The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon
Summary
Oedipa Maas, a suburban California housewife, is named co executor of the sprawling estate of her former lover Pierce Inverarity, a real estate tycoon, and while sorting through his affairs she starts noticing a recurring symbol, a muted post horn, scratched into bathroom walls and printed on stamps. The symbol leads her toward Trystero, an underground, possibly centuries old alternative postal system supposedly locked in secret rivalry with the historical Thurn und Taxis postal monopoly, communicating through a network called W.A.S.T.E., an acronym for We Await Silent Tristero's Empire. Pynchon keeps deliberately unclear whether Trystero is a genuine, vast conspiracy Oedipa is slowly uncovering, a delusion produced by her own increasing isolation and paranoia, or an elaborate practical joke Inverarity built and left behind for her specifically to find. The novel ends without resolving the question at all: Oedipa sits down at an auction for lot forty nine, Inverarity's stamp collection bearing the post horn symbol, waiting to see who bids on it and what that bidder might reveal, and the book stops before the auction itself does.
Pynchon writes in dense, referential prose stuffed with wordplay, invented history and a play within the novel called The Courier's Tragedy, and it reads as strange and genuinely funny in a paranoid, conspiratorial key rather than a comic one. At under two hundred pages it is Pynchon's shortest and most approachable novel, though approachable is relative for a writer this determined to withhold a clean answer to his own central mystery.
J. B. Lippincott published The Crying of Lot 49 on April 27, 1966, Pynchon's second novel after his much longer, more difficult debut, V.
Historical Context & Significance
The Crying of Lot 49 won the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award in 1967, a real prize given by the National Institute of Arts and Letters to reward a young writer's most promising work, following Pynchon's earlier debut novel V., which had itself won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for best first novel in 1963. Reviews at the time captured the book's strangeness without settling how seriously to take it: a Time reviewer called it a metaphysical thriller in the form of a pornographic comic strip, while Richard Poirier in the New York Times praised its technical virtuosity.
Pynchon's own famous reclusiveness, no public photographs, no interviews, kept the novel's reputation growing almost independent of its author, and its ambiguity about whether Trystero is real became a small industry of its own among academic critics arguing over what the ending actually proves. The book has stayed continuously in print since 1966, taught widely as an entry point into Pynchon's more demanding later novels, and its short length has made it the one Pynchon most readers actually finish.