Here we go, friends!
A mighty showing, one and all! Well done careening collectively toward the finish!
And yes, this is a wee book. But the language is thorny, scenes swirl into each other, the comedy is mixed with some horror, intentional or otherwise. And it’s a Pynchon gol-dang it. Just picking it up off the shelf earns you an arched eyebrow and a round of applause coming from somewhere unclear.
Now comes the wrap, and as always, I don’t know about other folks — but you — you’re made of the stuff.
This coming week: We charge many-as-one, Mucho-style, for the back cover. Shout out when you make it, with closing thoughts. And then next week, in addition to hinting at and not really telling you much about The Mystery Prize, we’ll also offer up a glimmer of the plan for the idea of a January Meander, with a twist or two new to these adventures.
Happy Lot 49ing — enjoy it to the last. And thanks again for the excellent companionship and commentary at every step!
-Cecil
I knew before I even finished this book that it needed a re-read to fully soak into my consciousness.
A couple of things:
1. I feel like Pynchon probably delighted in the creation of the term “trolling.” Or his Pierce Inverarity would have, anyway. Maybe?
2. I kind of delighted in finding a typo here and there. With his Pynchon’s writing style, I always doubted whether something was truly “wrong” or cleverly “wrong on purpose.” Which is in line with the paranoia in the book, I guess!
3. I underlined so many cool words in this book. Pynchon’s English is delightfully insane and enlightening.
4. Mucho’s LSD-laced interpretation of Muzak reminded me a bit of the way that a hallucination was depicted in Midsommar. It felt fantastical yet somehow true to life. It was, as Mucho might say, very groovy!
Salutations, fellow Meanderers. I appreciated both your commentary as well as the format of this trip we’ve been on; thanks to Cecil for being our conductor. I must say that the timing of this read has been either pure serendipity or a wonderfully insightful choice of something perfectly suited to our present zeitgeist.
And indeed that is where I arrived with this reading. Oedipa’s plight at the end is much like the era in which we find ourselves: grasping for meaning, confounded by truthiness and alternative facts, buffeted by conspiracy theories which increasingly appear to have been credible explanations of reality. What is it then—truth, hallucination (thanks, AI giants, for making that commonplace), a conspiracy against me, or a delusion of such?
“Those, now that she was looking at them, she saw to be the alternatives. Those symmetrical four. She didn’t like any of them, but hoped she was mentally ill; that that’s all it was.”
That definitely tracks. Early best wishes for a safe and happy holiday season; may the Trumpet be muted in 2026!
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here (and I was about to post an independent comment but you’ve largely preempted me so I’ll do it as a reply).
One of the most resonant themes of this book (which is one of my very favorites) is the question of whether (or to what extent) the conspiracies Oedipa perceives are real or imagined. I was born just a couple years after its publication, and I’d say this question has persisted as one of the most eminently animating social psychologies in my lifetime.
The funny thing is I finished the book right after my week 4 post, and checked off in my mind as done. Alas this is symbolic of my general failures in communication.
I’m glad it all wrapped up so nicely. No unanswered questions here.
Reading this book reminds me that science fiction has always been predictive and that the keys to understanding our present dilemmas lie in our past or at least simulacra of our past. As a writer and professor and citizen I’m really pessimistic about the outcome of our push toward AI everything. How long before we supplant our own creativity? Not long before we lose half our jobs and have trouble figuring out how to create new ones, because we have raised two generations who are terrified of failure and the need for reinvention, and who anyway don’t have the attention span to solve these sorts of problems. I’m pretty convinced that the conspiracy Pynchon explores is no longer conspiracy. It’s a business model for a privileged few. So Crying is a good reminder of our spot, and also depressing. I think that as fiction it’s a bit outmoded and much in the way that, say, Neuromancer is. Fiction writers are free to embody confusion and the speed of contemporary society and tech, but does that method make for enjoyable reading? Does it give us space and time to think? Or does it just remind us that we no longer can do that very clearly? On the upside, Pynchon is gallows funny, and that matters. Pierce and part the overwhelming wave and maybe you see the sun again.
I made it!!
Towards the end I let go and just tumbled aimlessly through the prose. I’d grab a hold of a plot point for dear life.
And at the end we are left to imagine the real conclusion.
Who is bidding for Tristero?
A very interesting, challenging and provoking read.
I look forward to the next… challenge…
And now we know what “THE CRYING OF LOT 49” is
Still here, so close to the finish line! I gotta say that if I’m going to read a challenging book, I much prefer it to be as short as this one. Leaves a little
time for re-reading (and re-reading again) to try to catch the meaning of those meandering sentences.
At the end, when Oedipa doesn’t get an answer to the Tristero Conspiracy, it seems like symbolism for so many of the elements in the book that don’t have easy answers. In particular, there is so much emphasis on religion throughout the book, and I think the end could be pointing to religion and other complex belief systems where there is most often not a clear set of ideals or a black-and-white way to think about them.
