Contemporary Novelists, 6th ed.

[Dave Monroe]

ritic: Jan Pilditch
Source: Contemporary Novelists, 6th ed., edited by Susan Windisch
Brown, St. James Press, 1996
Criticism about: Thomas (ruggles), (jr.) Pynchon (1937-), also known
as: Thomas Pynchon, Thomas (Ruggles) Pynchon, (Jr.), Thomas Ruggles
Pynchon, Jr., Thomas Ruggles Pynchon

Paranoia, or the suspicion of it, is not uncommon in the world of
Pynchon's novels. Oedipa Maas, in The Crying of Lot 49, cannot be
certain that she has discovered an alternative Postal Service in
America, nor whether it has any connection with the legacy left by her
rich one-time lover, nor whether there really is a group of alienated
citizens in America whose lives are lived without participating in
ordinary American life and its institutions. It may be mere delusion,
and the reader like Oedipa, is tantalized into a quest for
significance amid linguistic brilliance in which meaning is possible,
but never quite confirmed, and a style which can charge any moment
with significance. The reader's experience can be Oedipa's when she
first views San Narciso. She is reminded of her first sight of a
transistor circuit, "... though she knew even less about radios than
about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a
hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.
There seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her
(if she had tried to find out)." This surfeit of form can forge a
satiric metaphor, which measures the loss and decay of communication
in the post-Joycean novel: it is akin to the debris and detritus which
form the central metaphor for civilization in The Crying of Lot 49.
This latter is epitomized in the novel by Mucho Maas's used car lot:
"... 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 ... it was horrible.
Endless, convoluted incest." It is in this sense that Pynchon's
allusions to popular or low culture, at least as frequent as his
allusions to classical or high culture, may be best understood. His
latest novel, Vineland, which casts a satiric eye at the television
and video generation, is steeped in such allusion. The detritus clogs
the attempted communication; the system disintegrates.

http://edphelps.net/bookclub/Callie/Crying_of_lot_49_02.htm