How do places gather meaning? Logically it would seem to come from us, the way we form and reform our spaces in our image, but no one who has ever lovHow do places gather meaning? Logically it would seem to come from us, the way we form and reform our spaces in our image, but no one who has ever loved a place will accept that explanation in its entirety. Perhaps we project ourselves on our homes, but our homes project themselves onto us as well. We are in constant conversation with our environment; even as we sweep and paint and rearrange furniture and make our hiding places and tend our gardens, it is a mistake to think the land itself does not also housekeep our hearts, so to speak.
But not everyone experiences this. Jack Boughton certainly didn't, and while there are places I hold scared, my childhood home is not one of them. The turbulent histories of every square inch of that house cancel each other out, every memory of happiness has its anti-particle and vice versa, so that when I think of those halls and rooms, I come up surprisingly blank. It is a structure that can accommodate any meaning I choose, and it has no hold on me.
For Glory Boughton, the childhood house where she has been condemned to spend weary years with her ailing father has taken on the role of a prison, and I understood deeply her terror at the prospect of being trapped. Marilynne Robinson also knows how her gender feeds this fear; despite serving as our ostensible narrator, Glory is a protagonist severely limited in agency, constantly adapting to the wills of the men around her. Yet she remains a strong character, asserting her will when it is necessary and underpinning the rest of the novel with her ceaseless understanding and depth of kindness. The women of Gilead do not exactly have the luxury to constantly question and do battle over their faith. In some ways, their mental stability depends upon believing their subservient status to be justified by God, and they have accepted the reality of their faith without question.
As an observer of people, Marilynne Robinson is unmatched. When she attempts to make an argument, philosophical or theological, she is extremely persuasive, and that's because she backs these arguments with a sense of psychological realism that I have never before encountered in fiction. Perhaps I'll find a writer to match the verisimilitude of her characterizations, but Robinson's grasp on why people do and say the things they say astonishes me.
And so this small, quiet story of people in a house becomes, through process of accretion, transcendent. Robinson stacks vignette after vignette firmly into place, each one subtly surprising yet inevitable in its own way.
I was initially put off by the simplicity and silence of this story, the flat realism and lack of verbal grandeur. Still giddy after the majestic "Gilead" I expected more of that novel's poetic intellectualism, the wonder and images of exceptional beauty, the deep solemnity that faded to giddy joy, the reflections wrapped in theology lessons wrapped in aphorisms, the ever shifting landscape of language that had enraptured me more than damn near anything I've read for years.
But "Home" is not a sequel to "Gilead", not a continuation of the story. It is more like "Gilead"'s necessary shadow, the earth to its heaven, the ontology to its phenomenology. Here we have the brutal facts of the case, presented with almost unbearably painful detail. These events and conversations and people exist, and they tear each other apart like nonviolent gladiators.
Transpiring parallel to the events of the previous novel "Home" presents the story of Jack Boughton, freshly returned after many years to the home where his dying father has rotted, praying for his prodigal son, forgiving his every transgression, hoping desperately for a chance to atone for wrongs he cannot even identify yet assumes he must have committed. Reverend Boughton cannot understand his son, cannot reckon with the pain he has caused. He cries out to the Lord yet has received no answer, yet he offers second chance after second chance to the son he cannot bear to lose.
And Jack knows it. He knows that his father will be ready with gifts and money whenever he chooses to reappear, aching to win back some measure of faithfulness and love that perhaps he never possessed in the first place. Because Jack feels lost, lost from the very beginning, some measure removed from the world that his entire family exists in, abandoned even despite their endless attempts at reconciliation, doomed from before he was born, predestined for perdition as if the God he does not believe in has placed a curse on him.
Make no mistake, this quiet, almost mundane novel is about nothing less than the war for a man's soul, and the nature of a soul itself. Throughout these 300 pages, Jack and his father do battle in gestures and quiet conversations and tortured recollections of an awful past, and Glory watches from the doorways, patching up the emotional wounds that these men leave as they struggle and wound.
This may be one of the most violent books I've ever read, and it's about people in a small Iowa town sitting at dinner tables and shaded porches, talking about their lives, their hopes, and their regrets.