Staggering towards the finish line!
I first read this book over 20 years ago. I can’t say that this reading “made more sense” than it did the first time around, but I definitely enjoyed it a lot more. Don’t know whether it’s because I’m 20 years older wiser (the latter is totally debatable) or because so much has changed societally, culturally, and technologically over those 20. Makes me think that maybe I should reread Gravity’s Rainbow.
… Nah!
Poor Oedipa. I feel so sorry for her. She decides that she is dealing with four “symmetrical” alternatives. First, that she’s stumbled “onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American” she knows. Second, that she’s hallucinating it. Third, that an expensive and elaborate plot has been mounted against her, “so
labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke.” And finally, that she’s “fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull.”
“For this, oh God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead. Old fillings in her teeth began to bother her. She would spend nights staring at a ceiling lit by the pink glow of San Narciso’s sky. Other nights she could sleep for eighteen drugged hours and wake, enervated, hardly able to stand.“
It’s hard to leave Oedipa in the locked room with the cruel men, but it’s where she wants to be. I hope she finds her way.
I have thoughts but they’re not coelescing into sentences– perhaps a hangover from the book. Glad I read it!
Keep it bouncing.
Happy to finish my first Pynchon book.
Happier that it was meander style.
Greetings Everyone, & thanks for the Meander. Twice as fun walking through it with all of you.
Am I the only one who found the ending disappointing? I never cared enough about the Thurn & Taxis / Tristero subplot to follow it carefully, happy to let that history “slither unseen” (p. 134). Metzger, Mucho, Hilarius and Driblette drop away; Inverarity was never there. I didn’t remember the Bortzes (they’re not all that memorable), Genghis Cohen’s little more than a funny name.
That leaves Oedipa.
We leave her at the end still in the dark, awaiting Illumination, an avatar stripped (“they are stripping from me,” p. 125) to her binary code: “Ones and zeros” (p. 150). Either Tristero exists or she’s a paranoiac nut. Either there’s an Other (“Trystero would symbolize the Other quite well,” p. 128) or she’s Narcissist-in-Chief of San Narciso:
“Meaning what? That Bortz, along with Metzger, Cohen, Driblette, Koteks, the tattooed sailor in San Francisco, the W.A.S.T.E. carriers she’d seen—that all of them were Pierce Inverarity’s men? Bought? Or loyal, for free, for fun, to some grandiose pracitcal joke he’d cooked up, all for her embarrassment, or terrorizing, or moral improvement?” (p. 140)
Either post horn or swastika. “Transcendant meaning” or “only a power spectrum (p. 150). “We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire” or “the bones of the G.I.s at the bottom of Lake Inverarity”( p. 150). Boxcar America (p. 149), with its secret hobo signs, or Pierce’s sprawling suburban one:
“San Narciso had no boundaries. No one knew yet how to draw them. She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America.” (p. 147)
Typing it out like this, it looks a little mechanical, and I felt that as I read it; a young author with loads to say trying to tie up too much quickly, with a tiny bow. But too much is a good problem to have, and he got better at it as he went along. And longer!
And it’s not all Ones and Zeros, open and shut. The alternatives interpenetrate. So there’s always a hope for a glimpse of:
“that magical Other who would reveal herself out of the roar of relays, monotone litanies of insult, filth, fantasy, love, whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger for the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word.” (p. 149)
That magical Other pops up in unexpected places. Print errors in stamp runs (p. 144). The oddly scholarly railroad drifters “speaking as if they were in exile from somewhere else, invisible yet congruent with the cheered land she lived in” (p. 149). “The sound of a stainless orchestral chime held among the stars and struck lightly” before it “became a name again, was assumed back into the American continuity of crust and mantle” (p. 147).
I love those moments in Pynchon, where his paranoia shades into the mystical: the world as we see is doesn’t gets the last word.
Now for the final riddle: Cecil, what’s the super-secret Mystery Prize??
I would like to put this book into Chat GPT and ask it to help me express myself more clearly and see what comes up. Conspiracy to the end. It’s all about the bones and the stamps. My money is on rogue underground postal service!
(Sort of?) oLike the 1s and 0s of the computer, I liked and didn’t like the book, found the plot engaging and frustrating, the sentences beautiful or baffling, feeling like I was close to finding deep understanding and otherwise totally confused.
Reminded me a little bit of a couple of my favorite older memories of my father, who, in his later years, suggested the events in question never actually happened. He could have been putting me on, his memory could have faltered, or maybe I imagined things that did not actually occur. Initially, it bothered me not knowing what was true. Now, I kind of like the idea that all of it may have happened. Or not.
Thanks TP and CV for the read
Can certainly relate to going down rabbit holes, trying to find those connections – real and imagined – that may exist. So in that spirit, a recommendation, facially perhaps unappealing but assuredly no more impenetrable than this text generally was.
