A not so positive short 1966 review (Warren French, Col49)

[bulb at vheissu.net]

French, Warren. Review of The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon. Western
American Literature, vol. 1 no. 2, 1966, p. 142-143. Project MUSE,
<http://doi.org/10.1353/wal.1966.0002> doi:10.1353/wal.1966.0002.

 

The Crying of Lot 49. By Thomas Pynchon.

(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1966. 183 pages, $3.95.)

 

The West doesn't end at the Sierra Madre. Beyond plains and prairies and
last lettuce ranch, it falls- often quite literally- into the cool,
complacent Pacific. Along the sea's littoral, the dregs of the Westward
Movement have deposited - like a town hiding its garbage in a ravine at its
edge - a litter of paranoid suburbs, their ceaseless conspiratorial
whisperings erupting only occasionally into the grating grunts of
motorcycles and the nightmare shrieks of old men dreaming of losing money.

 

This twilight zone is the West as much as the land of "High Noon,"- a gilded
fringe dipped too often in gravy - and some time our novelists are going to
have to come to terms with its senile sun-seekers, frantic-to-be fashionable
junior executives, atavistic hordes of juvenile delinquents. Some day we are
going to learn how the land that sprawls from Palo Alto to Chula Vista has
turned the old alchemist's wistful dream into living nightmare by converting
movie stars into public officials, peroxided tramps into cult goddesses,
subliterate outcasts from other states into authorities on education,
morals, and art.

 

All this by way of preface to saying that Thomas Pynchon, who recently
stirred some excitement in the literary world with his novel V, has ventured
into California's Suburbia in his second, The Crying of Lot 49, blazing a
trail others might follow through the cultural quagmire. He leaves, it must
be ruefully admitted, much for the others to do; for, like a little kid at
Disneyland, Pynchon has been so overawed by the abundance and vulgarity of
his material that he has lost sight of the neon forest in his fascination
with the polyethylene trees. Pynchon has the style to do the job: "One
summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose
hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she,
Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of
one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul. . . ." So begins the
unlikely tale; unfortunately, it gets little further. We never learn much
more about the Inverarity estate, Mrs. Maas's claim to it, or her eventual
fate at the hands of some sinister rival of the government postoffice, the
trail of which she happens to cross. Perhaps Pynchon's point is that in
Kitschland, cleverness becomes an end in itself, nothing does ever get
anywhere, distraction and dissipation are the end of effort; but a
successful novel must be more than a comic distorting mirror. Pynchon
reminds us that there's a lot left to be done in fiction with Western
materials, but he doesn't get around to doing much of it. Let's hope someone
else will really get this fantastic show on the road.

 

Warren French, University of Missouri at Kansas City.

 

Happy holidays!

Michel.