It is a novel that surprises you with its depth of feeling and intricacies. As the last 100 pages wax to achingly gorgeous crescendos of feeling and tragedy, passages of dialogue where each word falls like the executioner's blow, you find yourself almost taken aback by the explosions of feeling. But Robinson is a careful and masterful architect of story, and she guides you to the overwhelming ending as if such a path were inevitable all along. As if it were predestined.
Jack Boughton is one of the greatest characters of American literature. He embodies so many archetypes, yet he is entirely himself, lonely, tortured, troublemaking, passionate, self-destructive, cruel, loving, broken, remade, fiery. I feel like I know him, like I care for him, yet I also feel intimidated and aghast at his casual manipulativeness and disregard. But most of all, I empathize with his loneliness, his suspicion of love. It's a hard and cruel world, especially for those who don't fit in, and Jack has spent his entire life wounded and afraid.
Anxiety follows in Jack's footsteps. He's the type of person that makes a cat stand up rigid with tension in their presence. He is wary like a beast, yet his mind churns with the intellectual fervor of a philosopher. He settles for nothing except the truth. At first he looks down on his sister Glory yet he learns to value her sincerity. He wants to please his father, yet he cannot bear to lie to him. He is at once consumed by his past and unwilling to address it.
Meanwhile his father weeps and prays and loses sleep for the fate of his son, yet is by no means a saint in his own right. He is being steadily left behind by the world around him, speaking derisively of the civil rights protestors on television, clinging to a conservatism that will soon fade into the distant past. He understands that his son might be his intellectual superior, yet his spiritual convictions overrule all. He trusts his God and he refuses to give up the fight.
Yet kindness and condescension are only separated by a thin barrier. Jack certainly sees the constant charity as an attempt to control him. He sees the forgiveness his father offers as a kind of bribe. "Please, oh, please, won't you come back to what I believe? Won't you admit that I'm right and that you're wrong." He takes the questions of faith seriously and only when the madness of old age begins to set in on his ailing father will he consider lying in order to provide false comfort.
I sit here at my laptop and I find myself genuinely frustrated, a sense of dull anger in my heart at my inability to hammer these thoughts into an accurate reflection of this book's complexity. Because Robinson is an intelligent and sly writer, not to mention a firm Christian, and although I do not share in her religion, I can't deny that the negative space of this novel makes a damn good case for it. She understands the true value that religion can add to someone's life, and while she never explicitly identify Jack's atheism as the cause of his torments, it is certainly never ruled out. And on one hand, I cannot help but find this almost deceptive. It's one thing to argue honestly for your point of view, another entirely to write a book of fiction where the character who disagrees with you suffers anguish for his sins. Yet I think this novel is honest, more honest than anything relating to religion I've read since "Gilead." Robinson has her point of view, yet she allows events to play out realistically, and she does not make her judgements unfairly. The novel concludes by stating "The Lord is wonderful," but it is hardly a novel full of wonder. It is a novel of pain and sadness and misappropriated anger and haunted pasts and unsaid words. It is a novel of betrayal. Robinson does not pander, and she is fair to all sides.
Ames's presence in this novel is one of power and almost supernatural judgement. It is interesting how flawed and dogmatic his character comes across in "Home" considering his almost saintly goodness in "Gilead." I think Ames is a truly good person, yet he is also not the right person to help Jack through his torment, and their mismatch is more vividly evoked in this narrative than the previous one, which I really appreciated.
Overwhelming. That's the best word to describe this novel. As scene after scene of domestic dialogue approaches its apotheosis, I find myself unable to bear up under the emotional weight of this novel. I don't have the answers for the questions it asks. Perhaps there are no answers. I don't know why you are so miserable, Jack Boughton, why you are so alone. I don't think it's because God meant for you to go to hell from the day you were born, but I understand why it feels that way sometimes.
Beautiful. That's another word to describe this novel. Its evocations of landscapes and places. Its sense for the kindness that human beings are capable of even in the most painful of situations. In it's description of how the smell of warm food in a small house seems to wash away whatever animosity or arguments existed beforehand. In its assertion that, even if we don't have free will, grace remains. ...more
It is difficult to organize my thoughts about this novel. Like Reverend Ames himself, I feel compelled to write in short sections, pulses of thought tIt is difficult to organize my thoughts about this novel. Like Reverend Ames himself, I feel compelled to write in short sections, pulses of thought that move like bands of light across a far-off mountain, the distance between each streak suggesting the scale and size that cannot be strangled into words. “Gilead” is that mountain. It is a living being. It is every single minute of the twenty three years between the publication of Marilynne Robinson’s’ first novel and this one, and it is also the millennia of tradition and religion that inform the profound depths of truth lavished generously across two hundred and forty seven pages.
