Continuing my extremely irregular series of posts about non-marketing things that inspire me, I thought I'd write about a book I haven't touched in a couple of years, but which I've been itching to return to.
The Crying of Lot 49 is the most verbally intense and engaging novel I know. It's not very long, but it's a very deep rabbit hole.
It's about (hell, how do you even try to describe it?) Oedipa Maas, a woman in southern California whose former boyfriend has died and left her as co-executor of his estate. She is sucked into a world of secret meanings and signals and societies and purposes that may or may not all be an elaborate joke by her (dead?) ex-boyfriend. I can't even begin describe the invention and amazing flow of character names and incidents that befall Oedipa: Metzger, a lawyer who is her co-executor who is also a former child movie star; a young band called the Paranoids; secretive aerospace engineers working for Yoyodyne Corporation; her husband Mucho, of course, who is a depressed radio DJ; and her LSD-pushing shrink, Dr. Hilarius, who it turns out worked Buchenwald on a program to drive Jews insane because, as he explains, "Liberal SS circles felt it would be more humane."
It also contains an extended look at a Jacobian revenge play called The Courier's Tragedy, which is a brilliant parody of Jacobian drama at the same time that it is also a dead-accurate take on that genre, and I often get its details confused with plays like Duchess of Malfi or The Revenger's Tragedy; The Courier's Tragedy feels that real.
Sadly, I don't seem to be able to handle Pynchon over long distances; I got lost about halfway through Gravity's Rainbow and didn't pick it up again, stumbled to the end of Vineland, and have been ignoring my untouched copy of Mason & Dixon for a few years now.
But the couple of hundred pages of The Crying of Lot 49 will remind you what is possible with language.