Hey nice people — you made it! And with that, welcome to Week 1, in which we launch this hardy crew out onto the trail. Just a reminder that we are slow-cooking this time around. You may have read the book before or you may be tempted to jump ahead, but humor me, won’t you? Let’s keep our focus on these weekly 30-page sprints and savor the Pynchon together.
I’m reading the Harper Perennial (HP) paperback, but there are plenty of other editions — for anyone taking another path, I’ll do my best to include a quote you can use to hang your hat on, whatever medium or printing you choose.
For those new to Pynchon I’ll share the one tip I’ve figured out with my modest experience — just to enjoy the sentences. Sometimes I get a little lost I’ll admit. But pretty much every page has a sentence to underline and delight in. And so we turn the pages, gem to shimmery gem.
So remind me one more time, how’s this thing work?
We’ll be reading T C of L 49 over the next 5 weeks — each week I’ll post the next week’s target. Read along, comment on each thread by week’s end, make it to the finish line, and you qualify for some unique digital thing I’ll figure out on the other side….
As always, I believe in you and your ability to read a book in thinly-sliced increments and post on a blog. I don’t know about everyone — but you? You’re a sure bet to make it to the end!
This week: Enjoy chapters 1 and 2, adding your comment (pithy or otherwise) here, pausing for some water and perhaps a slice of orange at the bottom of HP 30, where After a while, she said “I will.” And she did.
Upward and forward!
-Cecil
-I had to break out the pencil for this one! Pynchon necessitates a circle-words-and-write-in-the-margins kind of approach. Too many fun/beautiful words and phrases to adorn! (Now I know that a “censer” is that swinging, smoke-emitting thing that priests carry around. Also, “hierophany.”)
-This is my first go at Pynchon’s work and I was surprised how funny he is. “Mucho Maas” is a great dumb DJ name. (“Mucho Maas in the Morning” would make for interesting drive time listening. All the hits, plus extra dread and self-loathing!) And the motel scene got pretty slapstick with the layers of clothing and the torpedo hair spray from hell.
-At first, it felt a little incongruent that almost every character Oedipa encounters makes some kind of pass at her—but it’s not clear why she’s so alluring. (At first. The clothes gag was hilarious.) Curious to see how she develops as a character.
“She was scared but nowhere near sober.” Favorite — and shortest — sentence so far.
I felt drunk for the first 15–17 pages, forgetting what I just read, rereading, drifting off. Then the narrative comes into focus — goes from black & white to color — as soon as she arrives at the motel and walks into the pool courtyard.
Oh no! I’ve been reading lot 48. I’ll have more to say next week.
Oh, these sentences! These long, convoluted, run-in, colon-dotted, meandering, (Dr.) Hilarius, vivid sentences! I kept interrupting my kid’s own meander (through YouTube) by making him listen to sentences until he fled to his room. “Yet to look at him now, in the twilit living room, gliding like a large bird toward the sweating shakerful of booze…” Glorious. I give it five stars. Embarrassed to admit that I’m reading the Libby sample, but I’ll get myself to a bookstore for a proper paper copy today.
The reels out of sequence was a trope I’ve never read before- wonder if the following chapters will be like that.
https://www.cecilvortex.com/2025/10/the-crying-of-lot-49-meander-week-1/#comment-16491
Am I the only one who thought Mucho was her dog (and /or) her husband. He “rolled over and was looking at her,” and “bounded through the screen door.”
I’ve been in Pynchon withdrawal for too long. Need to put the pieces together more quickly.
I really enjoyed the lawyer’s compulsive need to tell Oedipa all of the things that Inverarity had invested in every time commercials came on the TV.
Very cool observation. The TV show and related action were super well written.
I am new to Pynchon. And it took me some meandering in the meander to find my way in. I might be new to Pynchon but I was 40 years ago quite fond of Robert Anton Wilson and William Burroughs an to me reading Pynchon gives me familiar vibes.
I think, Oedipa is an interesting woman. I like her ability to detect patterns: Circuits in a radio or the layout of a suburb: “Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Califonians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There`d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); So in her first minutes of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.”
