Sunday Pages: "The Crying of Lot 49"
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Maxwell's demon
15 min read
The article mentions 'a thought experiment debunking the second law of thermodynamics' - this refers to Maxwell's demon, a central metaphor in Lot 49. The novel uses this physics thought experiment as a key symbol for information, entropy, and communication systems.
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Revenge tragedy
13 min read
The article references 'Jacobean revenge plays' as a plot element in Lot 49. Pynchon invented a fictional revenge tragedy called 'The Courier's Tragedy' that drives much of the novel's mystery - understanding this theatrical genre deepens appreciation of his literary parody.
Dear Reader,
When I was in my early twenties, a novelist on the make, there were three writers who, for me, comprised the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of literary fiction—not so much for their output, but for their technical brilliance. Writing is about writing, after all, and no one else wrote better, on a granular level, than these three.
This is all subjective, I realize, and of course there are plethoras of talented writers unknown to me 30 years ago, or not yet operational, who are just as good. But as I saw it back in the 90s, no one constructed sentences of greater beauty than the Holy Trinity of Vladimir Nabokov, J.D. Salinger, and Thomas Pynchon.
Together, they cover three generations: respectively, the Lost (b. 1899), Greatest (b. New Year’s Day 1919), and Silent (b. 1937). And all three are loosely related. Pynchon took Nabokov’s writing class at Cornell and, owing to his reclusiveness—which is not reclusiveness as much as a reluctance to have his photo taken—was thought, by at least one conspiracy theorist of Alex Jonesian imagination, to be Salinger.
None of these connections amounted to much. Nabokov gave Salinger a great review but did not remember Pynchon from his lectures; Pynchon was not, is not, Salinger.
In the early 90s, when the collective personality of “Generation X” was still being formed, what we most wanted was to write a novel that some esteemed Boomer book critic would call “the Catcher in the Rye for this generation.” There were a few such Gen X Catchers in the Rye already in circulation by then: Less Than Zero; Bright Lights, Big City; Slaves of New York; Generation X itself. When I was young and stupid—as opposed to middle-aged and slightly less stupid—that was the literary moon I was shooting for.
My first (and blessedly unpublished) novel was called My Brain Is Full; the title is derived from a Far Side comic strip. I wrote it my senior year of college. There was a lot of senior-year-of-college stuff going on, but the plot, such as it was, involved an aspiring young novelist-in-training making a pilgrimage to Cornish, New Hampshire, to the home of the (genuinely) reclusive Salinger. Much like an Athenian of old approaching the Oracle at Delphi, our youthful first-person narrator hoped to find wisdom at the great writer’s remote, rustic farmhouse. What he found instead was
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