Suggestions (Gale Online 3 - T.C.O.L.49)

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Source: Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.

    The Crying of Lot 49 has only one protagonist, another quester with
the quest-hero's resonant name of Oedipa, and only one line of action,
which remains resolutely chronological. Readers are thus largely spared
the task of making connections within the story and left to observe the
spectacle of the hero making her own connections which is to say either
discerning them in or projecting them onto a satirically envisioned
landscape of Southern California at mid- century. The parodic quality of
V. is if anything intensified in The Crying of Lot 49, where Oedipa Maas
(the surname means "more" in Spanish and is close to "measure" in
German) is joined by Manny DiPresso, Stanley Koteks, Genghis Cohen, and
a rock group called the Paranoids. Manfred Puetz suggests in his study
The Story of Identity that Pynchon's characters tend to be stereotypical
and "curiously one-dimensional" precisely because of the interpretive
dilemmas in which they find themselves: "they remain caught in their
situations" and "act out the same obsessions in compulsive
repetitiveness." Certainly the metaphors of entrapment that confine
Oedipa also define her. She is most memorably a princess in a tower
weaving a tapestry that comes to constitute the world.
    Like V., The Crying of Lot 49 is concerned with the "plot" of
history, embodied in the force that might be behind a spectral
underground association called the Tristero. The novel is also more
explicit than V. in its assertion of decoding activities as
characteristic of scientific thinking and to this end uses the concept
of entropy as an aspect of both physics and information theory. As Ann
Mangel notes in an essay appearing in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on
Thomas Pynchon, "By building his fiction on the concept of entropy, or
disorder, and by flaunting the irrelevance, redundancy, disorganization,
and waste involved in language, Pynchon radically separates himself from
earlier twentieth-century writers, like [William Butler] Yeats, [T. S.]
Eliot, and Joyce." But this antimodernism becomes productive, a critique
of the modernist rage for order and in the process an exemplary
postmodernism, inasmuch as it sees in the order of closed artistic
systems an analogue of the conditions for entropic rundown. Mangel
continues, "the complex, symbolic structures [that the modernists]
created to encircle chaotic experience often resulted in the kinds of
static, closed systems Pynchon is so wary of."
    (continued)

Source: Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.