The Crying of Lot 49 puts me in mind of the classic film, Citizen Kane. Both have an enigmatic "great man," deceased, lurking in the shadows of the story -- Pierce Inverarity and Charles Foster Kane. Both have a cardboard cutout of a character pursuing the meaning of the man -- Oedipa Maas and Thompson, the reporter. Both serve up a tantalizing key to that meaning -- Tristero and Rosebud.

Pierce Inverarity died a few months prior to the beginning of CL49, leaving his former mistress, Oedipa Maas as his executor. He had amassed great wealth in real estate and Oed thought his lifestyle would provide escape from the gray Eisenhower years of her life. She found he was more absorbed in his stamp collection than with her, but also came to realize that the lifestyle which transported her to exotic locales in Mexico provided only the illusion of escape. She returned to her world of tupperware parties, where we first meet her, recovering from the spiked punch they offer.

We see no depth to her character and relate to Oedipa mostly through her role in searching for meaning in one person's life. Ostensibly, that would be Pierce Inverarity's, but it is also potentially her own and, by extension, our own. The key to unlocking the enigma is Tristero and the keyhole is first exposed with the cancelled stamp marked "Report All Obscene Mail to Your Potsmaster." This misspelling starts her on a path through the brown conformity of southern California, finding stepping stones of non-conformity amidst the military industrialism of the Yoyodyne corporation, the ticky-tacky housing and resort developments of Pierce Inverarity.

Tristero links these pockets of non-conformity through its secret mail system which sprang up in opposition to the monopoly of the European state-endorsed postal system. The downtrodden, those at the edge of society, those with a severe mistrust of the established order use the American incarnation of Tristero to communicate with each other.

Pynchon creates a bridge between the engineering and literary worlds by introducing entropy as a motif in his story. Notoriously confusing, entropy is clarified by a recent interpretation as a measure of freedom. Entropy in nature tends to increase, but can be locked in a stasis. An ice crystal remains rigidly frozen until it receives a small amount of melt energy. Entropy decreases temporarily with the addition of this energy, but then increases dramatically when the water molecules are freed to move out of their locked position in the crystal. One can also imagine that, with the right activation energy, the rigid grid of drafting tables of the Yoyodyne engineering department can be freed to form a society for creative invention.

Pynchon closes his book with an image of brilliant points of dust dancing in a patch of sunlight outside the door to the auction room. As the door closes on Oedipa, we wonder whether she can use Tristero to free herself from herself, to dance on the light beams of imagination, or that this quest is just another illusion of escape.