Near the end of this novel, Reverend Ames writes, “Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable -- which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.” This is true of art as well. “Gilead” is a slim book; the prose is often quiet. (I almost wrote, “The prose is often simple,” but I’m not sure that’s accurate). Indeed, the civilization of this novel is half-broken with a sadness that comes less from tragedy than ceaseless toil, yet the ruins which serve as its foundation are those of the grandest cities humanity has ever boasted. It’s notion of what is beautiful is the broadest possible.
The novel finds beauty in the simplest, most primal elements of Being (light, water, wind, sun, food), yet also in the irreducible mysteries of human thought and theory. Our narrator, the author of the letter which comprises this novel’s text, is enraptured with the miracle of being anything at all, the undeserved joys of existence, the “shimmer on a child’s hair” that is also found in the petals of flowers, yet he has also written thousands and thousands of pages of dense sermons, enough to equal and outpace any theologian in history. Perhaps most amazingly, “Gilead” does not merely possess or idealize these notions of beauty, it actually satisfies them, it lives up to its own ideals.
Religion has played a huge part in my short twenty years. I was brought up in a hardcore fundamentalist community, insular and isolated. We looked down on other churches and considered traditional religious practices to be essentially invalid. “Nowhere in the Bible does it say to go to a church on Sunday!” and so we wrote off nearly all other avenues of Christianity as false; only we had the real truth. Because of this upbringing, it took me a while to understand that faith, particularly generational faith, is something that can accommodate an enormous amount of varying perspectives and worldviews. This is something that Marilynne Robinson portrays brilliantly in her novel of four generations: the vast differences of opinion that can coexist within a single ideological framework. The truth is that “Christianity” is too broad to be corralled and figured out as the community in which I was raised attempted to. To say you believe in the literal truth of the Bible only means you believe that all others should submit to your interpretation. Religions are so ancient, so fundamental, so important to humanity for so long, that when we approach them we must bear in mind that nearly every categorical statement one could make about Religion could be cancelled out by an equal counterargument. This doesn’t mean we cannot make up our minds, it just means that blind confidence is always blind.
It also means that most atheist arguments against Christianity are, as Ames writes, “essentially meaningless.”
Throughout the novel, Ames laments the general lack of good faith often haunting arguments concerning atheism and Christianity; something that has also been on my mind recently. Too many atheists confuse belief with doctrine. Religion is more than believing certain things to be true; it is an entire framework of seeing the world.
I don’t think many atheists realize that nearly every “scientific” argument one might raise against religion is meaningless to the truly faithful. How can God be discredited by his own creation? I’ll admit I’ve enjoyed ridiculing the stupidity of claiming that God put dinosaur bones into the ground in order to test us, but when a religious person makes this type of wild claim, what they are essentially saying is that they don’t even consider this “evidence” as even applicable to the current situation. Who cares about dinosaur bones? God has a purpose for everything, and if you can’t find it, it’s probably just a test.
I also think that particularly “New Atheists” often don’t give theology the respect it deserves. All the witticisms and logical might of a Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris is nothing to the depths of thought and reason that have been dedicated by theologians to the paradoxes and depths of the scriptures. Nearly any philosophical argument one could raise against religion has been pondered and answered exhaustively in dozens of volumes of religious literature.
Yet despite all the answers that might be suggested for any number of atheistic queries, it often seems that faithful Christians aren’t particularly interested in the idea of defending their faith as if it were a political position. Why is it nearly impossible to change the mind of the truly faithful? What is that confidence they possess that can never be shaken?
Ames writes: In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can usettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. We participate in Being without remainder. No breath, no thought, no wart or whisker, is not as sunk in Being as it could be. And yet no one can say what Being is…. So creating proofs from experience of any sort is like building a ladder to the moon. It seems that it should be possible, until you stop to consider the nature of the problem. So my advice is this --- don’t look for proofs. Don’t bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they’re always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp.”
