The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon
I have a lot of respect for Thomas Pynchon but I have to say there are some very long and extremely dragged out sentences. These were very hard to understand and that's frustrating but the plot of the story makes up for it. Secondly awkwardly eying Pynchon again I would say its a necessity for somebody who has never read Pynchon's The Crying of lot 49 to have a dictionary at bay at all times. I found my self looking up every other word as I read through chapter four.
I was not expecting the story to take such an erotic twist as Mrs Oedipa Maas drunkenly cheated on her semi-rehabilitated car lot junkie turned disk jockey husband. I didn't expect all the explicit and wild bar talk and drug scandals such as the pot smoking good times at the lake and drinks at the bar, or even the unethical science experiments with unsuspecting patients taking LSD. This style of writing is amazing and draws the reader in because you don't feel as if you are trying to learn something your are being assigned to read, rather from this work you feel like you are getting a chance to read something you want to read for once, or something you decided to read on your own.
I will admit Thomas reminds me of how i used to write back in high school because everything that I wrote had such descriptiveness. A good example of Thomas using way to long of a sentence, yet still being good in plot with amazing descriptiveness is on page two paragraph four of the first chapter when Thomas is describing Mucho's affair with the lot is
"Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him
come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins:
motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out
there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender
repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly
of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust and
when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of
telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had
to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising
savings of .05 or .10, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs,
help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already
were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see
whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the
bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust,
body wastesit made him sick to look, but he had to look."
come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins:
motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out
there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender
repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly
of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust and
when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of
telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had
to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising
savings of .05 or .10, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs,
help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already
were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see
whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the
bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust,
body wastesit made him sick to look, but he had to look."
It seems like Thomas uses every literary device possible to keep the sentence going without being a run on, and this works on the readers mind just as hard trying to read it without getting lost and making it sound like a run on to you self as you read it.
For some reason I become more relaxed and aligned with the tone of the text when it feels like im reading something that is not educational. In a text book you are not going to hear many words like "Cracker" which is now days considered a racial slur. Because Thomas uses that type of personal expressiveness in his descriptiveness, this draws the reader in. Aside from being mentally exhausted by the time you get to the end of the sentence you are still enthralled by what your reading.
The descriptiveness Pynchon uses here leaves the reader no room for interpretation given the chance to put a finger on what its like to be in the shoes of Mucho the car sales man, that poor fellow. And later on the plot thickens as you get enlightened by the fact that something is still haunting him about the job; even though he has a new life.
I did become very confused as to the meaning of the play that Metzgert and Oedipa attended; what has that got to do with anything so far, and why must Pynchon again get the reader so deep into the dictionary and into trying to not get lost in very very long sentences? I must continue on reading past chapter four to find out I guess as I have not been able to understand yet.
