The Crying of Lot 49

The test is subtractive, and it finds the spine required and the ornament partly permitted. Each clue Oedipa follows is necessary: the post horn on the latrine wall, the play with its one line about Trystero, the stamps, the night walk, the editions of Wharfinger, the auction. The Courier’s Tragedy, long as its summary is, cannot go, since it is the only place the Tristero speaks with a history. What could go with little loss is part of the comic machinery: the full length of Strip Botticelli and of Metzger’s career as the child actor Baby Igor, the Paranoids’ songs, part of the Inamorati Anonymous story, and the more cartoonish turns of Dr Hilarius’s breakdown. Each of these carries the theme of signal and noise, so none is idle, but each runs past the point where it adds a turn. Perhaps a tenth of the whole is permitted rather than compelled.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated. The America of the postwar boom is a closed estate, owned and willed by its Inveraritys, and beneath it lives a whole country of the excluded, the old, the addicted, the obsessive and the dispossessed, who communicate, if at all, by channels the estate does not carry. The night walk through San Francisco brings this into the open as no exposition could: Oedipa finds the post horn everywhere among people the official country does not see. The second disclosure is about knowing: in a society saturated with information, pattern and paranoia cannot be told apart from inside, and Oedipa’s alternatives at the end, a real Tristero, a hoax laid by Pierce or her own madness, are the “excluded middles” she cannot escape. The axis meets the bar and goes no higher, because the second disclosure is partly a mood of dread, and the book withholds by design the ground on which the first could be tested.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Elevation comes in a few great moments set in a comic medium. Oedipa weeping in Mexico City before Remedios Varo’s painting of girls in a tower, embroidering a tapestry that spills from the windows and becomes the world, is the first height, and its image of a self that weaves what it takes to be the world governs the rest. The night walk rises continuously, and the old sailor shaking with the delirium tremens, whom Oedipa holds, is the book’s purest transport, a pity close to the religious. The last page, the auction room locked and the bidder about to declare himself, is a suspended sublime. Held in the low eights because much of the book is slapstick and satire, and its heights are few and spaced.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Much of the myth is built. Oedipa’s name carries the riddle-solver who finds that the riddle is about himself, and the book inverts the pattern: the quest yields no answer, and the question becomes whether the solver has made the world she reads. The maiden in the tower, from the Varo painting, is built into that question, a woman weaving what she takes for the world. The quest for the Grail runs through the waste land of San Narciso and the system called W.A.S.T.E., and Narcissus is in the city’s name. Held a tenth below the bar because the myths are layered as allusion as often as they are load-bearing, and because Oedipa, by design, is more a reader of patterns than a figure who bears one.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is the detective novel of the California private eye, Borges’s fictions of invented worlds and hidden orders, Nabokov’s play, the Jacobean revenge tragedy, and Pynchon’s own V. (1963), which had already built a long novel on the quest for a conspiracy that may be imaginary. The swerve is the detective story that refuses its solution and ends at the instant before revelation, with a woman as the detective and the postal system as the conspiracy, so that the genre of certainty becomes the genre of undecidable knowledge. The stake was smaller than V.’s: a short, accessible book after a large one, in a genre frame. Held two tenths below the bar because the undecidable quest was V.’s and Borges’s before it was this book’s, and the turn here is concentration more than departure.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The novel is a detective story whose last scene is withheld, and the withholding is the whole of its knowledge: told to a solution, in either direction, it would become a thriller or a case history; ended at the crying, it leaves the reader where Oedipa stands, between a real Tristero and a projected one, with no ground to choose. The reader’s work is the heroine’s, sorting signal from noise in a text dense with names, acronyms and false leads, and the book’s discourse on entropy, Nefastis’s machine and Maxwell’s Demon with the sensitive who must feed it information, is built into what the reader does. The play within the novel, a revenge plot that turns on a changed text, mirrors the novel’s concern with corrupted transmission. Held below the top because some set pieces are containers for comedy rather than instruments, and the short form limits how far the method can be tested.