If you are reading this review without having first read the book, you might wonder whether “Gilead” is a work of philosophy. And it is, but it is also a novel. It is a novel that uses the full possibilities of the novel form more fully than almost any other book I have recently read. It plunges deep into the mind of our main character, Reverend John Ames, and then emerges into the light of the world again to keenly observe the cast of beautiful characters inhabiting the small town of Gilead. I’m so excited to read the following novels in this series, particularly the most recent “Jack”, as Young Boughton ranks among the most fully alive characters ever evoked in fiction.
And as stimulating as the novel’s philosophical and intellectual veins are, it also made me cry about five times. The warm pastoral life, the simple joys of friends and family, the comfortable light of the prairie likened to a cat that chooses to lie on your lap… These jewels of detail adorn a heartbreaking tale of fathers and sons which seems to emerge organically out of the ocean of thought and inner monologue in which the action is suspended floating, glistening, clarity and dialogue and presence pulled from the murky swirls of consciousness. The novel breathes and swells and crescendos and quiets down and crescendos again. The final 30 pages are a gauntlet of irreconcilable emotions, and the interactions between Ames and Jack Boughton are almost Biblical in their mythic significance. The story here is not conventional, nor does it try to be. It is a story about nothing less than the nature of a man’s soul and the question of predestination and fate, which is a question that cannot be taken lightly.
Jack Boughton is a bad, bad man. When he was a kid, he pulled pranks designed for a kind of maximum meanness. Ames notes that “he stole things of no value except to the people he stole them from.” As a young man, he impregnated a minor and abandoned both her and their daughter. He’s backstabbed and betrayed more people than you can count, and yet his father, Reverend Ames’ best friend since childhood, cannot bring himself to abandon his wayward son. As Ames notes, “He has some fine children, yet it always seemed this was the one on whom he truly set his heart. The lost sheep, the lost coin. The prodigal son, not to put too fine a point on it. I have said at least once a week my whole adult life that there is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving. Still, when I see this same disjunction between human parents and children, it always irritates me a little.”
Jack Boughton’s real name is John Ames Boughton, named after the Reverend, and thus representing perhaps some second half of the good Reverend Ames, which is why I think the Reverend tries so valiantly to save his soul. Maybe he thinks of the task as saving himself in a way. Yet Reverend Ames is not a stupid man, or an idealistic one. He is extremely wary of Jack. He does not want the man around his wife or child. He is careful about when he chooses to engage with him, and seeks always to protect and preserve the innocent people around him. Yet in the end, he desperately wishes only that the younger man will change his ways, and when at the end, he desperately gives Jack the blessing of God, I couldn’t stop the tears. I think we all hope that someone would grant us that type of unconditional hope, no matter how far we fall. It’s one of the most beautiful passages about love I have ever read.
When Jack chooses to leave town, abandoning the ailing Old Boughton, Reverend Ames notes, “It was a dreadful thing he was doing, leaving his father to die without him. It was the kind of thing only his father would forgive him for.”
That one got me too.
While this is a story about the nature of souls and the nature of faith, every theme is seen through the lens of fatherhood. Reverend Ames’ father was a meek pacifist, but his father’s father was a crazed man of God who seems to have walked out of some wild tall tale, guns blazing. His grandfather fought with John Brown and may have killed a man. He claimed to have actually spoken with God.
Yet for all his religious zeal, his grandfather was also callous and cruel and violent and thoughtless. In fact it seems to me that his grandfather was so drunk on religion that he failed to maintain any kind of appreciation for the world of the now, something that Reverend Ames understands is necessary for a full appreciation of Christianity.
In one of the book’s most beautiful passages (and one of the most beautiful passages I’ve ever read), Ames writes: ”I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.”
For a book so obsessed with fatherhood, indeed, a book written as a letter from a father to a son, it is interesting to me how little we learn about John Ames’ pacifist father. He’s there of course, sojourning across America to find his grandfather’s grave, arguing and eventually abandoning his son, yet he has a comparatively small presence in the story.
I think this is because Ames’ father offers a quandary that Ames is not entirely able to solve. Throughout he speaks of fatherhood as perhaps the only way of comprehending the mind of God, yet his own father was a passive and weak man who eventually moved away to live comfortably on the coast. I would suspect this presents a wound that Ames is not entirely able to reconcile, and it is all the more painful for its absence from the book.
