The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon (1965), begins when a Californian housewife, Oedipa Maas suddenly finds herself named
as the co-executor of an old flame‘s - Pierce Inverarity’s - estate. Leaving her DJ husband, Mucho Maas, at home in Kinneret, she sets off for San Narciso; a modern, nondescript town of the type which are proliferating throughout the Western world.
Having booked into her motel, Oedipa quickly becomes involved in an extra-marital affair with her co-executor; a child-star actor turned lawyer by the name of Metzger. It is when they go to The Scope, a bar near the motel, frequented by employees of Yoyodyne - one of Inverarity’s many, many interests - that she first comes across WASTE; a secret, underground, private mail system. It is also where she first sees the enigmatic symbol of a muted post horn.
Oedipa becomes obsessed with WASTE and Tristero, the secret
organisation involved with it. Suddenly, she begins to find clues for it everywhere: the muted post horn symbol appears on stamps; tattoos seen on the back of a hand; scratched on the back of a bus seat, tacked on the bulletin board of a laundromat. References to the
organization appear in a play or in a children’s song. Wherever she goes the clues and hints are there.
As the novel progresses, Oedipa becomes ever more isolated. Her lover, Metzger runs off with a fifteen-year-old girl; her husband becomes lost to the hallucinatory world of LSD. There is only Oedipa - and Tristero. She begins to doubt her sanity, wondering whether the whole Tristero organization is nothing but her paranoia at work. She also goes through a phase of hoping that she is mentally ill, that paranoia is the simple explanation. Part of her also suspects that her late lover, Pierce Inverarity, organised the entire series of clues as no more than some kind of elaborate joke for her.
However, there is, overall, the hope that this organisation truly does exist; an organisation for the dispossessed and disinherited. For if there isn’t, then there is only America, and things are exactly as they are, and nothing carries meaning.
Although written in 1965, this novel has a very contemporary feel. The lost, hallucinatory quality of the novel is ideally suited to a book whose theme is meaning and meaningless, and the modern world’s sense of isolation. This is a unique, brilliant, funny and quite disturbing novel that deserves to be read.