The Crying of Lot 49 [ペーパーバック]

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.

I thought it was great. Really great, actually. His writing style strikes me as very similar to a number of his contemporaries (Robert Stone, DeLillo, etc.). The central riddle of the book and the mixing of obscure historical fact and fiction reminded me strongly of authors like Borges.

With regard to some of the negative reviews below I would say the following:

1. I consider myself a pretty typical reader and I did not find this to be a particularly challenging book to read, although Pynchon's style (punctuation-sparse and prone to occasional lapses into heavy factual detail) takes some getting used to.

2. This is not a "neat" story in the conventional sense. There isn't a tidy conclusion to the story and there isn't a "typical" character development arc. But so what? I don't think either of those things are a necessary requirement to good fiction.

The deliberately silly-sounding character names should be the first clue that Pynchon does not intend this to be a conventional work of fiction. It isn't. But that doesn't mean it's not a great book.

The book is clever, well-written, and confounding with its plot twists and turns. That's what made it a fascinating read and that's also what makes it the kind of book that I think I could read over and over again and not get bored. I think I'll always find something new that I didn't see before.

Isn't that what makes a book enjoyable to read in the first place?