Followed by her feelings of an “religious instant” to the sight.
And later on comes this hilarious thought, that the road “was this 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 later on we get this picture with the hairspray can creating chaotic patterns .
To me it is like two sides of the same coin.
And I love the naming in this book as everyone else does.
Oh – and I am happy to only read 30 pages a week, I often need to reread passages. But isn’t that what it is all about. 😉
wonderful, like a pebble skipping from o to o to o: “They often went to the same group therapy sessions, in a car pool with a photographer from Palo Alto who thought he was a volleyball.”
also great: Yoyodyne. I associate that corporation with the movie “Buckeroo Banzai” and am happy to find they got it from Pynchon.
things i didn’t like: the typos! also Mucho Maas (way too much more–a literal drag); glad she drove away.
i remember from a previous march/meander that pynchon was super fond of getting high and not editing himself; i give him points for indulging himself in these ways, especially so early in his writing life.
I too struggled to find just one—one!—of the two and maybe three copies of this book in our house before resorting to desperate measures. Despite having read this book several times in school, I cannot for the life remember its resolution and I am pleased to find that I’m enjoying the meander more this way.
One thought: Oedipa, like her classical eponymous forebear, begins this quest with the presumption of being unbound by fate: “I will,” she says, both asserting her autonomy and reminding us of the legal document that has brought her to San Narciso (another reference to an ill-fated Greek). Metzger is no Jocasta—and in fact displays Oedipal issues of his own—but this motel hookup seems like a date with destiny.
Those used cars that made Mucho cry, heading down the mainline into LA….this is an interesting, wild ride.
Just tracked down a copy and haven’t started it yet. But I promise I’ll be caught up by next week. No, really.
Ima be real: im in the midst of moving houses/layoffs/family trip and my life-addled brain is not keeping pace with the breathless prose. I don’t so much resent the author as resent that I lack the capacity to fully DELVE. But I appreciate the assignment either way! Not since my English-major days have I been asked to read and respond to challenging pages and it feels like one of those good stretches that hurt deliciously. I’ll keep at it! Xo
These characters turn in a heartbeat. I thought she was happy with Mucha the Hungarian.
Read this book a number of years ago, was certain it was in my house, but could not find it. Determined not to buy it online, called several local bookstores whose owners thought they had it, but upon searching, realized they didn’t. Wondered if there was a message in this. Found the boo yesterday, getting comments in under the wire, preserving my rights to a finisher’s mug.
What stayed with me were images mentioned by others – the salt fogs of Kinneret, the glasses full of sorrow and tears, the circuit board city, the car buyers trading in their sad and used lives/cars for someone else’s. Sometimes I struggle with individual sentences, sometimes I really enjoy individual sentences, sometimes both at the same time.
30 pages in! Liked it all but especially: Mucho’s trauma from the car lot, Oedipa using clothes to recreate a Rapunzel tower, and the disorientation of entering a place that did not grow up naturally. I idly wonder what Joan Didion thought of this book. And now onward!
Here’s a link to a view of the Remedios Varo painting that made Oedipa cry: https://historia-arte.com/obras/bordando-el-manto-terrestre
The accompanying essay proposes that the central figure is an alchemist who conjures golden threads from the four seamstresses.
Maybe the sunglasses that conceal Oedipa’s tears, that she wishes would preserve her tears so she could experience the same grief over and over, look like these:
https://femalehysteriavintage.com/products/1960s-black-white-sunglasses-foster-grant
thank you for the painting. i’m not sure why Oed was moved to tears–the painting feels ominous but not sad–just seems like another shift at the factory….
Oh thank you, that is so intersting to see. I never thought that there exists this image so I did not look it up. Very glad you did!
Intriguing that when Metzger awakes and starts getting it on with Oedipa, his first move is to “pierce” her with his eyes.
I can’t begin to guess what Metzger means by suggesting that his mother “was really out to kasher me, boy, like a piece of beef on the sink, she wanted me drained and white.”
