No plot, political, novelistic, or personal, can issue from the circumstances of love, from the simple human needs, say, of a Rachel orĪn Oedipa, and Pynchon implicitly mocks this situation by the Byzantine complications of plots which do evolve from circumstances devoid of love. Running from the responsibilities of love and compelled by phantoms, puzzles, the power of Things. Pynchon's intricacies are meant to testify to the waste-a key word in "The Crying of Lot 49"-of imagination that first creates and is then enslaved by its own plottings, its machines,Įxcept for the heroin of "V.," Rachel Owlglass (she who can see wisely without being a voyeur), and the heroine of this novel, Oedipa Maas-lovable, hapless, decent, eager girls-both novels are populated by self-mystified people The various quests for "V." all of them substitutes for the pursuit of love, are interwoven fantastically, and the coherence thus achieved The first novel, "V." was a designed indictment of its own comic elaborateness. And the uses to which he puts them are very much the same.
Like John Barth and Joseph Heller, his security with philosophical and psychological concepts, his anthropological intimacy with the off-beat-these evidences of extraordinary talent in the first novel continue to display themselves in Pynchon's technical virtuosity, his adaptations of the apocalyptic-satiric modes of Melville, Conrad, and Joyce, of Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Nabokov, the saturnalian inventiveness he shares with contemporaries Homas Pynchon's second novel, "The Crying of Lot 49," reads like an episode withheld from his first, the much-acclaimed "V.,"
Embattled Underground By RICHARD POIRIER The Crying of Lot 49 By Thomas Pynchon
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