, considering how many Americans there are now who wouldn't mind the staid yet secure postwar world so hated by these characters and probably Pynchon too. As a temp worker who can't afford anything better than catastrophic health insurance, I know I wouldn't mind a bit more security, even at the cost of having to be a "company man" in a gray suit.
Regarding the notorious pranksterism of the plotting, the cartoonishness of the characterization, and the manic, elaborate parodies of all sorts of contemporary modes of rhetoric, I do have to admit that Pynchon overdoes it sometimes. There are moments of hard-earned pathos if not sincerity, but as in the films of Godard, it's hard not to wish that they came little more often and with a few less caveats. Still, fans of Nathanial West and Flannery O'Conner (or for that matter, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Harvey Birdman, and Radiohead) should feel right at home here in this cynical, scathing, absurdist brew.
Rating: 
Summary: A major WASTE of time
Review: When I started reading this book, I was expecting a Victorian crime drama. I couldn't have been more disappointed! I guess I should have bought something by Paglia (pron. Pole-ya) instead.
Rating: 
Summary: Meh......
Review: I, unlike other reviewers, am NOT a Pynchon fan. I had to read this book for class, and it was terrible. It made no sense at all, and the author's attempts to be clever just backfired.
Rating:
Summary: An Enjoyable Read...
Review: For those who want to read Pynchon but don't want to go near V or Gravity's Rainbow this is the one for you... It is very accessable and has a lot of the craziness that is characteristic of Pynchon's other works. His genius is there on every page, and although he substitutes aesthetics from time to time (there will be moments when you will wonder 'where exactly did the setting go?' or 'this character really doesn't need to be here, isn't that obvious?') in order to wow you with the sheer power of his brain, it is still a great book. There are so many humorous scenes in this book, especially with Dr Hilarius, that it is worth it to read it just for them. But beware there is a lot going on beneath the surface here, and even if you're a highly intelligent person, you will still be scratching your head from time to time. I located an online study guide and followed after each chapters and it enhanced my enjoyment of this slim but heavy book.
Rating:
Summary: Very Stabby
Review: I read this book and then I wanted to stab the bus driver but I didn't because I wanted to read some Cormac McCarthy and I figured that the prison library wouldn't have any of his work.
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