I’m getting to like Pynchon the more of his novels I read. (Sometime I will attempt [b:Against the Day|409|Against the Day|Thomas Pynchon|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1276429450s/409.jpg|3016553].) There is something about his dense, evocative style that is both incisive and meandering, revealing and arch. He’s also got a real gift for metaphors and punchlines. An example of the former:

What the road really was, she fancied, was a hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner LA, keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain.

And of the latter:

They went to lunch. Roseman tried to play footsie with her under the table. She was wearing boots, and couldn’t feel much of anything. So, insulated, she decided not to make any fuss.
“Run away with me,” Roseman said when the coffee came.
“Where?” she asked. That shut him up.

‘The Crying of Lot 49’ was first published in 1966. Although it displays this by referring to people of colour as ‘negroes’, it also depicts an America that feels spookily familiar today. Anti-government conspiracies are ubiquitous yet meaningless; Nazis are in plain sight but white people don’t want to look; men don’t listen to women; the rich can do whatever arbitrary bullshit they want. I greatly enjoy Pynchon’s humour and appreciate that it always has a bleak and unsettling edge. All of the female narrators I’ve come across in his novels are excellently drawn, too. Not to mention his [a:Mervyn Peake|22018|Mervyn Peake|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1341040504p2/22018.jpg]-esque character naming.

Although the plot of this novella is largely incidental and irrelevant, what it left me with was a profound sense of Oedipa’s complex unease. How many male American authors wrote like this in the sixties:

What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realises that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: and what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disc jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

Very few, I bet. ( )

It's been quite a while since I've read any Pynchon, but I had this sitting around for decades and it wasn't that long so decided to give it a try. It's kind of like Foucault’s Pendulum on acid. It also reminded me of VALIS.

Very surreal, sometimes incomprehensible (at least by me), sometimes funny, I was really betting everything on the ending being some ingenious, unexpected explanation, but instead it just left everything hanging. ( )

This was a re-read for me; this book is consistently amazing. This time around I noticed a greater melancholy in the story, as though the conspiracy inside was both something desired (to make the world make sense) and something feared (because of a loss of control). ( )

Pop goes the weasel! Pynchon's 1960s California-paranoia story of odd names, fractured plot and multiple conspiracy theories is soaked in clever allusion and hieroglyphic metaphor, but never really leads to anything. Indeed, frustration is obviously the point, as this clown-car drama full of interconnected but ultimately unresolved inquiries never arrives at a meaningful pattern but simply cuts to black.

Pynchon artfully distances us from character, plot and emotion - one assumes as an act of dislocating our own deluded efforts to make sense of this complex and chaotic world, and allowing us to feel instead the disorientation and anxiety inherent in a 'post-modern' society, where communication of all kinds is unreliable, uncertain or unfinished despite our efforts to systematise it.

Pynchon packs a lot of sophisticated and tantalising signposting into a short novella, and you can see why armies of smart fans enjoy parsing the under-determined semiotics of Pynchon. But in the end, all the highways in his Golden State lead to the same unrequited longing for answers. ( )

Despite its short length, this was a very complex and clever book. It really stretched my reading capacity. ( )