Faith prevails against all for Reverend John Ames. He is a character worthy of being called a role model. He seeks to preserve the beauty in the world and to guide others towards more fully appreciating it. If he has a flaw it is that he overthinks things. He is not satisfied. I relate to this a lot. When he speaks of his near-jealousy for the happiness and contentment of others, I wondered if the sentences had been stolen from my own inner monologue.
Yet some of us have to keep thinking and questioning. Perhaps it was predestined.
Since the entire novel is presented in the voice of a single character, I have trouble parsing which of the stances taken in the narration are those of Reverend Ames and which are those of Marilynne Robinson. Having listened to an interview with her it seems that there is quite a bit of overlap. Nevertheless the story is strengthened for its artifice and fictitiousness. It avoids becoming a sermon. Sermons are boring. Stories are where the real ideas are.
I guess sometimes the awards committees get it right. I have a reflexive distrust for the “hits”, the Obama-endorsed, Pulitzer winning, bestsellers. I’m frankly baffled by the popularity of such a deeply thoughtful and strange book, but I’m also grateful. This book deserves as many readers as it can get, and I think anyone who reads it, really truly reads it, will come away improved. I know I did.
To be honest, I’m not entirely certain what I believe, not all the time. Having thankfully moved long past the fundamentalists who controlled my childhood, I feel like I’m in the unique position of being able to choose what I think, and I’m not sure if I’m ready. But this book shows great sympathy towards the undecided. Reverend Ames understands that his atheist brother Edward came to his conclusions based on logic and reason and he respects that. I think he understands that the enlightenment he seeks is not exclusive to Christanity. Near the end of the novel he comments that he cannot even speak on the validity of any religion other than his own, and there are a whole lot of religions out there.
But the beauty in this novel is the beauty of existence, not just spirituality. Although Christianity is the lens through which Reverend Ames appreciates the treasures of existence, it isn’t the only lens out there.
”This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”...more
I remember going on a trip to Florida a few years ago and about halfway there I was overtaken by a really overwhelming sense of depression, and I remeI remember going on a trip to Florida a few years ago and about halfway there I was overtaken by a really overwhelming sense of depression, and I remember thinking that these states we were passing through - states I had never visited before - all looked essentially identical to the Indiana I’d left behind. It felt as if America was this giant recursive fractal of stoplights and subways and dingy Walmarts, and no matter how far you traveled, you could never escape the infinite strip mall. And early in “The Crying of Lot 49” there’s an image that really stuck with me in the 3 years since I first read the novel, an image of a highway like a hypodermic needle injected into the endless sprawl of prefab and beige factories. As if we, the people were only here to keep alive the system that had long since ceased to serve us. As if our only purpose was to the blood in the veins of unfeeling corporations.
I think part of what makes America’s homogenous cities so eerie is that we also recognize the world has never been so diverse and advanced, and full of strange wonders. We can turn on our phones or televisions and watch the endless feed of new discoveries and seismic change, yet when we look out our windows its just old houses and weatherbeaten Toyotas. And so to fill the gap between the world as we experience it day to day and the world as we see it on the infinite feed, we must invent and identify with stories that enforce order on the rippling ocean of chaos and confusion. When the only constant is capital it seems like every meaning is equal to every other. Sometimes it seems like all the office buildings and dying malls and franchise restaurants are a front concealing an infinite conspiracy we can never quite understand.
On page 10 of “the crying of lot 49” Pynchon offers us a metaphor to understand this new world, and a metaphor for understanding his strange little book. Our heroine Oedipa Maas recalls an art museum she once visited in Mexico, and in particular a painting of “a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.”
To offer a highly reductive summary: the Crying of Lot 49 is about differentiating between reality and the tapestry. And at its dark core, it questions whether that is possible in the industrial hellscape of mass delusion, alternative facts, and corporate conspiracy that is – no, not 2021, I know it sounds familiar – but 1965, under the presidency of one Lyndon B. Johnson, the year in which the first American troops arrived to a small country called Vietnam, a world 56 years removed from the present. Early in the novel, Pynchon describes the world of a play that the characters have gone to see, and his description seems to me a window into how he viewed the world of 1965: “preapocalyptic, death-wishful, sensually fatigued, unprepared, a little poignantly, for that abyss of civil war…”
“The Crying of Lot 49” is the only novel by Pynchon which is not a period piece, the only novel of his set approximately in the same time period in which he was writing it. So in my opinion, the book functions as a skeleton key to his work, less of a novel than a manifesto or declaration of intent, demonstration of method. Pynchon himself didn’t really consider the book to be a novel either, in the introduction to his short story collection “Slow Learner,” he refers to the novel as a “short story with gland problems.”
