Remember when I read Catch-22 and I said I should have read it years ago? That wasn't strictly true in that at a younger age I probably wouldn't have appreciated it as much as I did reading it now. That I had to age into the point where that cynicism glitters.
I just read The Crying of Lot 49 and I may have the opposite situation, where I'm past the prime of my enjoyment of the book.
I did enjoy it, but I probably would have enjoyed it more at the point where I still thought powerful ideas were enough to change the world. That the sharpest knife is actually perspective and that it can be used to carve away all the parts which don't fit in the perfect world. That's the kind of book this was for me, an exploration of a perspective where paranoia is contagious and the extrusion of other worlds into one's own are wondrous and revelatory as well as disturbing and sickening.
Is that an operational definition of the consensus reality of the real world? Maybe. I'm less sure than I once was.
This story did seem to capture something core about the California experience, the droning background impression of living here, where everyone seems to be the star of their own dramatic tale and all other humans are merely bit players. In the same way that Oedipa Maas entertains the notion that the entire sequence of events she's experiencing are perhaps an elaborate prank or a targeted threat, many of the people I see every day similarly behave as if everything is staged for their benefit. It's an odd realization to notice that you're the least important person in California, if you were to judge by the reactions of others.
The book is the story of a woman brushing up against and becoming ensnared with either madness, a prank, a conspiracy or something which borrows from all three. It's structured very pleasantly and the protagonist is likable and not at all unreliable. The other characters are deftly conveyed but not very convolute. That's the surface.
I suspect there's a lot to decode here, going deeper and analyzing and unraveling the symbols but I'm a shallow reader so you'll need to talk to a graduate student about all of that.
What I liked about the book
- reliable narrator, hooray, even when she's possibly hallucinating
- conspiracy stories, love 'em, especially with secret history overtones
- short and fast read
- meta-fiction, with the play within the book narrative
What I didn't
- nothing
Who might like this book
- young aspiring anarchists, artists, rebels, malcontents, riffraff, hop-heads, surrealists and Republicans
- people who think they should like Pynchon but find his other works too long or too slow
- stamp collectors who've been looking for a racy book to prove to other people that philatelists can intersect with fornication