“Six pairs of panties in assorted colors, girdle, three pairs of nylons, three brassieres, two pairs stretch slacks, four half-slips, one black sheath, two summer dresses, half dozen A-line skirts, three sweaters, two blouses, quilted wrapper, baby blue peignoir and old Orlon muu-muu.”
So many great lists in Pynchon.
“…clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the market, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a grey dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes…”
Salad of despair!!!
“She thought of a hotel room in Mazatlán whose door had just been slammed, it seemed forever, waking up two hundred birds down in the lobby; a sunrise over the library slop at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west; a dry disconsolate tune from the fourth movement of the Bartók Concerto for Orchestra; a whitewashed bust of Jay Gould that Pierce kept over the bed on a shelf so narrow for it she’d always had the hovering fear it would someday topple on them.”
Enjoying the ride. Thanks for herding us cats along!
Love the sarcastic naming of places/people – San Narciso, Oedipa Maas, Pierce Inverarity, Mucho Maas, Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek & McMingus, and of course, Dr. Hilarius. San Narciso has been sub/urban sprawling ever since (boom!).
The motel hairspray can explosion scene made me laugh out loud, at 6am, gate area before my flight.
Written 60 years ago, it still resonates (more?) (capitalism, corruption, power – and related societal distortions).
Everyone else seems more erudite than I, which suggests I may be a bad fit for this group — or this book. Took me days to get through the first 30 pages and I normally read at 60 pph. Enjoyed the punny naming, though.
You haven’t seen my post yet — it’s going to be “who is Lot 49 and why is he crying? 🙂
Very glad to have you here as always. And definitely a thorny read, but I think the slow-part is the joy for this one.
Howdy all,
I just made it to page 30!! Someone had mentioned earlier about reading it twice. I did that just to figure out what was going on. It took time to get the rhythm of his writing. Now that I have I am enjoying this interesting story!
I look forward to the next challenge!!
I grew up in one of those post-war circuit board suburban layouts surrounding Los Angeles in the 50s and 60s, and what is delighting me now is the references to things almost forgotten: Huntley and Brinkley, trading stamps, Perry Mason, a rented Impala, and the jam-packed opening phrase, “One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue….”
First time cracking open a Pynchon (a combination of having felt daunted by approaching any of his works and preemptively exhausted by what I assumed the tone would be, if a work like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice was any indication). Perhaps expecting the worst, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find it both relatively readable and narratively cohesive thus far – full of asides that feel like random synapses firing off but with an underlying plot that’s slowly starting to unravel. I’ve recently been rereading some short stories by one of my favorite writers, Raymond Carver, so this is certainly quite a change from his much more laconic writing style. Perhaps as someone who doesn’t know when to shut up, I’m more drawn to or impressed by that kind of prose (clearly something I have no mastery of). Still, there’s definitely poetry here and certain turns of phrase that surprise or feel inherently “true.”
Interested as well by how musical (literally) the start of this novel is – we pause for a number of songs in these relatively brief chapters. Makes me wonder what other great novels include a significant number of songs, given how antithetical it feels to the form. Like how they say it is tremendously difficult to make a great film about writing because it is such an interior act that the film often becomes akin to watching paint dry (the writer sits and think, then the writer sits and writes!).
Chapter 1–Exposition. Chapter 2-Scene. Which is more manic? After reading the first chapter I was ready to offer a critique of Pynchon as a novelist more interested in reflecting the dynamic (Yoyodyne) nature of modern (1960s) society in exposition than in allowing us to rest in a scene. Then in the second chapter, he allows us to rest in a scene, albeit a scene shot through with self-conscious cross-cutting and crazed energy. This was all super-impressive when I first read the book 40 years ago. Now I wouldn’t use the word “impressive” in the same sense. The names and gags and sheer irreverence of it all don’t exactly delight me as much as they make me marvel at young Pynchon’s compulsion to invent. This was a novelist making his bones through complementary use of hyperactive narrative observation and a combination of erudite and colloquial sentences. At the time this method was absolutely innovative, though one could argue he’d paid close attention to Nathanael West and Joe Heller in this book and in V.