As such, “The Crying of Lot 49” is essentially one long, dense short story about Oedipa Maas, a southern California housewife who is named executrix of the will of her former lover Pierce Inverarity, a wealthy real-estate mogul. On her journey to untangle and distribute his many assets, Oedipa uncovers a potential conspiracy involving a secret postal system known as the Trystero, and attempts over the course of a few feverish days in L.A. to unravel the twisted web of history, legend, and lies surrounding this secret society. As with most of Pynchon’s novels, it is a book both literally and metaphorically about a quest for truth, and what we learn about ourselves along the way.
While it’s easy to get caught up in the intellectual intricacies of Pynchon’s labyrinthine stories, I don’t think enough Pynchon scholars talk about the sheer pleasure of reading his works. This time around I read “The Crying of Lot 49” in two sittings, one in the evening, one the next morning, and it played out in my mind like a surreal and enchanting movie. The novel is funny and warm and inviting and even if you’re not interested in plumbing the depths of philosophy here, you’ll enjoy the reading experience. I think a lot of postmodern writers, even as they ostensibly write against power and privilege, nevertheless fall prey to a kind of academic elitism, a snobbish sense of superiority over the proletariat who might just not have time to read their latest 900 page joyless brick. Pynchon never looks down on the common man, and he doesn’t look down on pop culture either. Indeed, Pynchon understands that pop culture – in this novel particularly, pop music – is a coping mechanism, with its sunny optimism providing an escape for those beaten down by the system. This novel has, in my opinion, an unearned reputation for cerebral difficulty, at its core it is a wacky detective story, a proto-Big Lebowski full of satire, puns, and adventure.
Beneath all these silly songs and strange names, the novel charts an entropic path towards the dissolution of reality. As Oedipa digs deeper into the contradictory histories of the Trystero, Pynchon teaches us about how we construct stories in order to maintain our sanity. Why is Oedipa so driven to uncover the secrets of this secret postal service only tangentially related to her reasons for visiting San Narciso? From the second she hears about the mystery she is captivated and obsessed. Maybe it’s just the sad fact that the idea of this unsolvable conspiracy is simply more interesting than real life, more interesting than her dull marriage with Mucho, her unidentified psychological problems causing her psychiatrist to phone in the middle of the night to offer her LSD. Oedipa craves purpose, some way to reverse the entropy of existence.
And I mean that quite literally, about halfway through the book, Oedipa meets the crazed scientist John Nefastis, who has constructed a machine which purportedly contains “Maxwell’s Demon.” Nefastis claims this is a perpetual motion machine, that if you are a “sensitive”, you can focus on the box and force the molecules inside to move from hot too cold without effort, and thus generate unlimited energy. Oedipa tries her absolute best. Pynchon writes, “For fifteen minutes more she tried; repeating, if you are there, whatever you are, show yourself to me, I need you, show yourself. But nothing happened.”
Few postmodern authors work in such plain view, but The Crying of Lot 49 is so richly layered that Pynchon can afford to put a lot of the meaning of the novel on the surface. The real question is what do we do after we’ve realized we can’t unravel the mystery? What do we cling to in a world of T.S. Eliot’s “broken images.” Several characters in the novel take their own routes. Mucho, Oedipa’s husband, has perhaps the most disturbing fall from grace. By the end of the book he is a compulsive LSD user, constantly tripping to avoid reality, and that’s not to mention his dark pedophilic secrets. The amazing “Bookchurner” podcast points out that Mucho’s desire to retreat from the world, his desire to, in a way, be a child again, leads him to this twisted path. Other characters find not so macabre purposes: happy to fight for their ideologies and systems, my favorite being Mike Fallopian, a right winger so extreme he actually opposes capitalism, which, in his opinion, leads inevitably to socialism.
As for Oedipa? Well, she doesn’t exactly give up, and by the end of the novel, she is still searching, still hovering on the edge of a revelation that we realize by now will probably never arrive. We understand that she has to believe in this conspiracy even as she tries at times to give it up. Without it she has nothing in this world. During one the novel’s climatic scenes, Oedipa visits her psychiatrist Dr. Hilarious, who, in true Pynchonian fashion, is revealed to be an ex-Nazi on the run. There’s a brief and telling exchange of dialogue between them.