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence over sixty years: for its length the book has drawn one of the largest critical literatures of any American novel of its decade, and it has been a standing text in the teaching of postwar fiction. The questions it plants do not close: whether the Tristero exists; whether Pierce Inverarity designed the whole as a last joke; who the bidder for lot 49 is; how the book’s imagery of the Word and the tongues relates to its thermodynamics; whether the excluded America is a fact or Oedipa’s need. Each rereading finds a new connection among the names and the clues. Held in the mid eights because part of what the scholarship does is decoding, which is difficulty before it is depth, and because a reserve about the book’s manner is shared by many who return to it.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The field is American fiction of the 1960s in English: Heller, Vonnegut, Barth, Barthelme, Bellow and Pynchon’s own V. The intrinsic force is real: the book gave the anti-detective novel its compact American form and made paranoia an epistemology for the novel, a way of asking how a culture of information can be known at all. Held a tenth below the bar because much of the reach belongs to Pynchon’s work as a whole, with V. and Gravity’s Rainbow carrying the larger reorganisation, and because this book concentrates a method rather than founding one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the most taught of Pynchon’s books and, for many readers and syllabi, the usual entry to American postmodern fiction; its figure of the quest for an undecidable conspiracy passed into later fiction; and the post horn has become a sign beyond the book.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over sixty years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print continuously. Presence is wide and steady through teaching and translation: it is a set text in many university courses and the usual first Pynchon, though its presence among general readers is narrower than that of the most widely read American novels of its decade. Its surface is fixed hard to its moment: Tupperware, a disc jockey’s station called KCUF, experiments with LSD, a parody of a British Invasion band, a defence contractor named Yoyodyne. That surface is the subject, the culture of signals the book anatomises, and it has dated into period rather than into irrelevance; the book reads more pertinently in an age of networks than in its own. It stands at the foot of the usual figure for its span, and sixty years demonstrate less than centuries.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Judged on Pynchon’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the long, comic, swerving sentence and of register. The opening, in which Oedipa learns she has been “named executor, or she supposed executrix”, compresses a social world and a mind into one sentence; the pastiche of The Courier’s Tragedy imitates Jacobean blank verse with a real ear and turns on one line ending “tryst with Trystero”; the night walk sustains a long lyrical paragraph without slackening. The invented names, songs and acronyms are dense and exact in their function, and “Shall I project a world?” states the book’s question as a question. Charges hold it below the top: the names and the slapstick sometimes thin the characters to devices; some passages overwrite; and the comedy at moments strains, as with Hilarius at the window with a rifle.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the game of Strip Botticelli in the Echo Courts motel, Oedipa putting on all her clothes with the Paranoids on the lawn, and the old sailor in a rooming house, shaking with the delirium tremens. They obey one law: every encounter is a problem of transmission, of whether what passes between people is signal or noise, and the book’s entropy, thermodynamic and informational at once, governs the comic and the elegiac alike. Mucho’s LSD, Hilarius’s paranoia, Driblette’s walk into the Pacific and the forged stamps are all instances of it. The range is wide in tone, from slapstick to elegy. Charged: the cartoon physics of some comic turns runs looser than the night walk, and the short span limits the range on which the law is tested.

Score: 8.6 / 10

For a short novel it holds many orders, joined by one question, what can be communicated. Consciousness, in Oedipa’s suspicion of her own mind. Marriage, in Mucho, and sex, in Metzger. Property and capital, in Inverarity’s estate, which is a city. The military and industrial order, in Yoyodyne. History, in Thurn and Taxis and the Pony Express. The state, as the postal monopoly. Science, in thermodynamics and information. The sacred, in the Word and the tongues. Class and the dispossessed, in the night walk. They are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the form holds these orders as signals rather than as lives: the family across time, labour and the natural order are thin, and the dispossessed are glimpsed in a night rather than held. A low mark on a short form describes the form.

Score: 8.0 / 10