I was thinking about Borges and his short story collection Ficciones, which has multiple tales approaching academically a fictional text/history, as we have here. Borges, in turn, was a major influence on the excellent Argentinian 3-part film Extraordinary Stories. Filled with convoluted tales, meandering tangents, paranoia, and possible secret organizations, I can see it scratching the same itch for some of the meanderers.
I see now, having already written all this out, that the film is currently not available on any obvious streaming service. But perhaps that is fitting. Maybe it was all just a figment of my imagination or sabotage at an intergovernmental level that is keeping it from the masses. Wish me luck as I try to unravel this conspiracy.
I found the plot turns a bit too thick overall, but I like the cosmic connections that the book postulates (and even some of the ones that I’m still trying to understand!). For example: “Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time . . . . But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person’s time line sideways till they all coincide. Then you’d have this bog, God, maybe couple hundred million chorus saying ‘rich, chocolaty goodness’ together, and it would all be the same voice.”
This happily reminds me of Milan Kundera’s idea in Immortality that gestures, being common among us, cannot be regarded as one “person’s instrument” — “it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations.”
When reading a Pynchon book I cycle from thinking he’s the greatest writer ever to write, to thinking he’s the most exasperating person ever to live, and back again, sometimes several times in the course of a page. But there’s something addictive about him. I jumped straight into my own slog (really there are no Meanders of Pynchon, are there?) through V. (actually overlapped by a couple weeks). Making decent progress but I’ll miss the company.
Yes, that line struck me, too, even after Election Day.
I agree that the ending is frustrating but inevitable. For most of the book I thought Oedipa was paranoid, but I ended leaning toward the literalist view that Tristero actually existed in the novel.
And finally, I, too, am impressed with the erudition of our fellow meanderers. Looking forward to the next one (as we await silent Tristero’s empire).
Wait — what line? “This is America. You live in it. You let it happen.”
Hm … I can tell you, the german translation is not good. So I ended up finishing with the original. I would have loved to know who the book bidder might be. On the other hand – I liked the fact, that the story ends with Oedipa waiting for crying of lot 49.
I am still not sure if I enjoyed the reading. I had to fight myself through parts of the book. But I might read it again to find all the gems you were seeing.
However: Thank you for letting me join this adventure!
I’ll be honest- although I was first seriously irked at the ending(??), in retrospect I can’t see it closing out any other way after the sheer chaos of Oedipa’s journey. Pynchon’s prose is such a firehose of context in minutia I’m pretty sure I’ll end up taking a second pass to fully unpack it all.
Wow (and bravo)… although I think I’ll need a stiff drink and a long walk now. Really really glad to have meandered this one with you all!
“She would give them order, she would create constellations. It was her duty, it was her love, it was her stuckness, it was her humanity.”
~Oedipa Maas
As the possibilities narrow and the time to the revelation shortens, in the end, there is always another delta-t
That infinitely small fraction in which the outcome seems so certain, but just like playing Strip Botticelli as a part of a bet on movie, anything is actually possible despite that certainty
We are always so close to knowing if it’s all random or all rigorously plotted, but there are so many delta-ts between us and it
Cecil — I’d like to share a photo of a post horn sighting with my fellow Meanderers. Can that be arranged?
it can! Sam sent me the photo and I’ll share it in the Sunday post. Thanks Sam!
If ever there was a book that should have “The End?” at the bottom of the last page, this is it.
When does The Crying of Lot 50 come out?
I thought having coffee in my Against the Day mug would be appropriately celebratory as I made it to the finish line. I thought what a nightmare it would have been to be the copyeditor on this book. I thought, is that actually a typo on page 151 (“was” for “way”) in a book that has been reprinted dozens of times in the last 60 years? I related to the ones and zeroes section–“Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none.” I feel like if I read it again I could excavate a bit more meaning. But I don’t want to. Glad I was along for the meander, glad for all the enlightenment that wiser commenters than I provided. Thanks to all!
In her conversation with Fallopian, Oedipa “sensed what he was going to say and began, reflexively, to grind together her back molars. A nervous habit she’d developed in the last few days.” Then, after she was “teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum,” and realizing that “there was nobody who could help her,” the teeth are back again. “Odd fillings in her teeth began to bother her.” I picture the molar grinding reaching a crescendo as Genghis escorts Oedipa into the auction room and waits for Loren Passerine to begin to cry Lot 49.
Thank you, Cecil, for a most difficult and downright ornery Meander! Awaiting the January reveal!
“The first piece to provide substantial information about Pynchon’s personal life was a biographical account written by a former Cornell University friend, Jules Siegel, and published in Playboy magazine. In his article, Siegel reveals that Pynchon had a complex about his teeth and underwent extensive and painful reconstructive surgery.” -Wikipedia
Just a few pages into this chapter and I feel beat up. First Serge and his 8-year-old; then Winthrop Tremaine; then this:
“You’re chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen.”
Damn, Tommy, why you gotta do me like that?
Same reaction and I underlined that one too as yet another line that felt too close to home… And that said, happy election day! 🙂