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.

Possibly the most boring book I've ever read. The ONLY redeemable thing about this book is that it is mercifully short.

I would give this book 2.5 stars if possible. Good, but not great.

I "get" the book, and I sympathize with those on both sides; read any of the reviews here and you'll see how extremely polarizing this book (and, indeed, Pynchon, in general) is.

As another reviewer said: it is interesting but not compelling. Paranoia for paranoia's sake. The ending was fitting, and I don't fault that. It has its moments as well as some genuinely funny passages. But the characters are forgettable. A lot of it is forgettable. It's one of those books where it's more satisfying to describe the plot than it is to actually read the book. In all, there may be about five memorable passages in the whole story.

I'm glad I read it and, perhaps, I may read it again to give it another chance. I found that it was a hard book to hate, and easy to like--or, rather, easy to *want* to like. But after giving it some thought, it seems that it tries too hard to say too much without saying anything of any significance at all.

But worse things could be said about a book. At least he tried.

This book is dated.

But that doesn't mean you can't enjoy it. It references songs, topics, and people who are not necessarily known today. If you are the age of the author or perhaps the age of his children (provided he had them young), then yes, you would be able to get the reference without the aid of Wikipedia and Google. However, I'm much younger (over 30 but under 40), so I had to keep my laptop close at hand while reading. This is not a problem for me. I learn this way, but if you are turned off by that, then perhaps you should give this book a pass.

There really isn't a strong plot here. What plot does exist can be described as a gerbil, spending his days running on a wheel, never really getting anywhere but expending a lot of energy.

In my opinion, this novel's saving grace was the humor. The more-than-memorable characters and their names give rise to a small and sometimes outlandish chuckle.

A sentence can be as long as a paragraph and a paragraph can span an entire page, but if you stick with it (I found reading slowly and sometimes aloud helped me to stay focused and not loose the subject of a page-long sentence) the worst thing that will happen is that you will have had one hell-of an experience.

I must disagree with the reviewers that found "Crying of Lot 49" unreadable. It's as easy to read as the back of a cereal box (and just as edifying - perhaps less so). I can imagine the author giggling as he came up with the silly character names, surely delightful to anyone under the age of twelve - or Pynchon's fans in academe. The professor in whose class I first read this novel made an issue of the names' implications: "Oedipa" is significant because it is the female form of "Oedipus;" her nickname, "Oed," is pronounced like a man's name ("Ed"); "O.E.D." stands for "Oxford English Dictionary," significant in that the O.E.D. has lots of different words in it, I guess. The book provides endless opportunities for this sort of meaningless theorizing. The names are about all the characters have to distinguish them - they are so lacking in depth as to make Cap'n Crunch look like Captain Ahab in comparison. The nonexistent plot consists of nothing more than a string of pointless incidents that could just as well be read in reverse order with no loss of meaning.

Pynchon concludes the novel with the unforgiveable sin of failing to write the final chapter. If he meant that the mysterious bidder's identity is both everyone and no one, he succeeded - it doesn't matter who it is. If the author doesn't care, why should we?