The Czar of Arkansas 2008-10-07
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The Crying of Lot 49 must have seemed incredibly witty when it first appeared in the mid-60's. This satire, which follows the twists and turns of Oedipa Maas' adventures in being the executor of a dead friend's will is a satire on Southern California culture in the mid-60's.
The back of this book compared it to Joyce's Ulysses; while I won't doom Lot 49 with such unfortunate company, it, like Ulysses, is probably more admired by critics than actually enjoyed by readers. The prose is intentionally dense, and the characters and events, which are set just before the rise of the hippie culture in the late 60s, seem almost quaint in comparison to what the 1960s are remembered for fourty years later.
While the first 30 pages are easily the toughest to get through, the story starts to move along after that following an intereting, if not particularly compelling, conspiracy angle. To Pynchon's credit, I didn't feel that the book was artificially lengthened in order to give the story heft--at 150 pages, Lot 49 is surprisingly brief for a critical darling.
Lot 49 reads like a poor-man's Joseph Heller, and it hasn't aged well. But, underneath it all you can pick up some interesting commentary about California just before flower power.