Now, here’s what I highlighted this time around:
Page 1: “You’re so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.”–The room’s knowing is the trick, right? In a supremely pathetic fallacy, the room takes on Oedipa’s conscience.
Page 6: “Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else’s life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest.”–More of the same projection of consciousness onto things, a Pynchon obsession I think, that animation of things that become substitutes for people. Like flags, like causes.
Page 6: whatever it was about the lot that had stayed so alarmingly with him for going on five years. Five years. You comfort them when they wake pouring sweat or crying out in the language of bad dreams, yes, you hold them,”–What is it about the lot? Is everything a person does in life a battle and every memory PTSD?
Page 16: “There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out);”–Our brains are wired to seek patterns, the seed of planning and, ultimately, conspiracy theory. It’s just a matter of attention. I’ve been watching “Rear Window” this week and thinking about attention, especially the “delayed attention” that Hitchcock like to project in his films, usually through the use of pans that generate suspicion. I also think about poetry here as the art of paying close attention to things we take for granted. I think this is what Pynchon is up to, and why his narratives are poetic, necessarily digressive. But I digress.
Page 17: “words she couldn’t hear”–Narrative, like poetry, like reflection, are words we can’t hear until we pay attention to the fact that we can’t hear them. All careful description and reflection is words we can’t usually hear. Oedipa is a gifted observer. Or is that Pynchon? Does he just want us to pay closer attention? To everything?
Page 23:”The film is in an air-conditioned vault at one of the Hollywood studios, light can’t fatigue it, it can be repeated endlessly.”–Corporate is corporate. A copy is as good as the original, as long as we say that out loud. What Pynchon is trying to do in prose is like what Warhol was doing in visual art. Pynchon is invisible. Warhol was anything but. He himself was a product, a projection. Pynchon’s characters project for him. What role do we all have in creating the stuff of art even when we aren’t artists like The Paranoids. But maybe it’s paranoid to have to see projections of ourselves in everything, as if the moon and the night would bother to come for anyone. But at least those artists recognize the power of nature of the man-made housing development (Back to Nathanael West).
Page 28: “Metzger rushed in to find Oedipa rolling around, trying to get back on her feet, amid a great sticky miasma of fragrant lacquer.”–The hairspray can is a force with a (projected) consciousness (“The can knew where it was going”). It isn’t itself a life force, but it precedes both art (The Paranoids’ appearance) and sweet love whose climax literally turns out the lights. So, it provokes human urges, to sing, to procreate. Do we now, as a people, look to the world of chemicals, to the man-made world, for our inspiration. Ah, the technology! Ah, the AI.
Page 32 (Still in Chapter 2): “On the doorsill the Paranoids, as we leave milk to propitiate the leprechaun, had set a fifth of Jack Daniels.”–Pynchon makes room for old-school mythology. Are “we” trapping the leprechaun to watch it turn green (work its magic) or to kill it? What happens to musicians when they are tempted by drugs? Why did I think I would learn anything from watching that Billy Joel documentary? But seriously, who are “we” to Pynchon? What power do we have to control the random forces of nature and quasi-human life? We still want to, even if we’re helpless at the hands of our own creations.
I don’t know if I can read this book, it’s got a vortex in it.
My fave thing about Pynchon is the bit-dropping. The narrative flows by me like rapids; but remarks like “that strange ’30s movie music with the massive sax section” keep my attention like a stick jammed between rocks.
“like all things viscous it distressed him” Wimp.
As a SoCal native, I attest that places in California are indeed often “less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts”. It has made my novel set in San Dimas much easier to write, as the boundaries of ‘cities’ in the San Gabriel Valley are all very quantum.
What I want to see with the reels out of order is the art film Kurt presented in “Gilmore Girls”.
First time Pynchon reader here. Definitely noticed parallels to White Noise right off the bat but with a different twist of silliness. Really enjoyed The Paranoids bit and am shocked that band name hasn’t launched a thousand ships (just a few from a quick google search).
Also of note is the edition I’m reading which has lovely leading making it much easier to parse those extremely long sentences. So far I’m enjoying this journey, which is decidedly less arduous than struggling through Midnight’s Children (assiduously!) during Covid with a newborn by my side.