“I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."
“Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.” Of course those words are spoken by a character, not by Pynchon himself, and that character isn’t a particularly admirable type either. But the sentiment remains poignant nonetheless. What else do any of us have?
That’s just one of the questions asked by this hyper-dense novel, which manages to encompass more themes in 152 pages than many novels do in 500. The role of media in this novel adds an entirely different layer of depth, the novel is packed to the brim with television actors, plays within plays, images and fictions encroaching on reality and overtaking it. One of my favorite scenes involves the character of Metzger, a lawyer who, as a kid, acted in a movie called “Cashiered,” which just happens to be playing on television as he reveals this to Oedipa. As they watch this bizarre film about a naval adventure, Metzger seems to recall the events on screen as if they were real history, not fiction.
“I know this part,” Metzger told her, his eyes squeezed shut, head away from the set. “For fifty yards out the sea was red with blood. They don’t show that.”
Smarter readers than me have broken down the elaborate intricacies of “The Courier’s Tragedy” a play which Oedipa sees in chapter 3, a play which Pynchon devotes a significant chunk of the novel to describing. I’m content with saying that this play is ridiculously entertaining to read, a wildly over the top Jacobean revenge drama involving copious bloodshed and orgies, and ending with a mysterious few lines of poetry that compel Oedipa on her quest. While I’m sure one can find a scholarly article explaining every single interaction and vignette along the journey, I think Pynchon wants some moments and characters to remain ambiguous. After all, he is attempting to evoke a world in which not everything can be intellectualized and rationalized into sense. “The Crying of Lot 49” is in some ways a testing ground for the methods he would later develop into his later maximalist, operatic magnum opus, “Gravity’s Rainbow.”
“The Crying of Lot 49” is a critical text for understanding Pynchon, and also postmodernism as a whole. I think Pynchon’s role in the postmodern genre is fascinating. I’m no literature historian, but it seems to me like Nabokov was sort of the handoff from modernism to postmodernism, with multiple novels that could be classified in each category. Pynchon was in fact Nabokov’s student (Old Vladimir did not recall him in class, but his wife remembered Tom’s extremely neat handwriting), and “The Crying of Lot 49” contains a tribute or two to his old professor, while ultimately hacking forward into unknown territory. This novel not only contains “skeleton keys” for understanding Pynchon’s own oeuvre, but for understanding the dozens of authors that would later be inspired by him, the Vollmanns and Wallaces if we’re talking po-mo lit, and the Andersons and Coens if we’re talking film. The novel continues to have a far reaching influence on art today, and certain sections seem almost cliched if you don’t understand that this was where the cliches had their genesis. Indeed, were the book published today, I think it would fit quite nicely into the current modern landscape of fiction; the novel doesn’t seem dated at all. Maybe that’s why so many storytellers are still shamelessly ripping it off, such as David Robert Mitchell’s entertaining albeit derivative “Under the Silver Lake” from 2018, the first hour of which is essentially the closest we’ll get to a full on “Crying of Lot 49” film adaptation.
Pynchon’s mazes and mysteries are endlessly compelling, and the novel remains a genuine pleasure to read. As I mentioned earlier, it’s difficulty is highly overstated; the book is an excellent entry point into Pynchon’s work. Most of the novel transpires at an almost screenplay briskness, although Pynchon also allows himself one or two long, dreamy paragraphs of poetic prose per chapter, reminding of us of his consummate skill as a stylist. Later works of his would be composed almost entirely of this dreamy, damn near over-the-top style, in “Lot 49” it is limited to a few grand crescendos. Chapter 5 of the novel, concerning Oedipa’s feverish walk through the San Narciso nightscape, seeing the post-horn symbol everywhere she goes, still stands as some of Pynchon’s best writing ever, a dark and heartbreaking elegy for the preterite and the lost; an eerie nightmare of secrets and codes everywhere you look.
“The Crying of Lot 49” is a masterpiece, a beautiful book which I will continue to appreciate further on each new reading. Its existence is itself consolation for living in this world that has only grown somehow more fragmented and more monotonous since it was published. It is Pynchon reaching across time to let you know that someone else understands how it feels to live in the modern world. He might not be able to offer the answer, but we are invited to join in the investigation....more
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