Ah, here’s to kind leading and genial margins! (and ornery meanders with newborns….)
I’m so tempted to give myself a Pynchonian renaming for the purposes of this discussion…but what would it be?! How to top these character names?!
Having not been exposed to Pynchon’s work until this week, I wasn’t prepared for its overwhelming verbal density – but OMG, what a ride that first 30 pages took me upon! Fighting the urge to read further before next week, to be honest.
Anyone else finding this really, really hard to read?! I feel like I start down a page and when I get to the middle of the page I realize I got lost somewhere on the way and I have to start over… This all to say that it’s slow going for me but I’ll keep meandering.
I love the names so far, from Oedipa to Mucho Maas (particularly Mucho makes me laugh as I’m reading these first 30 pages in Spain and am wondering in what way he’ll turn out to be “Much More” than others).
Ute,
I read this book as a 19 year-old, when I was dazzled by its dazzling pace, and was more likely to be so dazzled. I find it hard to read now, because over time I grew used to the manic narrative style, which I did and maybe still do love in novelists like Pynchon. I think meandering might be the antidote to readerly exhaustion and to appreciating what Pynchon was doing in 1965. I take the narrative mania to be a sign of rebellion in those times, which maybe doesn’t wear as well now, but still contains many of those gems. Oedipal. Mucho. Onward.
I have such a mixed track record making it through Pynchon — the words sometimes pushback or duck and dodge. But it helps me to underline and underline. 🙂 And when those long lists come to take the waterslide ride down. I am digging this slowed pace tho… Glad you are here Ute and I believe in you!
Yes, Ute, just the same here. I found myself astonished, that the english language allows such long sentences. I got the hint, it might help in the beginning to read it out loud. And it helped. Now it starts to be easier.
Having spent a few years of my very distant youth in Southern California (Orange County, to be specific), these first two chapters evoke a strange period in that region’s history. The 60s were all about the promise of California (think Beach Boys, Gidget movies, etc.), but there was a lot of darkness beneath the surface (think early aerospace industry and the military industrial complex). The circuit-board imagery feels dated to our oh-so-modern perspectives, but back then “digital machines” were just that–machines. And one of the most promising applications was for warfare. (Times sure have changed!)
I was curious about “[leaving] milk to propitiate the leprechaun,” but the most interesting piece of related information that I could find online was the fact that Lucky Charms were first released in 1964, one year before this book’s publication. Coincidence? 😉
There are no coincidences in Pynchonland.
Today it occurred to me to wonder if anyone had set Baby Igor’s Song to music. And of course someone has. It’s not bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jfS-qc-jnQ
That’s just a lovely thing the universe manifested.
Wow, so interesting. This is great to read something outside the usual stuff I read for distraction and entertainment. I never imagined what might happen if a hairspray can was pierced, but now I know! On a more serious note, felt a bit sad to think about Oedipa’s husband sitting at home while she got it on with Metzger. But perhaps her husband has his own experiences when they are apart and it works well for them. Looking forward to seeing what unfolds.
Pierced!!
Hello, everyone! Happy to be meandering with you all. Though these early chapters felt more like a strut from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks.
Dr. Vitz, I’m glad you brought up that out-of-sequence movie bit; I’ve been wondering about it too. First off, I’ve never seen a re-run that got the reels out of sequence. But I’ll grant TP a little creative license on that one.
And I’m with you that Oedipa’s wager is an odd one. Metzger knows how the movie ends, so why take his bet? Maybe because deep down she hopes to lose (if losing means being seduced, instead of staying trapped, Rapunzel-like, with a drip like Mucho Maas in the lasagna-layering hell of Kinneret-Among-The-Pines.)
Too, as Metzger points out, the bet’s legit so long as at least one person doesn’t know the outcome. Metzger knows how the film ends, and he knows if the reels are out of sequence. But he can’t know which ending Oedipa will wager on: rescue or death?
In somebody’s mind–say God’s, as I think Oedipa does at one point–the trajectory of that flying can of hairspray is already known, entirely predictable. The circuitboard of San Narciso was worked out in advance by Inverarity and his investment partners.
But from the perspective of an ordinary shlemiel like Oedipa (or us), intentions are sensed, but not seen. You feel there’s a script at work somewhere, but you can’t know where it’s going until the movie ends. The reels may slip out of sequence, but the movie comes to rest at the same place every time: The End.
Ending’s a lot like dying, and I thought I saw a lot of that in these early pages too. Inverarity’s the most obvious example (the Shadow of death?), but also, for me, were those used cars Mucho can’t sleep for having once traded, the detritus of each previous owner’s life identical to the next. The punters all thought they were trading up, but they were really just swapping one gray life for another. That was their bet maybe, that they could somehow break the circuit. Curious to see if Oedipa can break the one Inverarity’s set up for her. Onward!
I’ve never seen a rerun get reels out of sequence either, but based on my memories of those small local UHF stations that relied on old movies to fill out the schedule, I’ve seen them mess up the broadcast in some creative ways
I think about who, for Pynchon, is writing that script. And about that name, Inverarity.
A quick thought about names – Although Oepida could allude to Oedipus solving the riddle of the sphinx, it’s worth noting that Mucho calls her “Oed” which could allude to the O.E.D.
In Pynchon scholarship, it’s pretty much a cardinal rule that you must discuss 2 scenes from chapter 2 – Oedipa seeing southern California subdivision design as a circuit board, and the flight of the spray bottle. Both scenes are marked by Oedipa’s belief that both the subdivision layout & the can’s path are meaningful designs which, to steal Pynchon’s phrase, offer “some promise of hierophony”
But the chapter is really marked by how little design matters. The outcome of the bet should be certain, because the outcome of the movie is certain – so the Strip Botticelli serves no actual purpose. But along the way, film reels get confused, the can gets broken, Miles gets “duplicated,” and Metzger gets the prize even though Oedipa actually wins the bet
Anyway Oedipa’s lament closing Chapter 1 is gorgeously poignant in that recognition afforded by the painting in Mexico City–by the experience of standing before the painting in Mexico City–that her existence is characterized by captivity and no “knight of deliverance” offers any prospect of rescue. The men in her life–Mucho her husband, Roseman her lawyer, Hilarius her doctor–are, in a best-case scenario, useless to her. Maybe her “gut fear and female cunning” will prove to be weapons against the malignant magic that has her imprisoned. Maybe Pierce has posthumously offered her some escape tools. But we shouldn’t count on it. What is it that “remained [but] had, somehow, before this, stayed away” and will soon be revealed to her? I think we are already sensing by the end of page 12 that Oedipa deserves a better lot in life, a better bunch of cards, than the fat “conjurer’s deck” of indistinguishable days she’s been dealt.
This book is just so, so Pynchon right from the drop – the endless sentences, big words, goofy names, long lists, made-up songs…. Hard not to just gulp it all down.
Crikey!! It didn’t occur to me that I would not be able to obtain the Crying of Lot 49 more or less at a moment’s notice, but such is life in the wilds of Australia. Arrives October 14.
The scene with the hairspray banging around was so preposterously amusing! It reminded me of a comic writing technique I learned called “heightening.” It’s very hard to pull off, and Pynchon does it adeptly.
Pierce with those funny voices already sounds a LOT more fun than Mucho Maas. And Oedipa seems a lot brainier than Tupperware parties and lasagna layers leave room for. (Inverarity must’ve known this too, since he named her executor…er, executrix). What was Oedipa thinking? Rebound?
“Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men? The Shadow Knows.”
When I read this book in high school exactly 40 years ago, our teacher asked if any of us knew who Lamont Cranston was. I happened to be the only one who did. The reference must be completely obscure to almost anyone who picks the book up now.
For those who’d want to know: “The Shadow” was a super-popular radio serial in the ’30s and ’40s, sort of the Batman of its day. And Lamont Cranston was sort of the Bruce Wayne figure in “The Shadow.”
Thanks for this! So helpful. Would have never known that.
Oh thanks, that brings additional color to the reading!